KARACHI: This is with reference Saroop Ijaz’s article “Turning water into wine” (August 5). The writer is right when he says that “Mr Waqar has benefited from our television anchors, government personnel and luminaries from science who are desperate to have something new to believe, and have now found a quaint simplistic easy-to-believe ‘theory’.”.
I remember the attention a pregnant Indonesian woman got after she arrived in Karachi in the 1960s and proclaimed that the embryo inside her was periodically reciting the ‘azaan’. The whole nation went berserk and it was only when doctors examined her and found a miniature tape recorder concealed in her clothes that she was exposed as a fraudster.
Then there was the newspaper report about the first man on the moon — Neil Armstrong — converting to Islam because he heard the ‘azaan’ on the moon. Mr Armstrong has denied the report (he is still a Christian), but countless Pakistanis still firmly believe that he is a Muslim and I won’t be surprised if the father of our A-bomb is one of them. One can easily guess what the reaction of those who believed in Mr Waqar’s so-called invention would be if a man appeared on the scene and claimed to be pregnant!
Shakir Lakhani
Published in The Express Tribune, August 7th, 2012.
