The desert is spreading all around us

Universities were considered oases in deserts but if NUST orders its students not to wear jeans what is one to think.

Universities were considered oases in deserts but if NUST orders its girl students not to wear jeans what is one to think. Cardinal Newman, though a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, said in his famous essay “The Idea of a University” that the main function of the university is to provide a liberal-humanist education. And the Humboldtian idea is to create the scientific mind — the mind which questions; strikes out new paths; comes up with new ideas and eventually changes the face of the earth. But then both Newman and Homboldt would tell us Pakistanis that we sow what we reap. If we give our universities into the hands of military officers, even retired ones for that matter, we should not expect them to come up with anything like new ideas or liberal humanism. Militaries thrive on uniformity, chain of command, hierarchy and these are exactly what we need in military academies. No military can survive without them. But if we import them in universities, we distort the universities and change them into military academies. Such places can be efficient. They can fill their students with a certain body of facts and hone their skills but they cannot be places where one picks up new ideas, feels free, indulges in discussions and lets down one’s hair. In short, they may be crammers but they are not the fun places universities can be.

Lest anyone should imagine academic excellence is correlated with sartorial taboos, let us take the case of the world’s best universities. I have had the good luck of staying for some time in four: Cambridge, Oxford, Berkeley and Heidelberg and I have visited the world’s other top universities for days at a stretch. In none of them did I see restrictions on clothes and nobody banned eating in corridors and places. In some one could take food in lecture halls and people went around in shorts and sandals, and even barefoot for a short time in the summer, without raising eyebrows. At Berkeley and Heidelberg even faculty wore jeans at times and even in Oxbridge the younger faculty sometimes did. The overall value which was practised was that you are free to choose the clothes you wear. A student was a grownup and grownups are not treated like schoolchildren. In Pakistan, faculty call students bachche (children) and treat them as if they are five-year-olds. Only in one other country are students called anything but students and that is the United States where the term used for them informally is ‘kids’ but even there the ‘kids’ are treated in every other way like grownups. We just do not allow them to grow up and what NUST does today is what most administrators of universities would like to do tomorrow.

If this is the condition of a university, is it at all surprising that our anchorpersons take exception to the Lahore Grammar School teaching something like comparative religion. Our society has moved towards the right since the fifties when history books did have lessons on Ram Chandar Ji, Mahatama Gandhi, Lord Buddha, Ashok and so on. Now we start from Mohamamd bin Qasim and if at all we own any past, it is an Arab past which most of us do not actually have in reality. KK Aziz wrote a book called The Murder of History in Pakistan and he is not the only one who has documented the blatant lies we tell our children in history books. These children grow up so narrow minded that they cannot hear of other sects let alone religions. In such a society an attempt to create an oasis would backfire as it did. I hear that the same school also attempted to give some sex education to children. The irony is that children got to know about sex from smuggled pornography in the earlier generation and now they get the same in larger doses from the internet. But try telling the same children about health and disease, about irresponsible behavior, unwanted pregnancies, about venereal diseases and parents will be up in arms. And the very children you want to save from the horrors of ignorance are always only a few clicks away from violence, sadism and the worst excesses of the prurient commodification of the body ever known to humanity. So I am not surprised that these attempts at injecting sanity failed. I would have been surprised if they had not.

Why are we Pakistanis surprised to see the desert around us spreading. We created it. We had girls cycling in Lahore in the 1950s and the 60s but try doing it now. And it is not only that our roads are insane places for surreal car races; Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata are just as bad. But there girls do have the freedom to ride their motorbikes and scooters. They have basic mobility even if they cannot all afford cars. In Pakistan, we take away the right to be mobile from all those who cannot afford cars. And this has not made our girls safe from molestation. Far from it, indeed. Indeed, if our boys are exposed to sadism and violence masquerading as normal sex and our girls are submissive for cultural reasons, if divorce carries a stigma, if male domination is the norm, if a battered wife cannot call the police to lock up her abusive husband and if killers for ‘honour’ can be pardoned by relatives — who are in cahoots with them in many cases — then the female part of our population will be mere chattel with the Damocles sword of violence hanging on their heads all the time. If we want to see a mirror of what we have done to ourselves we should see the plays of Shahid Nadeem and Madiha Gohar in the Ajoka Theatre. We should read the reports of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. And then we can turn to the latest mayhem in K-P, Quetta, Karachi or anywhere in Pakistan. And we will see the desert creep over this green land right before our eyes.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 30^th,  2013.

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