Symposium: The question of bioethics and the need to grow

Dr Mubarak Ali discusses how the education system became divisive and commercialised

KARACHI: Education that does not generate new ideas and thoughts will keep society at a standstill and not let it grow. The state of education will not change unless the state takes charge of it and eliminates all divisions ingrained in the system.

Historian Dr Mubarak Ali voiced these thoughts on historical perspectives of Islamic education at a symposium titled 'Bioethics Goes to School' at the Centre of Biomedical Ethics and Culture, Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation on Saturday.

According to him, a huge change in madrassas was witnessed after the British with the introduction of proper examination system and hostels for students. "It is in these madrassas, such as Sir Syed Ahmed Khan's Aligarh College and Sindh Madressatul Islam, that both religious and secular education was provided," said Ali. He then trailed the series of events that led to the division of education system owing to people such as hakeems, who believed in the spread of knowledge to their particular community alone. "Subsequent division of education along the rich and poor lines led to what we now see as commercialism," he said.

Coming to the point of ethics and morality in education, Ali said, "A society with no ethics and morals is hollow inside. It cannot survive for long."

Scholar Dr Arfa Sayeda Zehra digressed from Ali's stance on the need of state intervention to get rid of all divisional elements in the education system. She stressed that it is a society that makes the state and not the other way around. She added that former military dictator Gen Ziaul Haq eliminated all traditions of morality. "Morality has no uniform," she said. "It doesn't have a religion either."

Slightly different was the discourse taken by Framji Minwalla from the Institute of Business Administration social sciences and liberal arts department. He talked about Caryl Churchill's play, 'A number', which deals with fundamental issues of how we are as human beings. The subject of the play revolves around the consequences of a choice made by a father when he gets his son cloned in order to redeem the guilt of being neglectful. Little does he know that the hospital has not made one, but 19 replicas of his son.

Minwalla pointed out very powerful themes that left one to question the right and wrong aspects of the choices that the father made. For instance, if a price can be put over another human being, if children are capable of making decisions concerning their own bodies and, above all, the age-old debate of whether or not individuals are determined by their biological makeup or the way in which social community shapes them. "The kicker theme that we find later in the play is that once the original son murders the first clone and [commits] suicide later, the father reaches out to the other 19," said Minwalla. "The ethics of cloning also play a role here as the father holds a materialistic view of the human body."

Published in The Express Tribune, September 20^th, 2015.