A Case of Exploding Mangoes - Mohamed Hanif

Major Kiyani doesn’t carry a briefcase or a file or a weapon. I look hungrily at his packet of cigarettes and gold lighter lying on the dashboard in front of him. He sits back, his hands resting lightly on the steering wheel, ignoring me. I study his pink manicured fingers, the fingers of a man who has never had to do any real work. One look at his skin and you can tell he has been fed on a steady diet of bootleg scotch, chicken korma, and an endless supply of his agency’s safe-house whores. Look into his sunken cobalt blue eyes and you can tell he is the kind of man who picks up a phone, makes a long-distance call, and a bomb goes off in a crowded bazaar. He probably waits outside a house at midnight in his Corolla, its headlights switched off, while his men climb the wall and rearrange the lives of some hapless civilians. Or, as I know from personal experience, he appears quietly at funerals after accidental deaths and unexplained suicides and wraps things up with a neat little statement, takes care of any loose ends, saves you the agony of autopsies and the foreign press speculating about decorated colonels swinging from ceiling fans. He is a man who runs the world with a packet of Dunhill, a gold lighter, and an unregistered car.

•••
As the outriders switched their sirens on one by one, General Akhtar and Bill Casey got into the fourth limousine, a posse from the CIA’s Special Operations Group, wearing suits and carrying no visible arms, and a group of Pakistani commandos with their sleek little Uzis got into the other limousines, and the journey to the Army House started. It was a forty-minute drive for civilians. The VIP convoy, with all traffic and pedestrian crossings blocked, could make it in twelve minutes, but General Akhtar seemed to be in no hurry. “Would you like a drink before dinner, sir?” he asked, both his hands in his lap. “Are we going straight to dinner?” Bill asked wearily. “Prince Naif is already there, sir.” “And my friend”—Bill mimed General Zia’s moustache with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand—“ is he really having these visions?” General Akhtar smiled a coy smile, puffed out his chest, and said in a very concerned tone, “Eleven years is a long time. He’s a bit tired.” “Tell me about it.” Bill slumped into his seat. “Go ahead. Get me drunk.” General Zia never served alcohol at his dinners, even state dinners, not even for known alcoholics. General Akhtar Abdur Rehman considered it his duty to keep his guests in good humour, either at his office or during the drive to the Army House. He tapped the driver’s seat, and, without looking back, the man passed him a black canvas bag. Akhtar produced two glasses, a silver ice bucket, a bottle of Royal Salute whisky and poured Bill half a glass and himself a glass of water; he asked the driver to slow down and said, “Cheers.” “Cheers,” said Bill. “Cheers to you, General. Nice country you got here.” He flicked open the curtain on the limousine window and watched the crowd gathered along the roadside, straining against the security police and waiting for this convoy to hurry up and pass so that they could get on with their lives. “Sad, though, you can’t sit down somewhere and have a goddamn drink. Cheers.” Behind the cordons set up along the road by the police for this VIP procession, people stood and waited and guessed: a teenager anxious to continue his first ride on a Honda 70, a drunk husband ferociously chewing betel nuts to get rid of the smell before he got home, a horse buckling under the weight of too many passengers on the cart, the passengers cursing the cart driver for taking this route, the cart driver feeling the pins and needles in his legs begging for their overdue opium dose, a woman covered in a black burka—the only body part visible her left breast—feeding her infant child, a boy in a car trying to hold a girl’s hand on their first date, a seven-year-old selling dust-covered roasted chickpeas, an old water carrier hawking water out of a goatskin, a heroin addict eyeing his dealer stranded on the other side of the road, a mullah who would be late for the evening prayer, a gypsy woman selling bright pink baby chickens, an air force trainee officer in uniform in a Toyota Corolla being driven by a Dunhill-smoking civilian, a newspaper hawker screaming the day’s headlines, a Singapore Airlines crew cracking jokes in three languages in a van, a pair of home-delivery arms dealers fidgeting with their suitcases nervously, a third-year medical student planning to end his life by throwing himself on the rail tracks in anticipation of the Shalimar Express, a husband and wife returning from a fertility clinic on a motorbike, an illegal Bengali immigrant waiting to sell his kidney so that he could send money back home, a blind woman who had escaped prison in the morning and had spent all day trying to convince people that she was not a beggar, eleven teenagers dressed in white impatient to get to the field for their night cricket match, off-duty policemen waiting for free rides home, a bride in a rickshaw on her way to the beauty salon, an old man thrown out of his son’s home and determined to walk to his daughter’s house fifty miles away, a coolie from the railway station still wearing his red uniform and carrying in a shopping bag a glittering sari he’d change into that night, an abandoned cat sniffing her way back to her owner’s house, a black-turbaned truck driver singing a love song about his lover at the top of his voice, a busful of trainee Lady Health Visitors headed for their night shift at a government hospital. As the smoke from idling engines mixed with the smog that descends on Islamabad at dusk, as their waiting hearts got to the bursting point with anxiety, they all seemed to have one question on their minds: “Which one of our many rulers is this? If his security is so important, why don’t they just lock him up in the Army House?”

İkiyüzlülük

Müslümanların bilim sahasında tarih boyunca yaptığı katkılardan bahseden kitaplara bakma şansınız olmuştur.

Bu kitaplarda zikredilen isimlere bir bakınız.

Al-Farabi, Biruni, İbn Sina, Nasreddin Tusi, Şemseddin Semarkandi, İbn Miskeveyh, Ömer Hayyam, Ibn Heysem,  vb.

Genel olarak burada zikredilen şahısların çalışmalarından gurur duyarız. Astronomiden optik oradan fizik ve matematiğe çok geniş bir sahada çok önemli katkılarda bulunmuşlardır çünkü. Dindarların en muhafazakarından en liberaline kadar ortak tepkisi umumiyetle budur. Hali hazırda içinde yaşadığımız karanlık günlerde parlayan ve İslamın aydınlık bir medeniyetin gerçekleştiricisi olduğunu hatırlatan deniz feneri gibi insanlardır bunlar.

Ama bir problem var burada. Bir çelişki. Daha ziyade bir ikiyüzlülük. Yüzleşmemiz gereken ve bu gün neden bu halde olduğumuzu açıklayan bir ikiyüzlülük.

Başarıları ile övündüğümüz bu şahısların pek çoğu bugün mezarlarından kalksalar ve Suudi Arabistan ya da Pakistan gibi bir Müslüman ülkesine gitseler yazdıkları kitaplarından dolayı irtidad (apostasy) yasalarından dolayı yargılanır ve idam da dahil olmak üzere çok ağır cezalara çarptırılırlardı.

Mesela bir Nasreddin Tusi’yi bulsalar trigonometri alanında yazdığı Kitab el-Şekl eserini önemsemez ve görmezden gelir, onu Tecrid al-İtiqad adlı eserinden dolayı hapse ya da idama mahkum ederlerdi.

Biruni‘yi muhtemelen Kanun al-Mesudi adlı astronomi, coğrafya, dinamik, mühendislik, ve matematik üzerine yazdığı eserinden dolayı ödüllendirmek yerine Tahkik ma al-Hind adlı karşılaştırmalı din çalışmaları üzerine yazdığı eserinden dolayı ya tekfir ya da izole edebilirlerdi. Böyle bir eseri bugün  Ezher gibi bir üniversitede savunamaz, bastıramaz, ve işinden olurdu.

İbn Sina‘nın tıb üzerine yazdığı şaheser Şifa’sını görmez, onu metafiziğinden dolayı küfür ya da ilhad ile itham ederlerdi…

Örnekleri artırabilirim.

Burada şu soruyu samimiyetle sormak gerekiyor. Bu şahıslar dinen makbul insanlar değilse neden başarıları ile din adına övünüyoruz? Bu halde bu şahısları  isimlerini İslam ve Bilim konulu kitaplardan çıkarmak gerekmez mi?

Bu bir ikiyüzlülük değil mi?

Eğer övünmeye devam edeceksek bu insanlarla teolojik ve fıkhî zeminde de barışmak gerekmez mi?

Eğer İslam tarihi içinde diğer medeniyet havzaları ile karşılaşma ve etkileşim bu gün dahi övündüğümüz sonuçlar üretmişse o halde din yorumlarımız da insanları sınır boylarında öteki dünyalarla karşılaşmaya teşvik edecek ve sonuçlarını tolere edebilecek şekilde genişlemek zorunda değil mi?

Bu büyük ve evcilleştirilmez beyinler buldukları her kaynaktan faydalanmışlar ve bilim ya da felsefe yaparken kendilerinden önceki medeniyetlerin birikimlerinden istifade etmişlerdir. Aristo ve Eflatun başta olmak özere Yunan felsefesi ile içli dışlı olmuşlar, Pers ve Babil astronomisinden istifade etmişler, Hind matematiğini kullanmışlar, Pyhtagor gibi Yunan matematikçilerinin yalnızca matematik sistemlerinin değil aynı zamanda matematik felsefelerini de benimsemişler, müzikten mantığa çok geniş bir sahada insanlığın birikiminden faydalanmışlardır.

Bu insanlar İslamın orijinal kaynakları ile diğer medeniyetlerden devşirdikleri arasında yeni ve orijinal sentezler üretmeye çalışmışlar. Zaten bilimsel ve felsefi başarıları böyle bir etkileşim olmadan mümkün olmazdı.

Bugün de Müslümanlar orijinal düşünürler, sanatçılar, ilim adamları çıkaracaksa bu “öteki” ile irtibat kurmadan, onu sevmeden ve ondan öğrenmeden olmayacak.

Her türlü yenilikçi ilmî başarı sınır bölgelerinde ortaya çıkıyor. Farklı dünyaların birleştiği yerlerde. Endülüs gibi, Bağdat gibi, Amerika gibi farklılıkların birbirlerine kavga etmeden değebildiği yerlerde.

Yani kendi dünyasını iyi tanıyan ve başka dünyalara da açılma arzusu duyan insanın cesaretle farklı bir düşünce ve kültür yapısı ile etkileşimi sonucu ortaya daha önce bilinmeyen orijinal fikirler çıkıyor. Eğer bu etkileşimden korkuyorsanız içe kapanıyor ve yeni bir söz söyleyemez hale geliyorsunuz.

Hakim dini kültür ise abartılı bir korumacı tavırla böyle bir etkileşimi engellemeye çalışıyor. Modern selefiliğin dar yorumları ile bu daha da problemli bir hal alıyor. “Kafalar karışmasın” diye Türkiye’deki ilahiyatlardan yavaş yavaş felsefe derslerinin kaldırılması bunun bir tezahürüdür mesela. Bu problemi aşmadan İslam dünyasındaki bu geniş çaplı çürüme devam edeceğe benziyor.

Özgür Koca

Zaman Amerika, 20 Nisan 2016

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Their offices were perched on the forty-first and forty-second floors of a building in midtown—higher than any two structures here in Lahore would be if they were stacked one atop the other—and while I had previously flown in airplanes and visited the Himalayas, nothing had prepared me for the drama, the power of the view from their lobby. This, I realized, was another world from Pakistan; supporting my feet were the achievements of the most technologically advanced civilization our species had ever known.

Often, during my stay in your country, such comparisons troubled me. In fact, they did more than trouble me: they made me resentful. Four thousand years ago, we, the people of the Indus River basin, had cities that were laid out on grids and boasted underground sewers, while the ancestors of those who would invade and colonize America were illiterate barbarians. Now our cities were largely unplanned, unsanitary affairs, and America had universities with individual endowments greater than our national budget for education. To be reminded of this vast disparity was, for me, to be ashamed.

**

In truth, many Pakistanis drink; alcohol’s illegality in our country has roughly the same effect as marijuana’s in yours. Moreover, not all of our drinkers are western-educated urbanites such as myself; our newspapers regularly carry accounts of villagers dying or going blind after consuming poor-quality moonshine. Indeed, in our poetry and folk songs intoxication occupies a recurring role as a facilitator of love and spiritual enlightenment. What? Is it not a sin? Yes, it certainly is—and so, for that matter, is coveting thy neighbor’s wife. I see you smile; we understand one another, then.

**

I inhaled and shut my eyes. There was a mental state I used to attain when I was playing soccer: my self would disappear, and I would be free, free of doubts and limits, free to focus on nothing but the game. When I entered this state I felt unstoppable. Sufi mystics and Zen masters would, I suspect, understand the feeling. Possibly, ancient warriors did something similar before they went into battle, ritualistically accepting their impending death so they could function unencumbered by fear.

A Journey

We all said surahs from the Quran and a special prayer to protect our sweet homes and school. Then Safina’s father put his foot on the pedal and away we drove out of the small world of our street, home and school and into the unknown. We did not know if we would ever see our town again. We had seen pictures of how the army had flattened everything in an operation against militants in Bajaur and we thought everything we knew would be destroyed.

The streets were jam-packed. I had never seen them so busy before. There were cars everywhere, as well as rickshaws, mule carts and trucks laden with people and their belongings. There were even motorbikes with entire families balanced on them. Thousands of people were leaving with just the clothes they had on their backs. It felt as if the whole valley was on the move. Some people believe that the Pashtuns descend from one of the lost tribes of Israel, and my father said, ‘It is as though we are the Israelites leaving Egypt, but we have no Moses to guide us.’ Few people knew where they were going, they just knew they had to leave. This was the biggest exodus in Pashtun history.

Usually there are many ways out of Mingora, but the Taliban had cut down several huge apple trees and used them to block some routes so everyone was squashed onto the same road. We were an ocean of people. The Taliban patrolled the roads with guns and watched us from the tops of buildings. They were keeping the cars in lines but with weapons not whistles. ‘Traffic Taliban,’ we joked to try and keep our spirits up. At regular intervals along the road we passed army and Taliban checkpoints side by side. Once again the army was seemingly unaware of the Taliban’s presence.

‘Maybe they have poor eyesight,’ we laughed, ‘and can’t see them.’

The road was heaving with traffic. It was a long slow journey and we were all very sweaty crammed in together. Usually car journeys are an adventure for us children as we rarely go anywhere. But this was different. Everyone was depressed.

Aunt Najma

Aunt Najma was in tears. She had never seen the sea before. My family and I sat on the rocks, gazing across the water, breathing in the salt tang of the Arabian Sea. It was such a big expanse, surely no one could know where it ended. At that moment I was very happy. ‘One day I want to cross this sea,’ I said.

‘What is she saying?’ asked my aunt as if I were talking about something impossible. I was still trying to get my head round the fact that she had been living in the seaside city of Karachi for thirty years and yet had never actually laid eyes on the ocean. Her husband would not take her to the beach, and even if she had somehow slipped out of the house, she would not have been able to follow the signs to the sea because she could not read.

I sat on the rocks and thought about the fact that across the water were lands where women were free. In Pakistan we had had a woman prime minister and in Islamabad I had met those impressive working women, yet the fact was that we were a country where almost all the women depend entirely on men. My headmistress Maryam was a strong, educated woman but in our society she could not live on her own and come to work. She had to be living with a husband, brother or parents.

In Pakistan when women say they want independence, people think this means we don’t want to obey our fathers, brothers or husbands. But it does not mean that. It means we want to make decisions for ourselves. We want to be free to go to school or to go to work. Nowhere is it written in the Quran that a woman should be dependent on a man. The word has not come down from the heavens to tell us that every woman should listen to a man.

Neighbourhood

Our house feels big and empty. It sits behind an electric iron gate and it sometimes seems as if we are in what we in Pakistan call a sub-jail, a kind of luxury house arrest. At the back there is a large garden with lots of trees and a green lawn for me and my brothers to play cricket on. But there are no rooftops to play on, no children fighting with kites in the streets, no neighbours coming in to borrow a plate of rice or for us to ask for three tomatoes. We are just a wall’s distance from the next house but it feels miles away.

Taliban

It seemed like the Taliban didn’t want us to do anything. They even banned one of our favourite board games called Carrom in which we flick counters across a wooden board. We heard stories that the Taliban would hear children laughing and burst into the room and smash the boards. We felt like the Taliban saw us as little dolls to control, telling us what to do and how to dress. I thought if God wanted us to be like that He wouldn’t have made us all different.

**

The Taliban targeted not only politicians, MPs and the police, but also people who were not observing purdah, wearing the wrong length of beard or the wrong kind of shalwar kamiz.

**

Terror had made people cruel. The Taliban bulldozed both our Pashtun values and the values of Islam.

**

Yet my father remained hopeful and believed there would be a day when there was an end to the destruction. What really depressed him was the looting of the destroyed schools – the furniture, the books, the computers were all stolen by local people. He cried when he heard this, ‘They are vultures jumping on a dead body.

**

My father always said that the most beautiful thing in a village in the morning is the sight of a child in a school uniform, but now we were afraid to wear them.

**

I know my mother didn’t like the awards because she feared I would become a target as I was becoming more well known. She herself would never appear in public. She refused even to be photographed. She is a very traditional woman and this is our centuries-old culture. Were she to break that tradition, men and women would talk against her, particularly those in our own family. She never said she regretted the work my father and I had undertaken, but when I won prizes, she said, ‘I don’t want awards, I want my daughter. I wouldn’t exchange a single eyelash of my daughter for the whole world.’

My father argued that all he had ever wanted was to create a school in which children could learn. We had been left with no choice but to get involved in politics and campaign for education. ‘My only ambition,’ he said, ‘is to educate my children and my nation as much as I am able. But when half of your leaders tell lies and the other half is negotiating with the Taliban, there is nowhere to go. One has to speak out.’

Conditional Change

When my father was at home, he and his friends sat on the roof at dusk and talked politics endlessly. There was really only one subject – 9/11. It might have changed the whole world but we were living right in the epicentre of everything. Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda, had been living in Kandahar when the attack on the World Trade Center happened, and the Americans had sent thousands of troops to Afghanistan to catch him and overthrow the Taliban regime which had protected him.

In Pakistan we were still under a dictatorship, but America needed our help, just as it had in the 1980s to fight the Russians in Afghanistan. Just as the Russian invasion of Afghanistan had changed everything for General Zia, so 9/11 transformed General Musharraf from an international outcast. Suddenly he was being invited to the White House by George W. Bush and to 10 Downing Street by Tony Blair. There was a major problem, however. Our own intelligence service, ISI, had virtually created the Taliban. Many ISI officers were close to its leaders, having known them for years, and shared some of their beliefs. The ISI’s Colonel Imam boasted he had trained 90,000 Taliban fighters and even became Pakistan’s consul general in Herat during the Taliban regime.

Malala’s Father’s Dream

His own village school had been just a small building. Many of his classes were taught under a tree on the bare ground. There were no toilets and the pupils went to the fields to answer the call of nature. Yet he says he was actually lucky. His sisters – my aunts – did not go to school at all, just like millions of girls in my country. Education had been a great gift for him. He believed that lack of education was the root of all Pakistan’s problems. Ignorance allowed politicians to fool people and bad administrators to be re-elected. He believed schooling should be available for all, rich and poor, boys and girls. The school that my father dreamed of would have desks and a library, computers, bright posters on the walls and, most important, washrooms.

Salman Rushdie

One of their most heated debates in that first year was over a novel. The book was called The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie, and it was a parody of the Prophet’s life set in Bombay. Muslims widely considered it blasphemous and it provoked so much outrage that it seemed people were talking of little else. The odd thing was no one had even noticed the publication of the book to start with – it wasn’t actually on sale in Pakistan – but then a series of articles appeared in Urdu newspapers by a mullah close to our intelligence service, berating the book as offensive to the Prophet and saying it was the duty of good Muslims to protest. Soon mullahs all over Pakistan were denouncing the book, calling for it to be banned, and angry demonstrations were held. The most violent took place in Islamabad on 12 February 1989, when American flags were set alight in front of the American Centre – even though Rushdie and his publishers were British. Police fired into the crowd, and five people were killed. The anger wasn’t just in Pakistan. Two days later Ayatollah Khomeini, the supreme leader of Iran, issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s assassination.

My father’s college held a heated debate in a packed room. Many students argued that the book should be banned and burned and the fatwa upheld. My father also saw the book as offensive to Islam but believes strongly in freedom of speech. ‘First, let’s read the book and then why not respond with our own book,’ he suggested. He ended by asking in a thundering voice my grandfather would have been proud of, ‘Is Islam such a weak religion that it cannot tolerate a book written against it? Not my Islam!”