Pakistan News And Discussion-11

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<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Meeting Ghazi Sahib</b> - TFT

The Lal Masjid-Jamias Hafsa and Fareedia have been taken over by Pakistani security forces after an operation against the complex on July 3, 2007, two weeks after I visited the complex. Here’s the story of what I saw.

A journalist friend in Islamabad agreed to try and get me into the premises of the Lal Masjid and the adjoining Jamia Hafsa seminary for women around the same time the Hafsa women raided what they claimed was a brothel owned and operated by a group of Chinese women and men, and abducted them along with two Pakistani male customers. The action, meant to warn and thence curb “sexual depravity” in Pakistani society, got China to take notice and protest openly to Pakistan.

I called Ghazi Abdul Rashid, deputy administrator of the Red Mosque, to finalise my trip to the mosque. The voice on the other end sounded surprisingly normal, and in response to my query about whether I should come to the Lal Masjid in a burqa, I heard a chuckle: “You are a Pakistani lady, yes? No need for the burqa. Just come dressed normally.” When I arrived at the mosque at 9 am the next morning, June 27, 2007, I was asked to cover my hair before being escorted inside by two bearded guards.

Facing me was a rundown brick wall with some Quranic verses scrawled on it in white paint. We turned right and a few feet down was another wall, obstructing any possibility of a larger view. Leaning against one wall was a large number of sticks the public had got so used to seeing being wielded by the Jamia Hafsa women. In a small clearing stood a group of men and boys in black turbans, and the straggly black beards, shalwar-kameezes and pathani sandals generally associated with the Taliban. They sported automatic weapons slung across their shoulders. My guide stopped and said that I’d have to leave the bags behind with him before I could proceed further to meet with Ghazi Sahib.

I needed my recorder to tape the interview, as well as my camera to take some pictures. As I was protesting, Ghazi Sahib made his appearance from one corner and asked if I was the woman who had come for the interview. He motioned the guard away, and I was asked to follow him, bags and all.

Ghazi Sahib on the Taliban and Pakistan government

We entered Mr Ghazi’s office in a low-lying building, a room really, with a little awning of straw and corrugated steel. Here, as I sat across from him on a small black couch, while he sat at his desk before a computer screen, he proceed to speak in English into the hand-held recorder I had brought along.

A young bearded man, sitting on the carpeted floor, gun slung across his shoulder, flipped open for me the provocative centrefold in a magazine against whose owners, publishers and staff, the mosque had issued a fatwa. It was a photograph of a male and female model scantily-clad in fig-leaf costume, acting out some Adam and Eve fantasy. “No religion allows its prophets to be treated disrespectfully, does it?” Mr Ghazi asked rhetorically. “The owners and models should know better than to dress up in this obscene manner in an Islamic society.” He smiled. “But now that they have apologised, we have removed the fatwa. We are reasonable people.”

Out of 13,000 registered madrassahs in Pakistan, the Jamia Hafsa, according to Ghazi Sahib, was the only school that provided training in Islamic Studies to females. He claimed that the school was the largest Islamist seminary for women in the world, with 6,000 students, mostly residential but many day scholars from surrounding neighbourhoods in Islamabad and Rawalpindi. Both the male and female seminaries run by the Lal Masjid, with a total student population of 10,000, were according to Ghazi Sahib, running only on donations from Pakistani citizens.

Ghazi Sahib said that it was both to retaliate against the West’s neo-imperialist and anti-Islamic policies, as well as the corrupt Pakistani government and upper-classes which are working in tandem to promote anti-poor and anti-Muslim agendas of the West, that outfits like the Jamia Hafsa and Lal Masjid had come into existence as the Voice of the Oppressed. I understood him to mean that terror begets terrorism, which has been the line of most Al Qaeda apologists.

“If I start practicing Islam you call me a fundamentalist, and extreme; what about secular extremism? What about the practices of vulgarity, ***** and prostitution which are rampant all over Islamabad and Lahore because of Musharraf’s policy of so-called Enlightened Moderation?” Ghazi Sahib asked in response to my question of his imposing his version of Islam on the country. “We do not want to enforce our views on others, but look at people like Auntie Shamim, who was reported to the police many times for un-Islamic business and oppressive practices against the young girls she employed.”

Seeing my eyes widen, Ghazi Sahib quickly added: “The poor girls in her service were arrested by the police several times and they revealed that they were badly exploited by her; they even came to us crying and complaining of the treatment they received at her hands – how they were promised good decent jobs and then just taken to clients and handed 8,000 rupees for their services. All this is on record with the police; yet nothing was ever done about it. No FIR was ever registered against Shamim. This is only so because she has links with senior officials in the government,” Ghazi said.

We then turned to the question of whether Lal Majid’s agenda with regards to women was similar to that of the Taliban: “But before you answer that, Ghazi Sahib, I want to know how it is okay in your book to be staring openly at me, and have your own women here covered from head to toe?”

Ghazi Sahib went on to give me his theory of the “pietistic” gaze. “You know, my wife drives. I am not against women outside the home. I did not force you to wear a burqa, now did I? This should tell you that we are not against freedom. We are not forcing women to veil themselves. But in an Islamic state, Islamic values should dominate.”

I reminded him again of the Taliban agenda and what that had translated into for the unfortunate women of Afghanistan. In response, he began to wax eloquent about the “total peace” the Taliban had brought to the country, how they’d abolished poppy cultivation and the warlord system. But, above all, said Ghazi Sahib, they announced severe punishments for all the men who would deny inheritance rights to their sisters and mothers. “Why,” asked Ghazi Sahib, “did the world and the media focus only on their [Taliban] mistakes?”

To my amazement, he argued that it wasn’t that the Taliban were against female education but just that they were trying to manage a war-ravaged country which necessarily meant lining up their priorities.  “And women’s education was not a priority?” I asked. He responded: “That is like asking someone who is starving why he does not eat cake. It’s like an American asking a beaten-down, war-ravaged Afghani without a roof over his head, why his children don’t sleep in an air-conditioned room.” He paused and then said: “The Taliban were never given a chance to complete their vision. But I am not advocating that system. I am only saying that the current system of here is corrupt, lawless and no one fights for the rights of the poor and the downtrodden.”

Time was up. He gestured to the women seated on the floor to escort me to the Jamia Hafsa seminary next door, and assured me he was available for further questions on telephone and email. I walked into the blazing heat outside, and heard him say to the women: “Be sure to give the scholar some lunch. Let Umm-e Hassan guide her and answer her questions.”

Inside the Jamia Hafsa

I followed the women to a reception area and was then ushered into the room adjoining the reception area to my left. There, in a modest-sized room, I was introduced to eight or nine women, half of them students, the others their teachers. I was invited to sit down and offered a soft drink. One student began talking to me about many things, particularly economics.

Before I knew it, we were thick into Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations . Amina Adeem very solemnly declared that Adam Smith and other western economists and thinkers, because they were afraid of Muslims’ collective strength, had decided that the best way to avoid an Islamic revival was to promote an economic model that would ensnare the Muslim Ummah in money-worship.  The decadent lifestyle that invariably accompanies the worship of such an idol has transformed what should have been Dar-ul-Islam – the Land of Islam – into Dar-ul-Kufr, or the Land of Unbelievers.

“Look,” she continued breathlessly, “at these rich, disgusting men of our society today who are not happy despite many wives, mistresses, cars, guards. Look at Abdul Rehman bin Arif, Abu Obeida, and Abu Bin Jaraa, leaders who lived like ordinary folk. Their homes were never looted, they did not live in fear of dacoits. But here, today, is the rule of dacoits. Who can afford mutton at Rs350 a kilo?”

There was a sudden hush as a fair-complexioned woman, slightly stout but good-looking, wearing a gray-blue shalwar kameez and holding a young boy in her arms, entered the room. “Welcome, you must be the professor Ghazi Sahib sent our way.” She sat down on the sofa next to me, and I informed her I had been having a most informative chat with her students, but that they wouldn’t let me tape them without her permission. “Oh no, I am afraid that is not allowed,” she said firmly, and then, in response to my query if I might photograph them, she replied again in the negative. “Not even with their burqas on?” I pleaded. “No. Why objectify us like that? That would serve only a sensational purpose and surely that is not why you are here?”

Very quickly, the woman, Umm-e-Hassan, Abdul Aziz’s wife and the principle of Jamia Hafsa, informed me that she was a Punjabi, not a Pathan as one may assume given her tall, fair carriage.  She claimed to have been in the school since 1992 when it came into existence, with her as founder and principal. I calculated that her tenure had lasted fifteen years, and she was, still, a young woman, maybe in her mid thirties.

Continuing where the younger students had left off on the subject of poverty, Umm-e Hassan told me that Pakistan needed economists schooled in the University of the Prophet. “What need do we have of PhDs from abroad when our own folks cannot find decent jobs? Over 300 people commit suicide on average every month because they are jobless.” Not more than an hour earlier, Ghazi Sahib had told me the figure was 3,000 suicides annually.

I asked the women why she called herself ‘Umm-e Hassan’; why so many others used the Arabic appellation. She shot back ferociously: “We love Arabs; we love our Prophet who was Arab and so we take our names from them. Some people like Imran Khan and Lady Diana and name their children after them; why criticise us?”

I then asked that I wanted to see a classroom. “Take her to the Hadith class,” she told the younger girls, and then said to me: “I will instruct them to treat you to the Naara-e-Takbir. That will be something you’ll remember, I’m sure.”

In the classroom, a sea of white hijabs greeted my vision, rows upon rows of pubescent girls stretching back as far as the eye could see. Hundreds of them were seated on the carpeted floor, under slowly whirring ceiling fans, with huge register-like books marked, “Hadith” spread out in front of them on long low wooden planks. An odour of musky perspiration hung in the air, and the principal, who entered right behind me, instructed the girls to shout out the “naara-e-takbir”.

From the back, a voice declared, “Naara-e-takbir” and then, the room began to rumble as hundreds of voices combined to raise a salute to God with one “Allah-ho-Akbar!” after another.

As I walked out of the compound, the girls asked me if I would visit again. “Of course I will; and we shall continue our discussions further. Maybe I will persuade you!” I teased. At this, one women replied seriously, “We pray that the guardian angels we have urged to take their places on your shoulders will protect you from all manner of evil. Maybe it is you who will have converted to our point of view by the time you return to us next.”

Two weeks after my visit, on Tuesday July 10, 2007, the mosque and the seminary have been ‘cleansed’ by the state.
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