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You can’t blame the holy fathers of the MMA (the religious alliance) for being so single-minded in pursuing their agenda. They are doing what comes naturally to them: utterly convinced they serve the cause of Islam when denouncing ‘obscenity’, attacking women marathon races, turning non-issues such as the religious column in passports into burning issues.
   It would be a huge mistake to assume that these clerics of the Pakistani school stand alone in the glorification of irrelevance. The way of the professional cleric—-Jewish, Christian, Islamic—-throughout history has been to champion bigotry and trash reason. Why does Bulleh Shah, the great sufi poet, mock the certified maulvi? Because he finds his make-believe and hypocrisy laughable.
   This is no reflection on religion, only on the mischief so often perpetrated in its name. To give but one example, if the glories of the Spanish Inquisition—-torturing ‘heretics’ and burning them at the stake—-are recounted, Islam’s holy fathers, by comparison, emerge as the very pictures of tolerance. There’s been no burning-at-the-stake in all the history of Islam, which does not mean that dark deeds have not been committed in its name.
   Makes everything sound relative, doesn’t it? It also leads to another conclusion: about the most profitless undertaking in the world is to get into a discussion about religion. You never arrive at a conclusion, seldom convince the other person. Only end up producing a lot of heat.
   Converts are few and far between. Most of us are born into the faiths we profess or hold sacred. I am a Sunni not because I have read the great Sunni texts and been persuaded of their merit but because I was born into a Sunni household. This being the genesis of my faith how does it behove me to impose my views on others, much less take up fire and sword to spread them?
   Religion is a matter of faith, woven into the tissues and sinews of the believer, part of his blood, of the very air he breathes. How can you change such a thing by debate or disputation? Isn’t it best then to practice tolerance and let each person stick to the faith he/she professes? Live and let live and get on with the business of the world.
   These are commonplace observations with nothing original or profound about them. The only reason they still command some relevance in the world of Islam is because whereas Christendom got over its baffling or dark ages long ago—-beginning with the Renaissance, to be precise—-the countries of Islam are still caught in a debate about the meaning of Islam and its application to everyday life.
   Take Pakistan, the quintessential debating society, still agonizing over the meaning of Pakistan: Pakistan according to Jinnah or according to the maulanas and their various schools of thought? Amazingly, this debate is still on, the battle for the soul of Pakistan as fresh today as it was 57 years ago at the country’s founding.
   You could be forgiven for thinking that fuelling this debate is religious fervour. Wrong. It is something more prosaic: out-and-out political failure. The more elusive democracy and economic progress prove, the greater the temptation to seek refuge behind the screen of Islam.
   Barring one or two countries, autocracy holds sway across the Muslim world. You would think that Muslim countries would be grappling with this problem which, above all, prevents them from realizing their potential. No, what they get from their rulers are grave sermons on how Islam is a progressive and enlightened religion.
   Pervez Musharraf is not the only one who has taken to speaking this language. Post-September 11, in the wake of western concerns about the direction Islam was taking across the Muslim world, every pro-western figure in the Islamic world (what other kind is there?), from Mubarak of Egypt to Abdallah of Jordan, has become a professor of ‘enlightened’ Islam.
   Islam can do without such defenders. Its cause would be better served with less talk and more progress towards representative government. Bin Ladenism is a reaction to Muslim autocracy and American imperialism, the one feeding on the other. That the cure proposed is worse than the disease is beside the point. Bin Ladenism thrives on real grievances and as long as those grievances remain, there will be no shortage of recruits to its cause.
   What about George Bush’s newly-discovered love for democracy in Muslim lands? Well, in his hands democracy is a handy stick with which to keep the Muslim world in line, that is, firmly behind the United States. Curbing even the most egregious manifestations of American imperialism in the Middle East is no part of his agenda.
   As far as Pakistan is concerned, its self-appointed ruler—-no doubts, I trust, about his self-appointed status—- protests too much about ‘enlightened moderation’. Enlightenment in the Pakistani context means only one thing: the army’s return to its primary duty of national defence, unless of course primary duty now also means ever more defence housing authorities; and the country’s return to constitutionalism, the genuine article.
   But precisely because Musharraf is hesitant to move on these fronts—-neither removing the army from the political sphere nor creating the conditions for free elections, thus hampering the ‘mainstream’ parties, the PPP and the PML-N —-he is proving to be the biggest benefactor of the religious parties, thriving in the vacuum he has created.
   Gen Zia was an avowed Islamicist, part of his political strategy the conscious effort to cultivate a religious constituency. But what even he couldn’t achieve through pro-activism, Musharraf has achieved unwittingly, the religious parties more powerful now than at any time under Zia.
   The religious parties thus are not to be blamed for trying to make an issue of non-issues or taking to the warpath against women athletics. They feel strongly about these issues and if the government itself is giving them space they would be foolish not to use it.
   Their belief in purdah is genuine. Music, dance and other forms of entertainment they genuinely frown upon, their outlook on life deeply conservative, their sense of right and wrong clearly defined. If there is a ‘liberal’ America and a ‘conservative’ America, a distinction made starkly clear in the last US presidential election, the same distinction holds true more powerfully for countries like Pakistan. Just as ‘liberals’ would be appalled at the prospect of becoming maulvis, don’t expect maulvis to make a stampede for the doors of ‘liberalism’.
   And it is no use holding on to different interpretations of Islam and claiming superiority for one interpretation over the other. Deeply-head beliefs, as already stated, are susceptible to no logic or reason. You believe and that’s the end of the matter.
   So what is to be done? For a start, don’t just talk ‘moderation’ or ‘enlightenment’. Do something about them. Be true to the Constitution and the rule of law, practice self-restraint, curb your hunger for power, study history and the causes of the rise and fall of empires, and before you know it the frontiers of ‘enlightenment’ will expand and those of bigotry shrink.
   Does one need a certificate from Al Azhar University to realize that justice should be speedy and quick, the streets should be clear of garbage and buses and trains should run on time? That the sick should be treated, every child should be educated and no one, not even dogs and other animals, should go hungry? That it should be the sovereign right of every school-going child to receive a glass of pure milk at school every morning?
   A reasonably well-run state in which cruelty, exploitation and injustice are not banished altogether, that being impossible, but in which the levels of all three are lowered as much as possible, is the aim, or should be, of every polity on the face of the earth. The meaning of Pakistan cannot be any different from this.
   Forget about attaining this goal. As soon as we start moving towards it, debates both theological and existential will become irrelevant. And although, even then, there will be maulvis on the right warning of imminent perdition, and ‘liberals’ on the left decrying the prospect of freedom unfulfilled, Pakistan will have strength enough to bear the weight of such tensions.

In 1968, Ecologist Garrett Hardin coined a new term in explaining a universal human phenomenon which is commonly known as the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’. Since then it has been proven a useful concept for understanding how we, the human race, have come to be at the brink of numerous environmental catastrophes. The underlying principle of the concept states that people in this world face dangerous and harmful situations not only by malicious outside forces, but sometimes by the apparently innocuous but indiscreet behaviour of many individuals acting alone.
   Hardin’s parable involves a pasture — open to all and defined as the ‘commons’. He then asks us to imagine the grazing of animals on the ‘commons’. Individuals are motivated to add to their flocks to increase personal wealth. Yet every animal added to the total degrades the ‘commons’ a small amount. Although the degradation for additional animal is quite small relative to the gain in wealth of individual owner, the ‘commons’ will soon be destroyed if all owners follow this pattern. However, when each owner adds to his flock, as a rational actor he tries to maximise his own gain. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without a limit in a world that is limited. And Hardin says, ‘Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons’.
   Despite being considered remarkable at the time it was published, Hardin’s tragedy was not a new concept. Its intellectual roots trace back to Aristotle who noted that ‘what is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it’. Similarly, Thomas Hobbs in his concept of ‘leviathan’ outlined a similar idea. As a matter of fact this concept applies in its broader sense to a great many modern environmental problems we are facing today. And, of the many paradigms out there that are truly representative of Hardin’s concept, Dhaka itself stands out uniquely with its own cornucopia of man made disasters - starting from the unnerving traffic congestion to the severe water logging to the mushrooming of unplanned development.
   Hardin could have found our beloved city as a perfect laboratory for postulating the very validity of his concept. In the early nineties when the ‘hoopla’ of apartment building phenomenon started taking place, it was quite astounding how even the professional architects (I was one of them) became so elated by that. It reminds me of a metaphor given by famous Indian architect Charles Correa while describing the mindset of the people of his own city Mumbai. His metaphor involves a frog swimming in a bowl full of water while a burner underneath is heating the bowl gradually.  At the first stage the frog becomes euphoric by the comfort of lukewarm water without any idea of the grim reality lurking in the near future (when the temperature will reach its boiling point). Although he used this metaphor to make us understand the common attitude of his fellow city men towards the so-called developments, it is quite a universal phenomenon and equally applicable to that of our fellow ‘Dhakaites’.
   After almost a five-year pause, I visited (from abroad) my beloved city last year. I found a noticeable phenomenon that was ubiquitous in almost all areas - from the low-income areas to the so-called ‘posh’ ones. Yes! I am talking about that ubiquitous sound of steel-hammering on construction sites. It was seemingly an expression of inexplicable pursuit for maximizing self-interest at the cost of that of millions; like an unbridled horse race among the landowners to rip off more than possible benefits out of a parcel of land, no matter where they have that in whatever size. Seemingly nobody was caring about potential negative impacts on other fellow neighbours or citizens; the goal was to maximise individual benefit, a vicious stage for Hardin’s tragedy. We may not realise that a city is like a machine-sometimes more complex than that-which needs regular maintenance, timely overhauling and has its own capacity to operate. Therefore when we push the envelope that far, costly panaceas like ‘flyovers’ become quite ineffective in bringing about desired relief. I don’t think that our policymakers in both the private and public sectors don’t know this; rather it looks like they are in a state of denial; pointing fingers at each other and playing childish pranks over each other.
   When we drill our wells deeper and deeper to provide water supply for an over populated area; when we build our high rises abutting narrow alleys and cut off the sunshine and deprive our elders from basking in it; when we devour our open spaces and build multi-storeyed markets on them and push our youths and children off from playfields to the streets to sit idle and gossip, we are in a way putting ourselves in the situation of that frog in the heating bowl. We might be euphoric over strolling around in our flashy shopping malls and we might be delighted over how beautiful views our apartments have, but we are heading towards a collective disaster both physically and socially a complete ‘tragedy of the commons’. We are holding conference after conference on disaster management for possible earthquakes on one hand, but on the other we are creating a serious ecological imbalance by letting our natural features (greenery, water bodies, underground water table, natural gas, etc.) be squandered by indiscreet self-indulgence. As long as this whole gamut of irony and double standard persists in our society, we tend to move forward every day towards the ultimate ruin of the ‘commons’.  And still we are apparently myopic and apathetic towards the signs, which bode us no good in the near future.
   Finding solutions for all these is like plunging into an abyss. Because it needs unprecedented efforts by both public and private sectors and a long term physical, environmental and strategic planning requiring astronomical amount of money for a country like ours. Given the context of catastrophes that have already happened, there is not that much of a glimmer of hope for us to eradicate all the problems completely. However, it is fruitless being inactive rather than proactive and the more we waste our valuable time the more we are heading towards a disaster that might be impossible to overcome by any human means. The biggest factor concerning long term planning is to change the Dhaka-centric trend of migration. Unquestionably, it requires greater aspects of long term regional planning such as restructuring our local government to strengthen bottom up planning, establishing a hierarchy of regional centres by proving massive incentives for private sector activity, developing a systematic and affordable network of communication and above all strong political will with a visionary set of reachable goals. Unfortunately, this area of discussion is mammoth in terms of scope and time available in this very article. But as a first step, (at the least) to delay a further decay of our urban environment, we must need to undertake some actions immediately. Firstly, our concerned people in the government, i.e., politicians, bureaucrats and policymakers, need to be fully aware of the consequences and convinced to do something in order to save our city. Secondly, it is imperative to launch a massive campaign to educate common mass about the possible danger of their unscrupulous activities and also to provide huge incentives to spur activities conducive to healthy environment.
   (To be continued)

The debate on Darfur in the UN Security Council last night is a salutary reminder that the only hope for peoples abandoned by their own governments is an effective international community. It was a Labour government that hosted the conference in post-war London that gave birth to the UN. Now this Labour government has the opportunity to modernise it by taking up the challenge of Kofi Annan’s blueprint for a UN for this century.
   The UN was founded in an era when most of its present members were not independent states, and even fewer were industrialised nations. Nearly all permanent members got there because they were the victors of the Second World War. To this day Germany and Japan have never overcome their initial exclusion as the losers, and the new industrialised giants such as Brazil or India remain in the waiting room.
   Not one permanent member represents the Muslim world, although developing a positive, tolerant relationship between the west and Islam is one of the most pressing security issues of our time. The obvious solution is for Egypt or Indonesia to take one of the four new permanent seats that the Annan package proposes for Africa and Asia.
   New permanent members will not qualify for a veto, which begs the question: what happens to the veto of the existing five? In truth the British veto is already vestigial. When I first went to the UN I caused consternation by asking when we had last deployed the British veto. After much phoning round retired diplomats, it was established that we had last cast our veto a dozen years before, bizarrely on a matter relating to the Panama Canal, although I never found anyone who could remember what exactly had been so important in Panama that it merited a British veto.
   The problem is that to Americans their veto in the UN occupies the same talismanic role as our veto in the European Union. The best hope is a self-denying commitment by the permanent five that they will each cast their veto only on matters of immediate national interest. Britain could start the log rolling by making such a unilateral statement on its own, which should not be difficult as we now do not use our veto at all. The economic and social council of the UN has never achieved the same status as its security council.
   The Annan report cogently points out the perversity of this imbalance, as so much of the agenda of the Security Council is taken up with violent conflicts that have their roots in the failure to promote peaceful development.
   This lack of authority on the part of the economic and social council produces a failure to coordinate the UN agencies competing against each other in the same field. It is striking testimony to the difficulty of the UN in exercising leadership on development that in the controversy over the appointment of Paul Wolfowitz it is rarely mentioned that the World Bank is technically a UN body. No one is asking for Kofi Annan to be given a veto over whether Wolfowitz gets the job, but it does not seem unreasonable to demand stronger coordination at the centre to stop the World Bank pursuing neo-liberal policies that are in flat conflict with the development agendas of other UN agencies. This brings us to the solid concrete roadblock in the path of the Annan reforms. The world is confronted with a choice between two competing models of global governance. The direction signposted by Kofi Annan is to a regenerated UN with new authority for its collective decisions. However, collective decision making is only possible if there is broad equivalence among those taking part. And there is the rub. The neocons who run the US administration want supremacy, not equality, for America and hanker after an alternative model of global governance in which the world is put to right not by the tedious process of building international consensus, but by the straightforward exercise of US puissance.
   There are ways in which this power can be displayed more subtly than by dispatching an aircraft carrier. Over the past six months their influence has been deployed in heavy press briefing against Kofi Annan, to their shame faithfully taken up by rightwing organs in the British press. There is a breathtaking hypocrisy to the indictment of Kofi Annan over the oil for food programme for Iraq. It was the US and the UK who devised the programme, piloted the UN resolutions that gave it authority, sat on the committee to administer it and ran the blockade to enforce it. I know because I spent a high proportion of my time at the Foreign Office trying to make a success of it. If there were problems with it then Washington and London should be in the dock alongside the luckless Kofi Annan, who happened to be general secretary at the time.
   But there is a deeper level of perversity to the denigration of Annan by the American right wing. They have long clamoured for reform of the UN. Kofi Annan has just proposed the most comprehensive overhaul of the UN in its history and is the general secretary most likely to deliver support for it. If they persist in undermining him they are likely to derail his reform package. The suspicion must be that they would rather have a creaking, ineffective UN to treat as a coconut shy than a modern, representative forum that would oblige them to respect collective decisions.
   The eccentric selection of John Bolton as Bush’s ambassador to the UN is consistent with such a strategy of sabotage rather than reform. His hostility to any constraint on US unilateralism is so deep, (and his life so sad), that he described his “happiest moment” signing the letter to Kofi Annan telling him that the US would have nothing to do with the international criminal court. His relish in the gesture is all the more revealing as the issue was not within the remit of his job, and he pleaded to be allowed to sign as a special favour.
   Ironically the first confrontation the US has faced since his appointment was the vote last night on the proposal to refer the war crimes in Darfur to the international criminal court. The problem for Washington unilateralists in trying to stop it was that the brutality and genocide in Darfur is a classic case for enforcement of international law through multilateral process.
   To its credit the British government had long made it clear that regardless of what the US did, they would support the French resolution invoking the international criminal court. Such a stand is welcome not only as the right policy for Darfur, but as a demonstration that Britain backs the Annan model of a modern, multilateral system of global governance and this time at least has declined to accept US supremacy.
   — The Guardian