Fabricating history

The SIUT’s Centre for Biomedical Ethics and Culture (CBEC) holds interesting forums periodically where renowned scholars are invited to address the members. Since ethics is a wide-ranging subject the thought-provoking speeches on a variety of subjects delivered there provide the audience some issues to chew upon.

In July, Dr Arifa Syeda Zahra, who teaches history in a Lahore college, was a guest of the CBEC and the point she drove home very forcefully and convincingly was that those who destroy history do it with the purpose of erasing the collective memory of a people. The idea behind this act of vandalism is to pre-empt change, which Dr Arifa Zahra describes as the most difficult process in individuals and societies.

Her hypothesis very appropriately articulated in chaste Urdu laced with pun and humour was that history is the tool that allows us to distinguish between good and evil in the past lives of a nation. This process of analysing past successes and failures is essential to facilitating changes in the present.

This is not happening in our case because those controlling the destiny of Pakistan will not allow it to happen. They are so focused on religion that they distort past records and entangle people in frivolous debates on rituals to divert their attention from substantive issues.

Thus a big lie exposed by Dr Arifa Zahra concerns the so-called ideology of Pakistan that has been used by many an unscrupulous leadership to enable it to exercise control via religion. The conventional belief that has been relentlessly promoted is that the slogan ‘Pakistan ka matlab kiya, La illaha il-Allah’ (What does Pakistan mean? There is only one God) was the battle cry of the Pakistan movement. Dr Arifa Zahra’s contention is that research into history has conclusively proved that this slogan was an invention of the Ayub era in 1968 and has ever since been presented as a fact of Pakistan’s history.

When all laws are supposedly based on religion, such leaders come to enjoy unlimited powers by virtue of their becoming judge, jury and executioner all rolled into one by arrogating to themselves the power of interpretation and implementation.

They create a kind of comfort zone for themselves into which they trap the simple people. Nobody wants to step out of it to face an uncertain future. Who has not seen the blatant misuse of religion for committing the most heinous acts? They go unchallenged.

This falsification of history has provided the right-wing orthodox champions of Islam sufficient ground to build their ideological castles that are actually like castles on the sand.

Accordingly, the belief was fabricated that Pakistan was created to enable Muslims of South Asia to build a separate state for themselves in which they could create a theological structure with an Islamic system in vogue.