Sending Pakistan to MarsPERVEZ HOODBHOY — UPDATED OCT 18, 2014 01:02PMWhen spacecraft Mangalyaan successfully entered the Martian orbit in late September after a 10-month journey, India erupted in joy. Costing more than an F-16 but less than a Rafale, Mangalyaan’s meticulous planning and execution established India as a space-faring country. Although Indians had falsely celebrated their five nuclear tests of 1998 — which were based upon well-known physics of the 1940s — the Mars mission is a true accomplishment.

Pakistanis may well ask: can we do it too? What will it take? Seen in the proper spirit, India’s foray into the solar system could be Pakistan’s sputnik moment — an opportunity to reflect upon what’s important. Let’s see how India did it: First, space travel is all about science and India’s young ones are a huge reservoir of enthusiasm for science. Surveys show that 12-16 year olds practically worship Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking, are fascinated by black holes and Schrödinger cats, and most want a career in science. They see more prestige in this than becoming doctors, lawyers, financial managers, or army officers. Although most eventually settle for more conventional professions, this eagerness leads India’s very best students towards science.

Ten years ago, I had personally experienced this youthful enthusiasm during a four-week lecture tour across seven Indian cities that took me to all sorts of schools, colleges, and universities. In places, hundreds turned up for my talks on scientific subjects. Every city had at least one much-visited science museum, and sometimes two or three. Student scientific societies, which appeared active, were everywhere.

How can we Pakistanis get to our bit of the solar system? Or establish a presence in the world of science?

Second, Indian universities have created the necessary backbone for advanced scientific projects. University quality goes from moderately bad to very good, with the median lying around fair. Many mediocre ones produce rotten science PhDs and publications prodigiously, suffocating growth. On the positive side, research in the theoretical sciences carried out in India’s very best universities — as well as institutes such as TIFR and IMSC — compares favourably with that in the world’s top universities.

Rigorous entry standards for students, and a careful selection of faculty, have been important ingredients for this relative success. National examinations for entrance into the Indian Institutes of Technology would make the best students anywhere in the world sweat.

Third, India values — nay, venerates — its top mathematicians and scientists. There is scarcely an Indian I’ve met who doesn’t know the story of Srinivasa Ramanujan, the child prodigy from Madras who astonished the world of high mathematics but tragically died at the age of 32. India is dotted with institutes bearing such names as S.N. Bose, C.V. Raman, M. Saha, and Homi Bhabha.

Back to space: a developing country looking at faraway Mars can take either the Arab way or the Chinese-Indian way.

The first needs a ticket. Petrodollars paid for Prince Salman ibn Saud, the first Arab in space, and put him aloft an American space shuttle in 1985. Recently the UAE announced plans for a Mars mission within 18 years. Just as cash and foreign experts built Dubai and its mega-sized airport, they will also put sheikhs on planets.

But how can we cash-strapped Pakistanis get to our bit of the solar system? Or establish a presence — which we so far lack — in the world of science? The process will be slow, but here is how to do it.

First, create enthusiasm in our young people for science. Space exploration is only a part of the larger whole. Instead of TV channels saturated with dharna news and random political “experts”, have good educational programmes. Standards of English in Pakistan must improve; they have fallen so low that English-language TV channels no longer exist. Sadly, the world of science is closed to those who can only read or understand Urdu.

Second, we must re-educate ourselves to know the difference between science and “cargo science”. This phrase, borrowed from anthropology, was introduced by the physicist Richard Feynman during his 1974 commencement address at the California Institute of Technology.

Feynman said: “In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During [the Second World War] they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas — he’s the controller — and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.”

We must stop teaching a kind of science in Pakistani schools which is science only in name but which bypasses its essence — evidence and reasoning. Students experience mathematics as a bunch of cookbook prescriptions, physics and chemistry are mountains of formulae, and experimental science has been almost totally banished.

Our universities need even more drastic reform. Desperate to show evidence of improvement, government organisations such as the Higher Education Commission and Pakistan Council for Science and Technology have institutionalised a reward system that has led to armies of cargo PhDs — with wooden pieces sticking out of their heads — as well as mountains of cargo publications. Serious de-weeding is needed else academic fakes will crowd out the few genuine academic scientists around.

Third, and last, individual scientific achievement must be recognised while narrow prejudices, both religious and ethnic, must be firmly rejected. India has had many, but Pakistan has had only one great scientist — Abdus Salam. His tragic marginalisation must be reversed. This will be a strong signal that the country is finally prepared to move into the future.

The author teaches physics in Lahore and Islamabad.

Published in Dawn, October 18th, 2014

Weather change: a conspiracy?PERVEZ HOODBHOY — PUBLISHED JUN 27, 2015 01:04AM

PAKISTAN’S weather is getting more extreme, less predictable. Concomitantly there is rising temptation to put the onus upon some human agency. Unsurprisingly, sinister and malign forces bent upon reshaping this country’s climatic pattern are being conjured up. But how well can they survive scientific scrutiny?

Yes, extreme weather is hitting Pakistan hard — very hard. There wasn’t enough refrigeration in Karachi’s hospital morgues to store corpses this week after 1,000 people died from a monster heatwave that left Sindh sizzling with 50ºC temperatures. But April was unseasonably cold in the northern areas, where rain and hailstorms destroyed crops and fruit on a massive scale. All these pale before the abnormal events of 2010. Rains of biblical proportion followed a summer of extreme heat. Sheets of water poured from the skies for days leaving 2,000 dead, millions displaced, and 20pc of Pakistan under water.

What is responsible? Some ask a different question: Who did it? A new book, Reality of Floods in Pakistan, purports to give an answer. It echoes the conspiratorial notion, pushed by certain fringe academics in the West, that weather weapons are secretly being used by powerful states against weaker ones. In particular, this book holds India responsible for the 2010 catastrophe.

In a world with multiple tensions, pseudoscientific claims of weather modification can do great harm.

Expecting that my dissent would add variety, last week I was invited to be a speaker at its launch in Islamabad by the author, Waqas Ahmed, a young Pakistani telecommunications engineer. Glowing tribute is paid on the book’s back cover by Pakistan’s famed nuclear scientist, Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood. Mr Mahmood, who also spoke, was awarded the Sitara-i-Imtiaz in 1998 for being the founder-director of the Kahuta Nuclear Enrichment Project. He is better known as Pakistan’s ‘jinn man’ for advocating the capture of these fiery beings, who would then duly add their contributions to our electricity grid. He achieved additional recognition after meeting Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in early 2001.

One argument in the book closely follows that of Prof Dr Atta-ur-Rahman, former chairman of the HEC and a Fellow of the Royal Society, which was published in this newspaper on Oct 17, 2010. Therein the good professor, quoting political leaders and non-scientists rather than his own research in chemistry, alleged that the massive floods in July 2010, and possibly various recent earthquakes, were likely instigated by an experiment in Alaska called HAARP which directs radio waves at a part of the upper atmosphere called the ionosphere. My objections to this bizarre theory will not be repeated here. The interested reader can google the various subsequent public discussions on the topic.

Less bizarre, but no less wrong, is the book’s contention that seeding clouds can lead to catastrophic floods. I say this is less bizarre because diddling with the ionosphere cannot have the slightest impact upon weather but seeding clouds might have some. The book hints that five years ago India prepared some combination of drones, aircraft spewing chemicals, ground-based cloud seeding generators, ionospheric heaters, and aerosol rockets that nearly drowned its unfriendly neighbour. But even if some of this paraphernalia could have been mustered without being detected, to cause massive countrywide rains is impossible. To understand this we first need to understand both the potentialities and limitations of cloud seeding.

For many decades we’ve known that spraying finely divided particles of certain substances, such as ordinary salt or sodium iodide, can coax the rain out of a cloud. But only sometimes! A cloud has to be of a particular kind with its temperature, density, droplet size, and internal wind currents being just right. Else seeding is useless, which is so about 80-90pc of the time. Most importantly, you cannot alter weather over large areas with multiple clouds through this mechanism.

Today’s extreme weather owes to two culprits. First, plain bad luck — these things just happen! From heat and cold waves to tornadoes and typhoons, nature has turned extreme from time to time over hundreds of centuries. Even today, although we know a lot about jet streams and currents, specific occurrences can be foretold only a little in advance.

Talking of luck (or chance) cries for explanation. Yes, for all its precision, science actually needs this concept! Chance (probability) is a perfectly well-defined mathematical quantity and essential because most systems are not rigidly deterministic. In particular, the atmosphere-ocean system contains chaotic fluids obeying certain equations which suffer from what is famously called the ‘butterfly effect’.

The butterfly effect is a metaphor for the particularities of a hurricane (strength, path, place of formation) being influenced by minor disturbances. Even a butterfly that flapped its wings several weeks earlier in China can make a difference! Before its discovery 50-60 years ago, it was thought that if atmospheric conditions could somehow be known exactly today, with big enough computers we could precisely predict weather for all times to come. But, as mentioned, weather equations are supersensitive to even the tiniest of input variations. This limits our ability for long-term prediction or for controlling individual events. Chance becomes inevitable. On the other hand, short-term forecasts and weather averages are accurately predicted.

The second culprit is global warming. Greenhouse gas emissions from cars and factories have made Earth steadily warmer. Correspondingly, the atmosphere packs greater energy and more moisture. These lead to more and bigger storms, as well as extreme heat and cold events. But when or where an extreme event will hit cannot be controlled or precisely predicted.

In a world crackling with multiple tensions, pseudoscientific claims of weather modification can do great harm by increasing mistrust. Although one cannot vouch for the future, no country today is capable of using weather as a weapon. As increasingly severe storms, droughts, and wildfires in the United States demonstrate, even the world’s most powerful country — one alleged to be at the forefront of weather modification — has not escaped nature’s wrath. Humans have collectively made Earth sicker and more feverish, and now it is lashing back. Rather than

lend our ears to conspiracy-obsessed theorists, we need to cut down emissions and go for eco-friendly energy solutions. And, of course, prepare for the tough times ahead.

The writer teaches physics in Lahore and Islamabad.

Published in Dawn, June 27th, 2015

HEC chief accused of plagiarismIKRAM JUNAIDI — UPDATED AUG 21, 2013 07:57AMAlthough it is the responsibility of the Higher Education Commission (HEC) to take action on plagiarism, a research paper allegedly copied from a European Union (EU) report has been moving from one office to another at the HEC without anyone taking action or at least holding an inquiry into it.

The reason behind it is that one of the authors of the research paper was Dr Javaid R. Laghari, the current chairman of the HEC.

On the other hand, the HEC management claims that it is a conspiracy against Dr Laghari because a summary for the extension of his contract is being moved to the prime minister.

An official of the HEC requesting not to be quoted told Dawn that the thesis “Study of Pakistan election system – ‘intelligent e-election’” was written by Mohammad Nadeem and Dr Javaid R. Laghari in 2003 when they were working at SZABIST.

“When the documents were received at the HEC, we checked it on the plagiarism detecting software -Turnitin - and found that 78 per cent content of the research paper was plagiarised.” It may be noted that 20 per cent plagiarism is ranked in the A Category (severe plagiarism). The official added: “We cannot take action on this because one of the authors of the paper is the current chairman of the HEC.”

Another official of the HEC on the condition of anonymity said both the EU report 2002 and the research paper (copy available with Dawn) showed that the research paper was copied from the EU report available on its website.

He said it was mentioned in the curriculum vitae of Dr Laghari (available with Dawn) that he had published “Study of Pakistan election system - ‘intelligent e-election’” in the Journal of Independent Studies and Research (Vol. 1, No 2, July 2003, pp. 2 – 7) along with Dr Mohammad Nadeem.

According to the HEC rules, anyone found involved in plagiarism before 2007 cannot be punished but all the benefits availed because of the plagiarised thesis or research paper would be withdrawn, he added.

A senior officer, however, maintained that Dr Laghari was just a co-author of the research paper. He has never taken any benefit because of that research paper so action cannot be taken against him, he added.

The officer pointed out that the research paper was written in 2003 when there was no policy about plagiarism. “Dr Laghari just supervised that research paper so action can only be taken against Mohammad Nadeem,” he said.He said some political personalities, who were stopped from taking part in the general elections because of fake degrees, had been trying to make Dr Laghari’s personality controversial. They are creating hurdles in extension of his contract as the HEC chief, he said.

Prof Dr Fida Mohammad, a former president of the Federation of All Pakistan Universities Academic Staff Association, said it was a very sensitive issue and the HEC should confirm it carefully.

“Plagiarism is an offence, but I feel that the HEC officials cannot take action in this case so courts or the prime minister can be approached to get a decision,” he said.

Renowned educationist Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy said he had recently been made aware of a paper bearing the names of M. Nadeem and J.R. Laghari. It is acknowledged in the latter’s CV that the paper was his own, he added.

“An inspection shows that it contains direct copies of text lifted from an EU report in 2002. This has been done without acknowledgment, and so appears to fit the definition of plagiarism as specified by HEC’s written guidelines,” said Dr Hoodbhoy.

“In principle, the HEC ought to be asked to investigate the matter. The problem is that one of the authors happens to be the current HEC chairman. Therefore, an independent inquiry is needed,” he said.

This reporter tried to contact the HEC chairman, Dr Laghari, for three days. SMS were sent on his cellphone and even this reporter tried to contact the chairman through his subordinates, but he did not respond.

Dr Mukhtar Ahmed, the executive director HEC, told Dawn that he had been informed by someone about the matter. However, he added that he had not seen the documents.

“I personally asked Dr Laghari about the plagiarism allegation but he denied it and said it was a conspiracy,” he said.

“Although I am not aware of the matter, if plagiarism is proved, it will be unfortunate. The HEC shows zero tolerance against plagiarism,” he said.

In reply to a question, Dr Mukhtar said Dr Laghari should have announced that he was not involved in the writing of that research paper “but if he has been using it in his CV, I only can say that it is unfortunate.

The science of farceNADEEM F. PARACHA — PUBLISHED JAN 30, 2014 02:16PM

I still remember a conversation I once overheard between two cops standing just outside my grandfather’s office as a teenager in the early 1980s.The conversation was in Punjabi and went something like this:

First cop: “Pakistan is about to make an atom bomb.”Second cop: “No, I think we already have one.”First cop: “Not yet, because I have heard we still do not have the atoms required to make the bomb.”Second cop: “We do not have atoms?”First cop: “No, they are on their way from China.”

Second cop: “Yes, China has a lot of atoms, that’s why America is against Pak-China friendship.”First cop: “Yes, they do not want China to export atoms to Pakistan.”

These were simple police constables trying to talk nuclear physics.

God knows what they thought atoms looked like, but in all probability to them, atoms might have been steely ball bearings that are fitted in a big metallic shell which when dropped from a plane, explodes.

Nevertheless, even though their chatter conformed to the distinct political paranoia of the Cold War era, they remained simple, half-literate men, somewhat endearingly trying to make sense about what the whole ‘atom bum’ hoopla was all about.

However, what was funnier in this respect did not have to do with simple people, but so-called scientists.

Dr. Parvez Hoodbhoy’s book, ‘Islam & Science: Religious Orthodoxy & Battle For Rationality’ (1991) lamented the unscientific thinking being encouraged in Muslim societies.

The following episode might have dissolved into history had not Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy reminded us about it in his excellent first book, ‘Islam & Science: Religious orthodoxy and the battle for rationality’ (1990).

In one of the chapters of this lamenting commentary on the fall of ‘universal science’ and rational thought in the annals of scholarship in Muslim countries, Dr. Hoodbhoy tells us how in the mid-1980s millions of rupees were dished out by certain oil-rich Arab countries and the Ziaul Haq dictatorship in Pakistan, to hold lavish seminars in Islamabad dedicated to celebrate the validity of ‘Islamic science.’

Before the late 1970s, Islamic science usually meant the exemplary work produced in the fields of mathematics, geometry, astronomy, chemistry and philosophy by a number of noted Muslim academics and scholars between the eighth and 14th century CE. In other words, it was about universal science practiced by objective men who also happened to be Muslims.

Children climb the statue of famous 9th century Muslim mathematician, Musa Al-Khwarizmi, in the capital of Uzbekistan.

By the late 1970s, however, the whole idea about Islamic science began to disintegrate into utter farce.

It largely began with a brain wave emitting from the oil-rich Saudi monarchy. Suspicious that Western education systems and models were producing free thinkers and secularists (or ideas that could threaten the theocratic basis of the monarchy’s power and hold); and repulsed and alarmed by the growth of revolutionary nationalism and socialism in the Muslim world (in the ’60s and ’70s), the Saudi government began pumping in ‘Petro-Dollars’ in projects designed to supposedly bring contemporary Islamic thought at par with western science.

The idea had a noble ring to it. But alas, it wasn’t put into motion by putting money into schools, colleges and universities in Muslim countries in an attempt to upgrade and modernise their curriculum and teaching standards.Instead, the big Petro Dollars went into hiring ‘scientists’ whose job it was to generate evidence that ‘secular science and thought’ was inferior to ‘Islamic science.’

As a stream of handpicked Western, Pakistani and Arab scientists and doctors, lured by the promise of big bucks and perks, began making their way into the new-found institutions of ‘Islamic science’ in Saudi Arabia, nobody

was quite sure exactly what ‘Islamic science’ really was or meant.

Renowned author and scientist, Ziauddin Sardar, was one of them. In his book ‘Desperately Seeking Paradise,’ Sardar writes he soon bailed out (from Saudi Arabia) after realising that all the Saudis really wanted were ‘cranks masquerading as scientists.’

Well-known scientist and author, Ziauddin Sardar, who was hired in the late 1970s/early 1980s by a Saudi university, but soon bailed out.The 1976 publication of Maurice Bucaille’s ‘The Bible, Quran and Science’ finally laid out exactly what the new concept of Islamic science would mean.

The book became a sensation in the Muslim world but at the same time left a number of Muslim scientists baffled by what Bucaille was suggesting.

The book is a fascinating read. It claims that various scientific phenomenon discovered by modern Western scientists had already been predicted and explained in the Quran. However, one would sit up and take a little more notice of the claims made by Bucaille had he been a scientist, but he wasn’t.

Maurice Bucaille was a French medical doctor, who in 1973 was appointed as the personal physician of Saudi monarch, King Faisal.

Bucaille’s claims were based not on empirical observation, but rather on his uncritical acceptance of certain musings of some of the most conservative and inflexible ancient Muslim jurists.

Maurice Bucaille.Bucaille faced stern criticism from both Western and Muslim scientists, especially Muslim scientists who accused him of misleading Muslim youth and encouraging them to shun the conventional study of modern sciences just because everything that they needed to know about physics, chemistry, astronomy and biology was supposedly in the Quran.His critics also suggested that the Quran was primarily a moral guide that actually persuades people to understand God’s world around them, and this can only be done by studying the sciences and philosophy.

Though Bucaille’s book is shaky and on soft ground if and when put against the rigors of conventional empirical

science, it set off a somewhat mind-altering change in the thinking of a majority of Muslims.

Impressed by the fantastical claims made by a French Christian doctor, very few Muslims were bothered by the fact that he was on the payroll of the Saudi monarchy, a regime trying to ward off the threat it had faced from various nationalist movements in the Muslim world, and the growing influence of secularism and socialism among the Muslims (between the 1950s and the 1970s).

The idea was that if politics could be ‘Islamised’ (Mauddudi, Qutab, and later, Khomeini), then so could science and (later), economics (banking).

Grudgingly recognising the economic and political advances made by the Jews after World War-II through education and economic initiatives, the Arab world tried to come up with their own notion of advancement.

But this advancement was not really about producing large numbers of highly educated and skilled Muslims, but rather, a populace fed on pulpy feel-good ‘scientific’ twaddle produced by overpaid groups of men calling themselves scientists and economists. And anyway, the new post-Bucaille Muslim mind-set also began labelling

the universal sciences as ‘secular science’ invented by Jews to subjugate the Muslims.

Bucaille enthusiasts were also not bothered (rather not aware) about the entirely unoriginal make-up of his theory. Many still believe that proving scientific truths from Holy Books has been the exclusive domain of Muslims.

Before Muslims, certain Hindu and Christian theologians had already laid claim to the practice of claiming that their respective Holy Books held metaphoric prophecies of scientifically proven phenomenon.

They began doing so between the 18th and 19th centuries, whereas Muslims got into the act only in the 20th century.

Johannes Heinrich’s ‘Scientific vindication of Christianity (1887)’ is one example, while Mohan Roy’s ‘Vedic Physics: Scientific Origin of Hinduism’ is another way of observing how this thought has actually evolved from the fantastical claims of the followers of other faiths.

As quasi-secular/progressive ideas in Muslim countries began to wither in the event of the Islamic Revolution in Iran (1979), and the eruption of jihad in Afghanistan, the idea behind Islamic science being the celebration of the achievements of ancient and modern Muslim scientists was gradually replaced by unsubstantiated and fancy convolutions being defined as science.

So, it was only natural that Pakistan’s military dictator, General Ziaul Haq, heavily influenced and financed by the Saudis, would be the man to green light a seminar of Muslim ‘scientists’ who met in Islamabad in 1986 to unveil the wonders of Islamic science where so-called learned men actually set about discussing things like how to generate energy and electricity from djinns, how to calculate the ‘speed of heaven’, etc.

The seminars may as well have been Star Trek conventions, but were actually promoted as a ‘giant step in the advent of Islamic science.’

The message seemed to be, why read books of science, or enter a lab to understand the many workings of God’s creations – just read the Holy Book. Forget about all those great Muslim scientists of yore, or Abdus Salam, Einstein and Stephen Hawking.

Just get in touch with your friendly neighbourhood djinn for all your energy needs.

Such was the babble many Muslim governments in the 1980s were ‘investing’ their money and efforts in while continuing to struggle to up their literacy rates.

This practice sanctified myopia and an unscientific bend of mind in the Muslim world.

Rationalist Islamic scholars have been insisting throughout the 20th century that the Quran is less a book of laws or science, and more an elaborate moral guide for Muslims, in which God has given individuals the freewill to decide for him or herself through exerting their mental faculties and striving to gain more empirical knowledge.

Iranian writer, Vali Reza Nasr, is right to mourn the trend today in which most Muslims are quick to adopt the fruits of universal sciences but simply refuse to assume the rational scientific mind-set that is behind these sciences.

No wonder then, for example, most Pakistanis still don’t have a clue about what the country’s only Nobel Prize winning scientist, Dr Abdus Salam, got the award for, but many are quick to quote from books written by Harun

Yahya and some others, explaining how things like the Big Bang and others are endorsed in the Holy Book.

Prolific Turkish author, Harun Yaya, who is also an active exponent of ‘Islamic science’, has a large readership in the Muslim world. Many scientists have accused his theories of having no grounding in empirical knowledge and in established scientifc principles.Though such bosh is thankfully no more a part of the state’s agenda (at least not in Pakistan), one still does come across absurdities in which oddballs manage to use mainstream media and forums to define sheer drivel as science.

But not always are such folk mere cranks. Some ‘respected scientists’ have also been known to take the Bucailleian tradition and fuse it with some post-9/11 conspiratorial claptrap.

Apart from some TV channels actually running shows in which grown-up men go around with meters in their hands to record ‘energy signatures’ of djinns, more disconcerting is the fact that men placed in positions of authority in the higher echelons of the scientific and education community in the country have gone on record

to furnish and endorse some bizarre theories in this context.

Critics in this respect suggest that such men actually make a mockery of faith with their claims because scientific truths are not doctrinal and fixed. They are highly evolutionary, mutable and prone to change.

For example, had some Muslim scientists of yore claimed that Newton’s Law of Gravity was already present in the scriptures; they’d have to change their stance after Einstein proved that Newton’s law was flawed.

Would that mean the scriptures were flawed as well?

Recently when a Vice Chancellor of a college in Lahore claimed that the Big Bang Theory was already mentioned in the Holy Book, he conveniently forgot that like most scientific theories, this theory too is not fixed and doctrinal and has been under the microscope of even those who do not reject it.

As scientists continue to dig deeper, the theory may as well collapse and be replaced with another one. What would the Vice Chancellor say then?

Muslim critics of this trend accuse those who claim scientific truths in the scriptures of discouraging Muslims to gain empirical knowledge by going out in the field or testing out their theories in the labs.

They lament that not only is the said trend doing a great disservice to science in the Muslim world, but to the faith as well.

Mosque versus statePERVEZ HOODBHOY — UPDATED JAN 10, 2015 09:30AM

THE mosque in Pakistan is now no longer just a religious institution. Instead it has morphed into a deeply political one that seeks to radically transform culture and society. Actively assisted by the state in this mission in earlier decades, the mosque is a powerful actor over which the state now exercises little authority. Some have been captured by those who fight the government and military. An eviscerated, embattled state finds it easier to drop bombs on the TTP in tribal Waziristan than to rein in its urban supporters, or to dismiss from state payroll those mosque leaders belonging to militant groups.

Very few Pakistanis have dared to criticise the country’s increasingly powerful mosque establishment although they do not spare the Pakistan Army and the country’s political leaders for their many shortcomings. For example, following the Army Public School massacre, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s promise to regulate the madressahs was immediately criticised as undoable. Had he instead suggested that Pakistan’s mosques be brought under state control as in Saudi Arabia, Iran and several Muslim countries, it would have been dismissed as belonging to even beyond the undoable.

The state’s timidity was vividly exposed in its handling of the 2007 bloody insurrection, launched from inside Islamabad’s central mosque, Lal Masjid, barely a mile from the heart of Pakistan’s government. It was a defining point in Pakistan’s history. The story of the Lal Masjid insurrection, its bloody ending, and subsequent rebound is so critical to understanding the limitations of Pakistan’s fight against terrorism that it deserves to be told once again.

Very few Pakistanis have dared to criticise the country’s increasingly powerful mosque establishment.

In early January 2007, the two head clerics of the Lal Masjid demanded the immediate rebuilding of eight illegally constructed mosques knocked down by the civic authorities. Days later, an immediate enforcement of Sharia in Islamabad was demanded. Armed vigilante groups from Jamia Hafsa and nearby madressahs kidnapped ordinary citizens and policemen, threatened shopkeepers, burned CDs and videos, and repeated the demands of tribal militants fighting the Pakistan Army.

At a meeting held in Lal Masjid on April 6, 2007, it was reported that 100 guest religious leaders from across the country pledged to die for the cause of Islam and Sharia. On April 12, in an illegal FM broadcast from the mosque’s own radio station, the clerics issued a threat to the government: “There will be suicide blasts in every nook and cranny of the country. We have weapons, grenades and we are expert in manufacturing bombs. We are not afraid of death….”

The brothers Abdul Aziz and Abdur Rashid Ghazi, who headed the Lal Masjid, had attracted a core of militant organisations around them, including the pioneer of suicide bombings in the region, Jaish-e-Mohammad. Their goal was to change Pakistan’s culture. On April 12, 2007, Rashid Ghazi, a former student of Quaid-i-Azam University, broadcast the following chilling message to our female students:

“The government should abolish co-education. Quaid-i-Azam University has become a brothel. Its female professors and students roam in objectionable dresses. They will have to hide themselves in hijab otherwise they will be punished according to Islam…. Our female students have not issued the threat of throwing acid on the uncovered faces of women. However, such a threat could be used for creating the fear of Islam among sinful women. There is no harm in it.”

For months, unhindered by Gen Musharraf’s government, Lal Masjid operated a parallel government. Its minions received the Saudi Arabian ambassador on the mosque premises, and negotiated with the Chinese ambassador for the release of his country’s kidnapped nationals. The showdown came in July 2007. Copious TV coverage showed armed madressah students with gas masks firing away into the dense smoke. The final push left 10 of Pakistan’s crack SSG commandos dead, together with scores of madressah students. A tidal wave of suicide attacks — as promised by the cleric brothers — duly followed.

Amazingly Pakistan’s civilian courts exonerated Abdul Aziz and Umme Hassan (his wife, who headed Jamia Hafsa). Ignoring TV footage, the court ruled that possession of heavy weaponry by

the accused could not be proven. Today Abdul Aziz remains firmly ensconced in Lal Masjid and hundreds pray behind him. He has threatened to unleash a force of 8,000 students from nearby madressahs if he is again arrested. At the behest of the then chief justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, the destroyed Jamia Hafsa was awarded 20 kanals of choice land in sector H-11 of Islamabad for rebuilding. The land tycoon, Malik Riaz, lavishly reconstructed the damaged mosque.

How many other Abdul Aziz’s does Pakistan have? Clerics who propagate Taliban and Daesh (Islamic State) views to their followers and who, like Aziz, are unmoved by the Peshawar massacre? No one knows even the number of mosques in Pakistan, where they are located, and, most importantly, what their khutbas (sermons) contain. This must change if Pakistan is to make any progress towards containing religious violence.

The first baby step towards bringing an estimated 100,000 to 200,000 mosques under state control requires tasking local authorities at the district and tehsil level with documentation: mosque locations, sizes, religious affiliation, and known sources of funding. The second is to monitor Friday sermons, a possibility offered by modern technology. Many worshippers have mobile phones capable of recording audio. A sermon, once recorded, could be uploaded to a website operated by the Ministry of Religious Affairs. Readers wishing to see how this might be done should visit http://imams.mashalbooks.org/ where sermons from scores of mosques in rural Punjab have been recorded, transcribed, and categorised for full and free public access.

A crisis is said to be a terrible thing to waste. Before the horror of the Peshawar atrocity fades from our collective memory let the state act decisively — albeit in small steps — to restore its right to regulate religious activities within its boundaries. Else the people of Pakistan shall continue to suffer terribly.

The writer teaches physics in Lahore and Islamabad.

Published in Dawn, January 10th, 2015

Math in our madressahs?PERVEZ HOODBHOY — UPDATED JUL 20, 2015 01:04PMEARLIER this month, Maharashtra’s BJP government voted to derecognise schools that teach religion without also teaching the primary subjects: mathematics, science, and English.

Although a few Vedic schools are likely to be classified as ‘non-schools’, this step is primarily directed towards the state’s madressahs.

To be eligible for state grants, they must now teach primary subjects in addition to traditional madressah subjects.

By this decision any child, male or female, will officially be considered uneducated and out-of-school if enrolled in an institution that does not follow the state’s formal school syllabus in these subjects.

Is this good or bad? Predictably, Indian Muslims have protested this as anti-Muslim. Indeed, given the BJP’s Hindutva agenda, to be suspicious of underlying motives is reasonable.

But let us set this aside and judge this new development at face value. It is a fact that children who do not know English, math, or science cannot compete in the job market or benefit from university-level education.They become the victim of conspiracy theories, pseudo-scientific nonsense, and various forms of illogic. Madressah graduates can become maulvis and qazis but not engineers, scientists, or doctors. India sees its madressahs as posing a serious education problem but not — at least officially — as a terrorism problem.

This view must be contrasted against Pakistan’s which now sees its madressahs entirely through a security lens.

From the 1980s, these institutions had been used to provide expendable warriors for use in Afghanistan and then later in Kashmir.

Although government-sponsored radicalisation tapered off after 9/11, putting the genie back in the bottle has proved difficult. Dozens, and perhaps hundreds, of madressahs now generate militancy mostly directed against the Pakistan Army and ordinary Pakistanis.

In an analysis of the profiles of suicide bombers who have struck in Punjab, the Punjab police said more than two-thirds had attended madressahs.

There are many instances where accidental detonations inside madressah premises have killed would-be suicide attackers.

Special Branch has identified dozens of madressahs that are linked to militant groups.

Nevertheless a state of denial had persisted and the public was largely inclined towards seeing madressahs as peaceful religious institutions.

Unless horizons are broadened by including secular subjects, madressahs will remain a perennial danger.

This changed, at least for a while, after the Army Public School massacre on Dec 16, 2014. Over the protestations of the JUI and Jamaat-i-Islami, parliament approved the National Action Plan (NAP) a month later.

This plan included insistence upon madressah reform as a means of controlling religious extremism. Hitherto unregistered madressahs were to be registered, hate speech and militant activities stopped, and funding sources uncovered.

But NAP did not call for a revamping of the content taught in madressahs, and did not insist upon the inclusion of primary subjects. This is a serious omission.

Even if by some miracle NAP’s idea of madressah reform could be implemented, it would scarcely change the worldview that makes militancy attractive.

Living in a primitive world where he is cut off from modern thought and almost all sources of authentic information, the madressah student can be made to believe anything.

Unless horizons are broadened by including secular subjects, madressahs will remain a perennial danger to state and society. Paradoxically, the BJP’s approach to madressah reform is the more enlightened one!

Nevertheless, I have no illusions on how difficult a task this will be. On the request of the-then minister for education, Sardar Aseff Ahmad Ali, the five heads of Pakistan’s wafaqs (madressah boards) and their deputies had gathered around a conference table.

The wafaqs are divided along political and sectarian lines. I was charged with enthusing them into teaching science and math in their institutions.

After expressing due deference to these powerful men who control what is taught to millions of students, I then proceeded to give a 20-minute lecture on how Muslim scientific achievements in the Golden Age had established Islam as a great world civilisation.

The bearded gentlemen were unimpressed. If you want to teach science and engineering in your universities that is your business, they said, but leave matters of faith to us.

The head of one wafaq said his branch of madressahs already taught science and math, and was not interested in further changes.

When the minister offered large sums of money if they modified their curricula, they unanimously said they would welcome the money — but only if it was unconditional. The meeting was a failure.

So what is to be done? As it stands, although faced by NAP, madressah heads have flatly refused to discuss their funding sources or show accounts to the government, and there are probably more unregistered madressahs than registered ones.

According to a report in this newspaper (July 16), law-enforcement officials are admitting helplessness in closing down even a single one of the 579 unregistered madressahs in Karachi because of their enormous street power, and the backing provided by religious political parties.

Curriculum reform may, therefore, appear even more difficult. But, in fact, unexploited opportunities are available to the authorities.

In 1981 Gen Ziaul Haq had ordered that various levels of madressah asnad (certificates) be equivalenced with regular certificates and degrees (bachelor’s, master’s, PhD), and the University Grants Commission (now called HEC) was empowered to determine equivalency requirements.

This gives the HEC leverage over quality: if madressahs are to teach English, math, and science, they must be tested by the same standards as in public schools.

More importantly, HEC can insist on curriculum changes and require that at least some mind-broadening subjects be taught.

Difficult or not, ultimately there is no alternative but for the Pakistani state to bring madressah and mosque under its control. Mere policing will not do.

Instead, the content of instruction must be shifted away from a paranoid and destructive vision of the world towards an inclusive and reasoned one.

Pakistan must do so even in the face of street power, as well as disapproval by Arab countries that fund those brands of madressahs which serve their narrow ideological interests.

Therefore reform must be done incrementally and carefully, and without provoking a massive backlash. But it has to be done.

The writer teaches mathematics and physics in Lahore and Islamabad.

Published in Dawn, July 18th, 2015

Maths & madressahsFROM THE NEWSPAPER — PUBLISHED JUL 27, 2015 06:15AMTHIS refers to Dr Hoodbhoy’s article ‘Math in our madressahs?’ It is tempting to think that the teaching of science, mathematics and English in madressahs would substantially reduce terrorism in the country.

The author has, however, ignored the fact that some terrorists (like the ones responsible for Sabin Mahmud’s murder and the Safoora massacre) had a good education, and one of them is even a business graduate from a prestigious institution.And what about those Pakistani origin men who carried out train and bus bombings in the UK? In fact, the UK was terrorised for many years by Irish terrorists, most of whom were products of the British education system which prioritises the teaching of mathematics, science and English.

It should be obvious that even quality education cannot prevent a person from being brainwashed and turning to terrorism. There must be other factors involved.

Shakir Lakhani

Karachi

(2)

THIS refers to Pervez Hoodbhoy’s article ‘Math in our madressahs?’ (July 18). I respect the writer’s scientific and rational thinking and endorse his opinion that the state should bring madressahs and mosques administrations under its control.

However, it is important that the proverbial baby should not be thrown with the bathwater and instead of discarding wholesale the madressah system it should gradually accept mathematics and science into the religious disciplines.

Jalaluddin S. Hussain

Canada

Published in Dawn, July 27th, 2015