Thursday, May 19, 2011

Telling sanity from insanity

Unidentified person(s) have torched a madrassa (religious seminary) in Swabi area of Pakhtunkhwa province in Pakistan. It is the first case of its kind. Call it bizarre, wacky or amusing, but the fire has ignited some interesting comments. A high police official told the BBC Urdu service that only a "half crazy" could do this. Going by this argument we can say that those who have torched and bombed hundreds of schools across the Pakhtunkhwa are full crazies. But we have never heard any police or any other government official describing the religious lunatics with such words after a school has been bombed or torched.
So far more than 300 schools have been destroyed in Pakhtunkhwa, with more than 170 only in Swat which was taken over by the madrassa-graduated Taliban for a short but bloody period. Apart from a few civil society organizations, who have been put on the back foot by an aggressive religious right, there had been no protest by any political party. Now even the routine condemnation in the media is being avoided.
But this time round it became hard for Jama'at-i-Islami and the known pro-Taliban JUI (F) to hide their hypocrisy: Their leaders' mouths are foaming in fury and they have asked their workers to take to the streets. Maybe they are furious that why the culprit(s) took a madrassa for a school and put it to torch.
Will anybody among the protesters ask these fire-breathing mullahs, "What about hundreds of schools that have been razed to the ground in the name of Islam?"
But I am still not convinced that the person(s) who did it in Swabi is "half crazy". If it is so, then his saner half was active while lighting the match.