First Anniversary Blog

It did not start with the flutter of butterflies and the appearance of rainbows, the desire to create my own blog sprang up because of a threatening situation.

I will not repeat here what I have already written in the blog’s sidebar (see ‘400 Volts Jolt’) but suffice to say that facing the imminent danger of having years of my work vanish overnight, on the night of 16 October 2009 I began to copy all the material from a certain website (which remains damned, literally and in the fullest literary sense).

As I did this, another writer who openly criticised the exploitive policies of western governments saw his work wiped off the same website’s archives. The website had hit back without a warning—much as I expected it would—where it hurt that writer most but it failed to injure me because I pressed the ejection button at the correct time. I also stopped contributing at the same website in order to concentrate on getting my own blog up and running.

It took me two full weeks to copy all my work and within a few days I learnt all I could about blogging. With conviction in what I wrote and a decent following to further encourage me, the timing was perfect for jettisoning the used first stage and propelling all efforts beyond cyberspace’s blogosphere.

On 02 February 2010, after a few months of beta testing, I announced my blog to the public. 8,900 hits later and having spent one year in the blogosphere, my work lives on the blog, categorized under the following three headings:

1. Chowk articles (things I had written since September 2000)
2. Chowk blogs
3. Blogs you’ll only find HERE

The last category caters to original material not published elsewhere on the internet.

The first blog came out on 04 February 2010 and whose title was a twist on Oscar Wilde’s famous quote ("That awful thing, a woman's memory!”): That Wonderful Thing

Right after announcing the blog I headed for FaceBook which undoubtedly helped attract more readers, many of whom I found interested in reading text more than a line long.

Even today the pessimists ask, “So, what exactly have you achieved with your dark socio-political satire?”

Do I need to prove through statistics what I have achieved? Must I look at people’s faces for a reward? The pessimists do not bore me; it is the naive optimists who provide me with satirical thoughts. Only if a certain intelligence agency, whose motto it has unfortunately become, does not interfere globally with the whole truth, ‘the truth shall set you free’.

It feels great to maintain a mailing list through which I am able to inform keen readers about new articles on my blog. The old layout and colour scheme recently received a complete makeover; the blog now has RSS (‘really simple syndication’ through which one can know, via the browser, whenever new material gets added) and Google chat too.

‘Writer’s Block’ is a terrible disease that seems to afflict almost every literary person at least once in a lifetime but perhaps by the word block, I do not mean stop or hinder but rather a chopping board of ideas. The blog is a record of my time, of thoughts turned into digital ones and zeros. They may not outlive the Egyptian hieroglyphics in terms of longevity but they will live until the globalists decide to end our freedom of speech picnic in cyberspace.

So how does it feel after having done it for a whole year? Wonderful is one word that comes to my mind. My blog has also very kindly been listed under the esteemed category of Webblogs/Think Tank at http://www.mazhar.dk/

I wish to sincerely thank all my readers and helpful friends who still visit my blog to comment on issues, and suggest changes in a well-behaved manner. I hope that you will continue to enjoy what I love writing about in this space.

Peace.

And now for the awards:

Most Visited And Commented Upon blog: Noah's Flood And The 9/11 Eid

Top Referring URL: http://www.mazhar.dk/

Top Referring Website: Facebook

Windows Users: 93%, Mac Users: 3%

Country That Most Reads My Blog is: USA (Pakistan is 2nd, England 3rd and India 4th)

Most Interesting Keyword Search: “what does TGH mean”

How NOT To Breast-Feed Foreigners

Thanks to all the foreign aid flowing out of the pockets of western taxpayers and the spins the media conglomerates create, Democracy is steadily taking root, of all the places, in the Middle East. While bearded Arab men are happy wearing abayas (Arab dress) and darting nowhere in their customized sports cars, the ladies are unhappy being mere buyers of Gucci bags and French makeup paraphernalia; the latter now want driving licenses in a certain country that does not permit them to drive.

The women’s plan is very cute by Arab standards; they will launch a campaign under a novel slogan: "We must either be allowed to drive or breastfeed foreigners".

Breastfeed foreigners?—we have no such precedent in the entire human history, leave alone that of monotheistic religions. With the annual Muslim pilgrimage around the corner, the ladies could not have chosen a better time to press on with such a demand. For the clean-shaven rulers, it is a worrisome trend because such overt protests are unheard of in the ultra-orthodox Arab land.

Gulf News has already reported that ‘women intend to turn a controversial fatwa (religious ruling) to their advantage and launch a campaign to achieve their long-standing demand to drive in a conservative Muslim country whose name we shall not mention lest our hunting grounds lose monetary patronage of these oft-invited dignitaries.

“If our demand is not met, we’ll follow through the fatwa which allows us to breastfeed our drivers and turn them into our sons”, said a veiled woman.

A housewife commented, “Our decision follows a fatwa issued by a renowned scholar who said that ‘women can breastfeed their foreign drivers for them to become their sons’, and since every family here needs a driver, our campaign will focus on women's right to drive.”

Who issued this strange fatwa? It was a member of the council of senior scholars and an adviser to the ruler, who sparked this interesting debate. With such a controversial ruling emerging from under the Shaikh’s abaya, I do not see the man remain an advisor to the ruler for long.

The Shaikh said, “Our women can breastfeed their foreign drivers for them to be become their sons and brothers to their daughters. Women can breastfeed mature men so that they become their sons. In this way, they can mix with their daughters without violating the teachings of Islam.”

Nevertheless, what does it mean? As understood by the female population, under this all-new relationship, foreign drivers can mix freely with all members of a family without breaking the local rule, which does not allow mixing of genders. Breast milk kinship is considered to be as good as a blood relationship in Islam but never equal in status. Adopted sons can never usurp the rights of real sons, rules the Qur’an.

Interestingly, the Shaikh based his fatwa on a Hadith (saying) of the Prophet Mohammad (peace on him) which was narrated by Saleem, the servant of Abu Huzaifa. Later, the Shaikh clarified that his ‘fatwa was distorted by the local media which ignored the condition that the milk should be drawn out of the woman and given to the man in a cup to drink’.

“The fatwa is ridiculous and weird, and it has become a hot topic of debate among women. Is this is all that is left to us to do: to give our breasts to the foreign drivers?” said a number of local women speaking to Gulf News while condemning the fatwa.

Another woman questioned, "Does Islam allow me to breastfeed a foreign man and prevent me from driving my own car? I have not even breastfed my own children, how do you expect me to do this with a foreign man? What is this nonsense? The fatwa should also apply to the husbands who should be breastfed by housemaids. By doing so, all will be brothers and sisters.”

A female Arab writer sarcastically asked the Shaikh, "Can the women breastfeed the driver in the presence of their husbands or can they do this alone? Who will protect the wife if the husband entered the house unexpectedly and found his wife breastfeeding the driver?"

It all started when Dr. Izzat Attya who is the head of the department of Hadith in Al-Azhar, which is the world’s most prestigious Islamic University, issued a fatwa (religious opinion) which declared it 'legitimate for a working Muslim woman to breast-feed her male colleague to avoid the sin of khulwa (staying with a stranger in one room).’ Many shaikhs in Middle-Eastern countries have issued similar fatwas in the past by, but this is the first time it has come from a high-level academic of Al-Azhar.

However, there is more to the story, a journalist for an electronic newspaper recalled how an Egyptian driver got infatuated with a female teacher he drove to school daily and finally asked her to breastfeed him. When she retorted angrily, he said, "I want to be your son."

Since Shakespeare claimed ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’, one must never underestimate the wrath of repressed women. In the preceding paragraphs, we have read how they have mockingly challenged the so-called religious ruling. Handing out driving licenses to chained women might be wiser; having hungry hordes of male drivers at one’s doorsteps lining up to be bottle-fed with mother’s milk is the folly of the century.

After having read the ladies’ comments, I think I now need to retire as a satirist. These are dangerous times for the affluent inhabitants of Pakistan and India, and my advice is to examine all applicants for the domestic position of a chauffeur. Earlier, one needed to worry about their salaries, the food and accommodation, but now one might need to consider their craving for mother’s milk.

I believe hordes of jobless drivers from the Indo-Pakistan region will now begin to beg for cups full of adopted mothers’ milk and work permits since nobody told the poor old Shaikh that milk does not ooze from women’s breasts on men’s or the government’s demands. In any case, women have breasts placed on women’s bodies for the nourishment of infants; their being small or over-sized need not bother grown men. As a man, if you do not believe me, ask any infant who can speak. But then infants are clever little angels who remain mum over matters relating to breast-feeding mummies.

Noah’s Flood And The 9/11 Eid

For some odd reason everyone spells it as ‘Eid’ but I prefer E’ed, just as I prefer spelling ‘Quaid-e-Azam’ as Qaid-e-Azam and ‘Haque’ as Haq. Spelling choices aside, I wish all the readers a very happy Eid.

Before I went to the mosque this E’ed morning, I sent nearly two hundred short messages through the mobile phone to all the relatives and friends. Thus far, I have received almost a hundred reciprocal greetings. Back in the old days, we bought E’ed cards for the near and dear ones, wrote inside the cards what we truly felt and went down to the post office to affix real stamps on the envelopes. Now everything is boringly instantaneous and digital. They claim digital is convenient but I say it is impersonal and most of what one does is destined for the computer’s recycle bin. Hence, when I delete all those E’ed messages sent to me, I cannot ever pull some nice cards out from the cupboard twenty years later and wonder how life was in 2010.

People seldom get creative with prayers so they sent me ‘showers of blessings’ and ‘unlimited bounties of God’. My original SMS to them was simple: "Have a sober E’ed. Too many blessings are a test". Actually, none of them saw in my message what I wished to convey and continued sending me tried and tested replies. The odd thing was that as I stepped into the shower, I could feel the spray of blessings—less the Bounty chocolates. On this E’ed, the Imam (prayer leader) for the E’ed prayers only asked the good Lord for forty-nine items; last year I counted sixty-five must-have things. I uttered a quiet ‘Aameen’ to most of his demands, and at some I smiled because God Almighty could not be expected to grant us world domination while we gleefully disobeyed His direct orders.

Nevertheless, really, is there festivity around us? Last night I drove down to the old city and noticed that the roads had a haunted look. Up until last year, one found it hard to move about due to late night traffic congestion—such would be the festive mood. The shoppers’ attendance at the malls was thin and perhaps the urban population, tired of giving to the flood victims, preferred staying indoors due to the fear of facing explosive terrorism at crowded places.

In addition, exactly nine years after American 9/11 (‘good for Israel’) happened, Muslims are celebrating E’ed on September 11. Some will mourn, the rest will rejoice, this is the way of the world. An American pastor is dilly-dallying whether he ought to publicly burn copies of the Qur’an to protest against 911 (actually, to enrage Muslims globally), while NATO soldiers in Afghanistan have killed Muslim protestors; such is the ebb and flow of Time. As for the recent flood in Pakistan, the citizens and the foreigners are quite tired of handing out aid because disaster after disaster follows us around.

A German friend asked, “I contributed one hundred Euros; what if you face the same situation next year and the year after that?”

I had no satisfactory answer to the pointed query; indeed our aid-fed government failed us five years ago when a massive earthquake shook Pakistan’s northern areas. The government did not rebuild, it gobbled up aid, it became a spectator to the irony of free aid items sold openly on the streets, and it did nothing to prepare us for the next jolt.

We have the flood now that has drowned out nearly half of Pakistan, destroying standing crops, separating children from parents, killing relentlessly, and causing millions to assume the status of displaced persons. I wonder if the media is really helping the situation with its neck-breaking headlines. The TV anchors, interruptive and loud as they are, seek opinions of the ignorant who utter a now familiar mantra: “Nobody from the government is here to help us!”

The government cannot survey and airdrop aid packets over such a large expanse of land unless it utilizes all its resources that are being utilized to serve Project American Wet Dream. I wonder what happened in the Mogul era. Did the rural folks send carrier pigeons with SOS messages tied to their feet or did they despatch fast horse riders to Delhi—the seat of power—to seek royal flood relief? No, nothing of the sort happened because after many months when the news probably reached the royal ears, the reagent regarded it as punishment meted out by the Hand of God to sinners; the most that he probably did for them was forego the agricultural tax for a year. And people fended for themselves or emigrated to get their lives back in shape.

In this age, our government requires a huge machinery to run—one that runs us over every step of the way to real progress. Members of provincial and national assemblies and senators with dubious educational qualifications need to be bottle fed with perquisites such as armed guards, bulletproof cars, protocol services, foreign tours, and free pilgrimage trips to the Holy land. Petty bickering, inter-departmental squabbling, idiotic participation in the G-WOE (America’s Global War of Error), and the inability to pass a single law with unanimity which might uplift the condition of the downtrodden, these are only some of the favourite things these men do non-stop for themselves at a great cost to the exchequer.

Is there a God Perspective to the flood? The destruction appears to be a repeat telecast of the pre-historic flood of Prophet Noah (Nuh). It is clear that sinners do not mean much to the Creator, and though we see their sobbing faces on the television day and night, let us see what might be their intentional and unintentional sins.

To begin with: murderous family feuds that span over decades; property disputes that feed the lengthy and costly legal system; committing ‘shirk’ (creating partners with God) by begging dead saints for help (this is the only sin that is marked out as ‘unpardonable by God’ in the Qur’an); never questioning those they help into offices; always voting the same looters into power; not moving together as a nation, and siding with the enemies of the country and religion. Have we missed something?

So how does God really see the violators? His Word is the command and let there be no doubt that the Word right now is: DESTROY. When the character of a nation fits into each abominable definition given in the Qur’an and it remains heedless and unrepentant, no matter how much one prays for the welfare of this Islamic state, God will do what He has promised the rebellious. To ask Him for the forgiveness of sinners attracts even more Wrath.

“How can that be?” you might ask. The Qur’an explains the entire moral lesson in the following verses from chapter 11:

(11:42) At that [moment] Noah cried out to a son of his, who had kept himself aloof [from the others]: "O my dear son! Embark with us, and remain not with those who deny the truth!"

(11:43) [But the son] answered: "I shall betake myself to a mountain that will protect me from the waters." Said [Noah]: "Today there is no protection [for anyone] from God's judgment, save [for] those who have earned [His] mercy!"
And a wave rose up between them, and [the son] was among those who were drowned.

(11:44) And the word was spoken: "O earth, swallow up thy waters! And, O sky, cease [thy rain]!" And the waters sank into the earth, and the will [of God] was done, and the ark came to rest on Mount Judi.
And the word was spoken: "Away with these evildoing folk!"

(11:45) And Noah called out to his Sustainer, and said: "O my Sustainer! Verily, my son was of my family; and, verily, Thy promise always comes true, and Thou art the most just of all judges!"

(11:46) [God] answered: "O Noah, behold, he was not of thy family, for, verily, he was unrighteous in his conduct. And thou shalt not ask of Me anything whereof thou canst not have any knowledge. Thus, behold, do I admonish thee lest thou become one of those who are unaware [of what is right].”

(11:47) Said [Noah]: "O my Sustainer! Verily, I seek refuge with Thee from [ever again] asking of Thee anything whereof I cannot have any knowledge! For unless Thou grant me forgiveness and bestow Thy mercy upon me, I shall be among the lost!"

There you have it, plain and simple from the Creator Himself! To expound upon in detail the entire moral lesson will require one more article on this site—something that I am better off postponing until the next ‘natural disaster’. Now, by quoting the above verses, I do not advocate that the rural majority be left alone to die helplessly; surely, there are innocent and pious people amongst them. The question now is not how do we understand God’s family planning move but rather how do we brace ourselves against repeated punishments?

Shall we ask the djinns, which the fake holy men claim they control, to build us dams and reservoirs overnight? Should we not repair and fortify our extensive irrigation system? Must all of us pay yet more taxes to the flooded folks—something that we did in the past to help East Pakistanis (now Bangladeshis)? Even Bangladesh has announced it will build more dams and reclaim land from the sea. India already has dozens of dams with their spillways pointed at us—just in case we refuse to watch Bollywood-meets-Hollywood movies.

Billions of tons of river water empties itself in the Indian Ocean each year during the monsoon season, how can we harness water to generate hydel power and also use it for humans and plants alike? We need huge foreign investment, which means more compound interest, more economic subjugation and gradual destruction. The real landholders in this country are the feudal families whose hold over the poor farmers has remained unchallenged ever since 1947. Many of these lustful families have destroyed their adversaries’ lands by diverting floodwaters to save their own palaces and cultivable areas. In addition, the foreign aid the politicians shamelessly seek in our name is actually the bribery of foreign governments who push their satanic agendas in regions they have no business being in. These and nothing else are the bitter facts.

Do I have a grand solution then, a Moses’ like strategy that liberates my people? Thinkers need not be confused with doers.