Now
you might have heard of the word abuse. You can say that it is a
combination of two English words, ab and use. Where ab can be understood simply
by connecting it to the word abnormal. To be, not normal. Yes, those
children whom the decorated West likes to call special children. Whereas
they are simply and straightforwardly speaking, abnormal children, as the
Eastern locale mind thinks. And how horrible it is right, to be abnormal? Well
then, what do you think about abuse? Ab and use together making abuse would
similarly mean the wrong use of something. So what does the Eastern society
think where does this abuse take place? Using newspapers as fans when the light
goes out? Or for selling samosas? Or for dum while cooking rice? Selling fruits
at high price during Ramadan? Diluting milk upon customer increase? Plugging
the electric pole with a residential wire? Gesturing for money in lieu of work
in a government office? Are these misuse or not? Are these abuse or not? Well,
it really depends upon who you are. For if you are the one doing it in a
government office, you would rubbish the whole idea. Its occurrence and its
evil, both. Well then what do you think about domestic abuse? Oh that, guffaw!
That is another one of those Western delicacies and propaganda where natural
family relations are blown out of proportion. I mean really, if a husband and
wife have a little scuffle, what does it really matter? It all gets made up
later in the night. So she should wait for the night rather than go to the
police station with the marks of abuse on her face. And start the next afresh,
for yet another abuse. But what should she do if she faces political abuse in
clear view of public?
Political
abuse? What the darn in the world is political abuse if one may ask? Well, you
can say it is about resorting to unfair means, cheap tactics and below the belt
hits to beat your political opponent. And if that political opponent is a
female … wolah … you have already won the feat. For it is so easy here in the
East, to attack a woman. You do not need any facts to attack. All you have to
do is attack her womanhood. You do not have to worry about her family lineage,
education, skills, character or even power. Just being a female makes you
vulnerable and they will attack you from whence you know not. And the people
will listen. Trust me, they will listen all ears. For the East, and perhaps the
West too, are obsessed with women, although maybe in different ways. The
Eastern and even Arab poetry is full of women and their description and
discussing about them. No, no, no … its not about non-religiousness. I have
found the religious sector quite obsessed with women too. If you go to female
religious circles, they are always discussing about the vices of women and how
women must correct themselves in order for the society to progress in the right
direction. Although the men are the leaders of the Islamic society, but the
women must correct themselves for us to be led correctly. Er, yeah … something
like that … whatever the logic! And if you go to the male religious circles,
the discussion is about how men will be rewarded with beautiful women in
Jannah, if they behave like good Muslims in the world. So you see, the
discussion pretty much revolves around … women, women, women … Are we being
abused by being discussed so much?
So
do you think Lady Fatimah Jinnah was abused? As a child? No. As a daughter? No.
As a sister? No. As a wife? Well, we can never know that for she never got
married. Instead, she lead her life as Quaid-e-Azam’s right hand. The youngest
of the set of seven siblings of her parents, she became an orphan at the age of
eight. But the eldest brother, Muhammed Ali Jinnah, who was of age twenty-five
at that time, took on the paternal role with her onwards. He truly lived up to
his name of Muhammed, for Prophet Muhammed SAW has tutored the Muslims that the
eldest brother is to be like a father to the rest of the siblings. He nurtured
her till she graduated from the fine University of Calcutta as a dentist and
opened her own clinic at the age of thirty. However, she smartly went on the
back foot five years afore, when Jinnah got married. Sadly, the married lasted
only eleven years, and ended with the death of his wife, Rattanbai. The little
sister Fatimah, whom Jinnah had nurtured for almost twenty-two years, now
decided that it was time to pay back. So she shifted back to Jinnah’s home and
started looking after him, his home and his dreams. She reversed the tables,
but only for the good. It was she now, who played the maternal role with her
elder brother. Perhaps, they had played ghar-ghar as children, and fate
replayed the play in reality where one of the siblings role plays, the father, then
the other sibling role plays, the mother. And what a fine father and mother
they became to each other. Well played!
But
happened after that? What should have happened after Jinnah’s death? She had
been second-in-command in his lifetime upon the political horizon. And a
capable one. Had Jinnah thought to nominate anyone after himself, I am sure it
would have been Fatimah. It is not clear why he did not nominate anyone.
Perhaps, given his fatherly figure, with which he had nurtured Fatimah and the
Muslim population of the subcontinent, he expected his people to make the
natural and logical selection after him. Fatimah. Even if a man has to captain
the ship as per Islamic guidelines of leadership, Fatimah should have been the
key counsel, as one of the consul’s of Rome. Interestingly, there also lies a
certain similarity between Fatimah Jinnah and Mother Aishah RA. Both had been
the right-hand of the leaders of their times, and a source pool of insight and
knowledge to the leadership. The Companions of the Holy Prophet Muhammed SAW faithfully
sought Mother Aisha’s knowledge and wisdom after the Prophet’s SAW demise. The
great and egoistic men of Pakistan did not.
In
fact, after Jinnah’s death, she was not allowed to address the public! Just
compare that to the nearly fifty years of dedicated teaching that Mother Aishah
RA did after the demise of Prophet Muhammed SAW. Fifty years! It was most
certainly by Allah Almighty’s plans that He created a relay of about fifty
years between Prophet Muhammed SAW and Mother Aishah RA, for her to carry on
the legacy of the Prophetic teachings. Similar was the relay between Jinnah and
Fatimah of almost twenty years. But what a waste! From 1948 till 1951, she was
forced to remain silent. Why? Shouldn’t it have been the other way round? I can
imagine the Pakistani population devastated after the demise of the father of
the people, so soon after the newborn state. Once again, it strikes an analogy
to the demise of Prophet Muhammed SAW shortly after the newly born State of
Madinah and Conquest of Makkah. For surely, there is stark striking between the
State of Madinah and the State of Pakistan. Both of them were born to uphold
the ideology ‘La illaha illallah … There is no god but Allah’ and both were
born in Ramadan. And the finale similarity being that the founders die shortly
after the conquest. Well, what did people want to see and hear after that? They
needed to be consoled and connected to the second-in-command to feel secure.
Instead, the people of Pakistan were torn away from the lap pf Fatimah Jinnah
and made an orphan. Although Liaqat Ali Khan is historically recorded as a good
and trusted companion and colleague of Jinnah, but for what reason he remained
silent upon the silencing of Fatimah, is unfathomable and mysterious. Is it something
like the present day PM Imran Khan has been silenced over Dr. Aafia Siddiqui?
Even
when she was finally allowed to speak to her children, the people of Pakistan
in 1951, in a public radio speech, her speech was heavily censored. What for?
What did she have to say which was a threat to the then establishment of
Pakistan? Disheartened, she decided to go into a retreat and write a book about
Jinnah and their political journey together and perhaps about their future
dreams for Pakistan? If the words were not finding their way across, perhaps
the ink might? Her book ‘My Brother’, was ready by 1955, but shockingly, it was
not allowed to be published. It remained on some bookshelf for around thirty-two
years, getting dusted. Finally, it was published in 1987, but with a lot of
pages torn from its original manuscript. It means, the original book written by
Fatimah Jinnah never went through the printing machine.
Like
many good people of the world, she chose silence over protest, although those
who choose to fight back are good as gold too but simply on the other pedestal.
Some of us fall and rise while others rise and fall and then rise again. Its
strange but two brothers come to my mind when I think of the way Fatima faced
the world after Jinnah. The two brothers being none else than the sons of
Fatimah binte Muhammed SAW, Hassan and Hussain RA. Why? Because one chose
silence and a retreat for the sake of peace and unity of the Muslim nation in
the face of the rise of kingship after the legacy of Khilafah, while the other
chose protest and action. Similarly yet differently, Fatimah first chose
silence and then action. She chose to remain silent for the first ten years,
after she was snubbed with her book in 1955. However, her maternal feelings for
the people of Pakistan were irked, when General Ayub Khan, the General and
President of Pakistan, compromised the water sources of Pakistan to India in
the Indus Water Treaty of 1960. In any case, she was never in favor of
dictatorship as opposed to democracy. So as the elections of 1965 loomed up,
she decided to return to politics, after eighteen years of non-participation,
or should we say, enforced non-participation?
And
what a hallmark she made in Pakistan’s history, Muslim history and the world
history. Fatimah Jinnah stood for elections at the age of seventy-two! Hello,
please take note Pakistani women … as most of us are ready to crackle and
fumble and hunchback as we hit the sixties. Fast-forwarding history, she kind
of reminds me of present day PM Imran Khan. What an energy he has! I myself am
a pretty energetic person but used to worry preemptively about the prospects of
an active life once the forties are crossed. But the day I heard Imran Khan say
in one of his speeches, ‘I am sixty-five, but I feel like twenty-five …’ I did
the achievement punch in air. So it is all about your mental age, rather than
your physical age!
And
it was not an easy elections that Fatimah challenged. The country was on two
horizons around two thousand kilometers apart, the sitting president was a
General-cum-dictator and she was obviously trying to be snuffed out since the
transfer of power to non-Jinnah hands. She toured a train rally by the name of
Freedom Special, standing at the door of the train and waving to people as
nearly one million lined up the train route to see the historical and amazing
woman and hear her speeches. Her train was twenty-two hours late as the crowd
pulled the train emergency-chain at each station and begged her to make a
speech. Indeed, it was an emergency for them, for they had been deprived of her
motherly counsel since long. At Dhaka, nearly two-hundred and fifty thousand
people thronged to get in touch with the Jinnah vision once again. People
hailed her as Madar-e-Millat, mother of the people, just like the Companions
sought refuge in the wisdom of Mother Aishah RA.
All
this must have made the establishment uncomfortable. It seems that they feared her
just like Julius Caesar was feared by the Roman parliament! He was murdered
simply for being so good and popular with the people of Rome. And indeed,
Fatimah was extremely popular with the people of Pakistan. So much so that
Jamat-e-Islami, who followed the clear Shariah verdict of a male leadership,
accommodated their stance by voting for her male representatives instead, thereby
voting for her indirectly. The establishment also countered her indirectly
then. They designed the elections to be indirect and combined it with electoral
rigging. Despite that, Fatimah won two of the major constituencies of Pakistan,
Karachi and Dhaka. So we can easily say that she swept the East and the West.
Analysts and historians say that if the elections had not been tampered with,
she probably would have swept the elections.
The
establishment probably would have liked if Fatimah would have been the Cincinnatus
instead, just like the insecure and jealous Romans. She should have been ready
to export her influence whence needed and then going back to tending plants and
chopping vegetables. For this is the ideology of the majority of the Eastern
men. They like demure, docile and domestic women, who, at the command of the
male wand, dust the flour off their hands, pick up the briefcase, or in tune
with nowadays, the laptop, become an earning member of the family, or whatever
is required at that point in time by the family, and then return to the
domestic role at the latter command. Or better yet, continue with both roles
and the infamous cliché, a woman must be seen and not heard. But hearing the
voice of Fatimah, and the cheers of the crowds, the establishment decided to
limit the Election 1965 campaign to only one month, which was then further
restricted to nine projection meetings only and those too were barred from
public attendance. Only members of the electoral college and the press was
allowed to attend the campaign meetings. The small pack was then I guess, easy
to watch, control and coerce.
1965
… rings a bell in the mind … as yes, we went to war with India in 1965. So to
say, we won the war. But thinking about it, I think it was kind of good for
Fatimah to have lost the elections, albeit narrowly, but lost nonetheless. Why?
Because had Fatimah been the President, or even vice-President, it would have
been said that Pakistan had been all ready to capture Indian Occupied Kashmir
and reunite it back to Pakistan Owned Kashmir to make one wholesome Kashmir,
but Fatima’s incompetency lead to the failure of the Kashmir adventure of 1965.
The 1971 misadventure of East Pakistan, also would have been posted on Fatimah’s
political wall.
Oh but she never lived that long. She died
before seeing Pakistan divided into Pakistan and Bangladesh. Just like a smart
sportsman who knows when to retire rather than fizzling out during his
downfall. Aha! That sounds pretty much like Imran Khan too, who retired at the
peak of his career. Then he was requested a comeback for the 1992 World Cup. He
came. He saw. He conquered. Only, the difference being that Fatimah had not
intended to retire in 1948, but she was forcibly held back in the pavilions.
She attempted a comeback with a radio speech, a book and an election win, but
she was censored and rigged. It baffles me as to what kind of people did this.
It reminds me of Jinnah’s words when he said, ‘I know that I have some bad
pennies in my pocket.’ He was hinting to have a deep inner knowledge that he
was accompanied by some insincere comrades. Not to him, but to Pakistan. He probably
sensed some power hungry mongers loitering in the sidelines, waiting for the
carve out of a new state that they could devor to satisfy their lust for power
and pomp. Just like the kings of olden times who liked to see a land divided
and rule upon a portion of it as kings rather than see it united and themselves
as humble servants of it. Oh no! That makes another analogy with the Prophetic
times. Prophet Muhammed SAW also got to know that there were around seventy
hypocrites amongst his comrades. And we do not know to this day who they were.
Only one Companion knew. Was he lucky or what? I think not. Most probably, it
made him very sad to know that there was even a single hypocrite within the
circle of Prophet Muhammed SAW. So was Muhammed Ali Jinnah encircled with some masqueraders
too? Most definitely yes. But the worst is yet to be acknowledged. Of the three
greatest sins for which there are Hudood in Islam, murder, theft and adultery,
men are usually character assassinated with two of them, murder and theft. While
the women are attacked with just one, but the most lethal of them. How could
they attack Fatimah’s character in order to root out her career ?
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