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 ?
