The Judges Are No Caliphs
By Dr Mohammad Taqi
Florida
A few days ago the National Assembly’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC) expressed its intention to revisit the policy of handing out plots to judges and bureaucrats and to scrutinize the accounts of the Supreme Court of Pakistan (SC). The PAC made public lists containing names of those who had obtained one or more plots. The lists included names of several judges and the current registrar of the SC. Even if nothing else comes out of it, the PAC and its chairperson Nadeem Afzal Gondal, MNA, have successfully flayed the last shreds of the caliphs of Islam pretence that the apex court has adopted of late.
The religiously charged sermons, heavy doses of Persian poetry and anecdotes about figures and events from Islamic history have become a staple of the Supreme Court judges in their assorted judgments in high profile. Nowhere was this attempt to present themselves as the reincarnation of the greats of Islamic history more evident than the Chief Justice of Pakistan (CJP) Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry’s initial attempt to preside over the case against his son, Dr Arsalan Iftikhar, who was facing charges of mega-corruption. Thankfully, CJP Iftikhar Chaudhry did eventually recuse himself from the case but not before making a dramatic appearance in court with the Holy Qur’an reportedly displayed on his rostrum. The idea ostensibly was to invoke the imagery of the justice of the second rightly guided caliph of Islam, Syedna Umar Farooq (RA), who had not only presided over a judgment against his son, Abu Shahma, but punished him with lashes. Abu Shahma is said to have died during the punishment and the remaining lashes were delivered on his grave per Syedna Umar Farooq (RA)’s orders.
However, it seems that the honorable judges of the Supreme Court only wish to invoke Hazrat Umar (RA) as their role model when they are firmly in command of the proceedings — whether against their family or others. When it comes to emulating Hazrat Umar (RA) in offering themselves for public accountability, the judges would rather remain lesser mortals like us, relying on the law supposedly shielding them from scrutiny by the PAC. The Supreme Court refused to send its registrar to appear before the PAC, saying per media reports: “The Supreme Court is not part of the government and the rules only empower the PAC to examine accounts showing misappropriation of money granted by the National Assembly. Since the sum allocated to the SC is charged expenditure on federal consolidated funds, it is not in principle granted by the assembly.”
The SC was alluding to the Article 68 of the constitution, which states, “No discussion shall take place in Majlis-e-Shoora (Parliament) with respect to the conduct of any Judge of the Supreme Court or of a High Court in the discharge of his duties.” But receiving residential plots beyond one’s employment or retirement remuneration package can hardly be categorized as something done in the line of duty. The inimitable attorney-writer Saroop Ijaz has dealt deftly and in detail with the legal and constitutional problems with the SC’s flimsy plea in his column, ‘Our right to know’, in an English contemporary.
But as our honorable judges are immensely fond of Islamic history and poetry, let me paraphrase for them an episode from Syedna Umar (RA)’s era recorded by his biographer and poet, Shibli Naumani, in the poem Adl-e-Farooqui ka aik waqia (an episode of Umar Farooque’s justice). One day, Hazrat Umar, while giving a sermon in the mosque, asked the congregation if they would obey him if he ordered them. A common man got up and said he refused to obey because he had plundered from the war bounty and was not fit to be the caliph thus. The man alleged that Caliph Umar (RA), who was a tall man, had taken for himself two pieces of cloth from the bounty to make the dress he was wearing that day, while everyone else has received just one piece. Now Syedna Umar (RA) had the option of shutting the man up under some pretext or other but instead opted not do so. Instead, he asked his son to stand up and bear witness. The son informed the congregation that indeed one sheet of cloth would not have been enough to make his father’s dress and that was why he gifted his share of the bounty, i.e. his sheet of cloth, to Hazrat Umar (RA). The accuser withdrew his allegation and renewed his allegiance to Caliph Umar (RA). The honorable judges of the superior judiciary wielding the false shield of Article 68 are clearly no caliphs!
Double standards however, are not just limited to the judges. The eligibility of dual nationality citizens to hold office is a hot and contentious topic these days. The ruling Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) is trying to move ahead with a proposed change in the law to allow dual nationality citizens to run for office in Pakistan. In an English paper, the PPP Sindh’s general secretary, Taj Haider, has written a rather harsh piece impugning the loyalties of the dual nationals. He wrote, “I do recall and wish to share a conversation I had with Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, when he said that expatriates are loyal neither to their country of birth nor to the country of adoption. They are loyal only to their own narrow self-interests. I will not be that harsh but perhaps, Mr Bhutto had a valid point. I would only say that by all means enjoy your dual nationality. Just leave our elected houses alone.”
While Mr Taj Haider’s piece needs a formal rebuttal, it may be imperative to quickly jog his memory a bit here. He has attributed some nasty words to Z A Bhutto but unfortunately has not quoted anyone else to corroborate it. I have no reason to doubt Mr Haider’s assertion that Z A Bhutto did lambast the expatriates. But was Z A Bhutto not himself a dual nationality citizen up until 1959 when he renounced his Indian citizenship and dropped the property cases he was pursuing in India until then?
I would submit to Mr Haider: enjoy whatever your heart pleases but do not cast aspersions on the loyalty of dual nationality citizens to their native and adopted countries, and kindly leave history alone.
(The writer can be reached at mazdaki@me.com. He tweets at http://twitter.com/mazdaki)
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The ‘God’ Particle
By Dr Zafar M. Iqbal
Chicago, IL
I k now nothing about particle physics but, thanks to the media fanfare last week, I did hear that the Higgs boson, named after Peter Higgs, a University of Edinburgh physicist (or the so-called ‘God’ particle), a sub-atomic particle that cannot be seen by the naked eye has now been ‘found’ to exist. Ever since Higgs proposed its existence in 1964, it had been very elusive but now the scientists claim finding it with over-99.99% confidence.
That it was ‘found’, not by an American effort but by the multinational European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) headquartered near Geneva, Switzerland and by CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, a 17-mile underground particle accelerator on the Swiss-French border that, by high-speed smashing of sub-atomic particles, generated the needed evidence are matters I would return to later. Additionally, it has had significant Indo-Pak input.
Don’t expect me to go into hardcore physics here (alien territory for me) but there are some facts that might interest some readers.
The term ‘Boson’ was coined by a famous physics Nobelist, Paul A. M. Dirac, after the Indian physicist, Satyendra Nath Bose (1894-1974), because these sub-atomic particles follow the Bose-Einstein statistics. Incidentally, Dirac was also the subject of a 2009 book, “The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom” by Graham Farmelo. In addition to being ‘strange’, this genius was also very taciturn, and to underscore this quality, someone even came up with the ‘Dirac Unit’, which was supposed to be equivalent to one word uttered in an hour.
Since Higgs boson was so hard to find, some theoretical physicists have said that it is something that “does not want to be found.” That it is also called the ‘God’ particle points to another story about its elusive history. Leon Lederman, another Nobel physicist and former Director of the Fermi Lab (Batavia, IL) wanted to call it the ‘goddamn’ particle but his editors had to shorten it to be appropriate.
Higgs boson, if the manifestation is confirmed, would be the last force missing so far in The Standard Model of particle physics, a set of equations that formed the law of cosmos 35 years ago. This model has four basic constituents: electromagnetism; the ‘strong’ force that holds the nucleus in the atom, the ‘weak’ force that represents radioactive decay; the last is gravity (which the Higg’s boson may now be able to explain). Solidification of the model included work of Dr. Abdus Salam of Pakistan who shared the 1979 Nobel Prize with Steven Weinberg (US) and proposed the 1974 Pati-Salam model (Grand Unification Theory, GUT) with an Indian physicist, Yogesh Pati. This model also predicts the existence of a weak interaction with heavy ‘W’ and ‘Z’ boson.
The Higg’s boson represents an invisible force that fills the space like molasses and “imbues” mass to elementary particles, and indicates diversity in nature. It could lead the scientists into explaining, for instance, matter, anti-matter, dark matter, and the most mysterious dark energy that gives the galaxies needed “gravitational scaffolding.” Dark matter and dark energy make up 96% of our entire universe; all we see is just the remaining fraction (4%).
Reports show how since December 2011, two independent research teams who run particles at CERN’s collider, found “promising bumps” in their data (a signal suggesting something ‘new’, possibly Higg’s boson) at mass around 125 billion electron volts. [For comparison, the mass of a proton is about a billion EV, and an electron, about a million EV]. Scientists at the Fermi Lab acknowledged that they missed the elusive particle though they had seen data similar to CERN’s.
Stephen Hawking, director of research at the University of Cambridge’s Center for Theoretical Cosmology, had doubts if Higg’s boson will ever be found. He even had bet a decade ago with Gordon Kane of the University of Michigan. “It seems I have just lost $100,” Hawking told BBC, adding that Higgs now deserves a Nobel. It seems about a thousand scientists and others waited all night to get into the CERN auditorium which seemed to have “a rock concept ambience,” and Higgs entered the meeting to a sustained applause. Announcing the discovery, CERN’s Director Rolf Heuer said, “As a layman, I think we have it …. But as a scientist, I have to say, ‘What do we have?’”
Until the existence of an invisible particle is confirmed, we may have to be content with the “approximation of the truth’, at best. This also reminds us of Stephen Dedalus (alter-ego of Joyce in ‘Ulysses’) saying to himself you are “almosting it.” Jim Holt also noted it in a review of “Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World,” by Lisa Randall, a Harvard physicist.
Sub-atomic particles have also infiltrated into the culture: both CERN and anti-matter vials are featured in Dan Brown’s book ‘Angels and Demons’, in which attempts are made to destroy the Vatican. It was made into a movie in 2009, as was its predecessor ‘The Da Vince code’ earlier. Higgs appeared in a 2011 “Nova” special by Brian Greene, describing the enormous difficulty in finding it.
This CERN announcement, made at CERN’s headquarters (Geneva, Switzerland) on our Independence Day, has brought out the irony of how the US budget cuts and other problems are now affecting our leading status in science and technology. Congress abandoned the Superconducting Super Collider that was to be built in Waxahachie, Texas, some 20 years ago. That collider, some scientists have said since, would have been larger and more powerful than CERN’s, and could have found the Higg’s boson and several others. We know, however, that over 100,000 scientists from 100 countries took part in the CERN effort, including nearly 2,000 Americans, with the biggest and high-placed group from California.
In the US budget, cuts in science and technology areas are now wide-spread and deep. Not just disappointing but many scientists think that talent is now moving away from the US for these reasons. This may be reminiscent of the exodus of some scientists when President George Bush put severe restrictions on stem-cell research some years ago. If this trend continues, expensive projects will have to rely on international support, in which US scientists may not be the sole players as has been the case for decades, but will continue to play a significant role in big and expensive multinational projects.
Eik hi zur-ray per naheen,
zur-ray, zur-ray per hai ooska naam
zur-ray, zur-ray may maujoodh hai wo
aasmaan-awn main hi nahin,
kithab-awn may hi nahin,
musjid-awn may hi nahin ---
nazar kay saam-nay hai wo,
dhoondnay ki zaro-ruth nahin.
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