A Message from a Pakistani-American: ‘Back to Basics’
By EjazShameem
Chicago, IL
One of my favorite, and in my opinion, one of the most prescient American presidents, Dwight Eisenhower, once said that “the search for a scapegoat is the easiest of all hunting expeditions.” The truth of this statement is on stark display these days in the almost comical but potentially dangerous campaign being run by someone hoping to don the mantle of that great man. It is something which is currently the source of much dismay and hand flailing amongst many but especially amongst us American Muslims. We should be rightfully concerned and ensure that our voices register through the free exercise of our vote. But it should also remind us that, for the past half century, scapegoating and conspiracy theories have tended to be the favorite pastime of Muslims in general and Pakistanis in particular. We have made an art of finding excuses for everything that is wrong in the Muslim world instead of looking inward for solutions. I am reminded of a quote from my favorite poet Jalaludin Rumi who so eloquently said, “ Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”
I have the good fortune today to be addressing a gathering of the sophisticated, educated, successful and worldly wise amongst the Pakistani American community. So I need not belabor this point. But allow me to make the connection between why we are here today and the dilemma that I just outlined. I surmise that we wallow deep in nostalgia for the long lost Golden Age of Muslim preeminence mostly because we have little of our own doing to be proud of. We forget that while it might have been religious fervor to spread the message of Islam throughout the world that led the ragtag Muslim armies to overcome the powerful Persian and Byzantine empires, it was ultimately the egalitarian message of Islam that won over converts. We should remind ourselves that these vast conquests were sustainable only because of the by and large just and capable governance that secured the acquiescence of those who elected not to convert. That egalitarian spirit and anything remotely resembling a just and capable governance does not unfortunately exist today in Muslim lands. More importantly, it should be recognized that it was that environment of stability and tolerance coupled with the pioneering spirit of those early Muslims that resulted in the great intellectual blooming of the ninth through thirteenth centuries which became the engine for progress and prosperity and which ultimately the West adopted and built the European Renaissance upon. As one of many examples, it was Ibn Al-Haytham who propounded the scientific method two hundred and fifty years before Roger Bacon wrote his treatise on the subject. I intentionally chose this example for the seminal influence it had on scientific progress in the modern world. And in the past century the entire Muslim world, which comprises twenty percent of the world’s population, has produced only two Nobel laureates in the sciences.
So why am I lamenting this sorry state of affairs and making you feel bad? I am doing so because, in my humble opinion, it is the root cause of the many problems that today afflict the Muslim world in general and Pakistan in particular. The corrupt and decadent elites have made short shrift of the basic Islamic values of equality before the law and protection of the weak and needy. Consequently, the masses feel completely disenfranchised and impotent. There is seething anger amongst this mostly illiterate mass of humanity. And as President Eisenhower said, “Anger cannot win, it cannot even think clearly.” And surely the opportunistic mullahs and other so-called torch-bearers of Islam have tapped into this anger and convinced many a gullible soul that the cause of all their troubles is modernity and the West. They have brainwashed the youth into believing that life is unimportant and that they should use their own precious bodies as bombs to destroy everyone who disagrees. The beautiful Islamic teaching of living a good life - a life of service to your fellow men - to ensure a happy outcome in the hereafter has been turned on its head into “blow yourself up and kill as many as you can and you will enter Paradise.” And so we see the murderous rampages in the schools in Peshawar and Charsaddaand hundreds of similar atrocities being committed in the name of Islam. There is an urgent need for a strong counter narrative. Islam teaches patience and perseverance, not the taking of innocent lives. But it is not an inactive patience of sitting on our hands either, but of patiently working towards a good outcome. As Rumi so beautifully said, “Patience does not mean to passively endure. It means to be far-sighted enough to trust the end result of a process. It means to look at the thorn and see the rose, to look at the night and see the dawn.”
Ladies and gentlemen, that counter narrative, the promise of dawn, is to go back to the basics – to the very first revealed word of the Qur’an, “Iqra (read)”. The pursuit of knowledge for one’s own good and for the wider good of humanity is a fundamental duty of every Muslim. Therefore, the only sane and long-term solution is to educate the illiterate masses. I am convinced that education holds the answer to most of the ills currently pervading Pakistani society, including extremism, intolerance, bigotry, and injustice. It offers hope in the face of despair for countless millions of kids who have been neglected by successive governments. Those of us that have been blessed with the ability to affect positive change have a responsibility to do what we can. As Allama Iqbal said:
TarbAshnayeKharosh Ho, TuNawa Hai Mehram-e-Gosh Ho
WohSurood Kya KeChupaHuwa Ho Sakoot-e-Parda-e-Saaz Mein
Know the pleasure of tumult: thou art a tune consort with the ear!
What is that melody worth, which hides itself in the silent chords of the harp?
And thus The Citizens Foundation came into being when five successful businessmen in Karachi said enough and started a silent revolution by building the first five schools. And it was thus that a man by the name of Babar Suleman and his 17-year-old son Haris set off on an around-the-world flight in a single-engine plane from Indiana to raise awareness and funds for TCF. They crashed and died in the South Pacific but in doing so gave renewed life and vigor to this great and noble cause. A documentary covering their heroic journey will be released this summer.
Babar and I were course-mates at the cadet college in Sargodha run by the Pakistan Air Force as a feeder institution for the Air Force Academy. Our bond was almost as old as us and as thick as blood. I have been a great fan and supporter of TCF almost since its inception. It was Babar’s decision, however, to embark on his epic journey for TCF that finally pushed me over the edge and I pledged to build a school as part of his drive to raise funds. But it was the tragic loss of my friend and his young son that focused my thinking and created this desire to further the cause for which he sacrificed his life.
I firmly believe that the power and symbolism of an aesthetically pleasing TCF campus in the midst of a slum and the brightly smiling faces of kids in nice clean uniforms eager to learn are the best weapons against the bigots and the extremists. Education is the biggest force-multiplier in the fight against injustice. Each child educated is a family brought out of abject poverty and the promise of greater things for their next generation. The leveraging effect of education is immense – I am a living proof of this fact for I am the proud son of a man of humble beginnings who was the first in his village to obtain a college degree. Born in a remote Punjabi village with no schools, my father, by pure dint of tenaciousness, overcame the odds and changed the future trajectory of our lives. So it is with some satisfaction that I report that construction is now underway on the first two of the cluster of five TCF schools being built in Kashmore district of Sindh in part to honor the memory of my late parents and Babar and HarisSuleman.
In conclusion, ladies and gentlemen, the choices are very clear. Do we allow the Taliban’s narrative to define us or the TCF story as embodied by Babar and HarisSuleman? Do we waste our time longing for a fabled past or go back to the basics and build a bright new future? The answers are obvious. I will leave you with this image and thought to ponder. When I see the smile on a child’s face, it reminds me of a beautiful verse of the Holy Qur’an: “The likeness of those who spend their wealth in Allah’s way is as the likeness of a grain which grows seven ears, in every ear a hundred grains”
Imagine the multiplication of this child’s beautiful smile hundreds of thousands of times as a direct result of what you do today and I bet it will put the most heartfelt smile on your face. Because as Rumi said, “When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.” May the river always move in you and may you be filled with the endless joy of giving.
(EjazShameem is a civil engineer and partner at a consulting engineering firm in Chicago. He was invited to speak at a recent TCF event in Silicon Valley, where he eloquently delivered this powerful keynote. The message is strongly relevant today.
EjazShameem is a major supporter of education and The Citizens Foundation (TCF). He is committed to fund the building and lifetime endowment of a cluster of five TCF schools to honor the memory of his late parents and his dear friend Babar Suleman and son HarisSuleman (pictured with aircraft).
The Citizens Foundation is a professionally managed non-profit which operates over 1,200 schools for underprivileged children in urban slums and underserved rural areas in Pakistan. It has embarked on a program of adoption of government schools to scale its impact through quality education.)
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