Opinion

The economics of Mullah bashing and Atif Mian’s ouster from the Economic Advisory Council

In backdrop of Atif Mian’s removal from Pak Premier Imran Khan’s Economic Advisory Council, guns were trained at Mullahs for being the ‘plotters’ behind the high-profile ouster. But there was more to the whole development than what met the eye. Here, an economics scholar throws light on the raging row in the light of economics and scholarly legacy of ‘god-fearing’ Muslims.

Islamophobic industry in the west churns hate 24×7. In the east, the same people can’t directly attack Islam through their henchmen.

They hence target Mullahs with the same intention to cut the western educated Hollywood and Bollywood fed population from the teachings and life of Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ). This vitriol has been normalised to such an extent that defending religious scholars has become the greatest act of blasphemy and heresy.

The recent example of this nature was witnessed after the sacking of Atif Mian, a professor of economics at Princeton University. The people who supported his sacking were labelled anti-science, anti-progress, and well-organised, but small religions zealots.

The truth about the entire incident was not carried out by major media outlets. There’re hundreds of Qadyanis in the Pakistani bureaucracy and judiciary. But Atif Mian has had serious disagreements with the Pakistani constitution and was therefore deemed unfit for the sensitive post. He’s not a minority. In fact, he doesn’t consider himself to be a minority.

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He was not born in Pakistan. He was born a Sunni Muslim and later converted to Qadyannism. Understandably he was granted a scholarship by a Qadyani institute.

Plus, he’s seen to be hand-in-glove with global imperialists when it comes to employing economic jargon to loot nations. As an economic hitman, he’s critical of CPEC, and uncritical of any western hand in the Turkish-Lira crisis.

Pakistan lost nothing by sacking him. There’re many brilliant economists in the advisory council.

Also, there’re people who wish to argue that Mullahs made Pakistan lose an economist who had been listed by the IMF in top 50. However, the truth is, IMF had listed him among the top 50 economists who are “likely to change the economic thinking in future.” 

And we all know the credibility of the IMF and how concerned it is when it comes to the development of the Third World.

Because the IMF is doing the charity work for ranking the economists, may we ask: who’s the stumbling block in the implementation of industrial policy and developmental model of Malaysia in the Third World?

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But then, given the row over Atif Mian’s ouster, very soon, we’ll have the people reminding us how intolerant Mullahs were in case of Abdus Salam. We’ll see the likes of Pervez Hoodbhoy making documentaries and TV channels interviewing him for TRPs.

The question is, if the likes of Hoodbhoy and Atif Mian are such well-wishers of Pakistan, how many students did they help to get into Princeton and Harvard? And how many of them became great Physicists and knowledge producers?

The fact is, they’ve sent none. 

So, besides bashing the ‘intolerant’ Pakistani society and its Mullahs, what’ve they been doing all these years in service to science and progress? Telling people not to celebrate Valentine Day!

This is the bitter truth about the hypocrisy of the mullah-beating-intolerance-shouting elite academicians in Pakistan, who hardly care about the people or science but use both of them to demonize Islam.

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In the entire row, the likes of Hassan Nisar will surely try to derive as much ammunition as possible: That’s how the Mullahs in Turkey called Printing Press Haram, leading to the decline in the Muslim world

One may ask who had stopped the Muslim scientists then to discover invent and innovate before that?

We must admit that there’s sectarianism in the sections of clergy who derive all honour from Islam and do everything to dishonour the religion of peace. Their job essentially was to paint the society in God’s colour, not to play the sectarian Holi. And it has its own historical causes in the educational system, often being incited by the establishment and power.

There’re people who skillfully use Iqbal to demonize the trained scholarship when the poet of east prayed to Allah to remove him, if he ever tried to be a thorn in path of Islam.

But then, much confusion is created on his verses, like Mullah ki azan aur… or Mullah ko jo hai hind mai sajde ki ijaazat…

The truth is, since childhood, Iqbal was fond of scholars. He maintained good contact with leading Islamic scholars, including Allama Anwar Shah Kashmiri and Syed Suleiman Nadwi.

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Mullah in the undivided India was a title used to refer to the scholars who after 1857 were engaged in teaching collaborators in the British army. Mullah ko jo hai hind mai sajde ki ijaazat was referred to one particular religious scholar who had said, ‘British are good because they are giving us freedom to pray.’

Iqbal was critical of the religious leaders in the sense that they were products of a system that had divided religious and positive sciences. Moulvis were knowing religion alone. Iqbal, however, felt both Molvi and ‘Mister’ lack creativity in their respective fields.

Entire society then was drowning in moral corruption. Some religious scholars too fell pray. Hence the criticism.

However, this criticism is not timeless that it’ll explain behaviour of every scholar till aakhirah, nor is it meant to do away with the institution of religious scholars, the Wuratha of Ambia.

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Umar [R.A] was a dynamic individual in the history of humankind ruling on the caliphate spanning over lakhs of square kilometres. But he was primarily a religious scholar and a Muhadith. The ‘philosopher king’ Ali [R.A] too was a great scholar of religion that once in the mosque of Kufa, it took him a time from the Isha prayers upto Fajr to explain the meaning of ‘bismillah’.

And before Saladin Ayyubi came on the scene, it was Shaykh Abdul Qadir Jeelani who carried out series of academic reforms in the Darul Uloom throughout the Islamic world. Being a scholar and one the greatest military commanders and strategists in the entire human history, Ayyubi loved scholars and would debate the matters of Fiqh.

It’s these religious scholars who’ve given the toughest fight to the cultural onslaught of the west in the entire colonial history, starting from Shah Waliullah Muhaddith Dehlavi, and using Atif Mian’s removal from Pak Premier Imran Khan’s Economic Advisory Council to bash the clergy is naive.

 

Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position and policy of Free Press Kashmir.

 

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