Re: Hudood Ordinance Amended!!! (Merged)
This is most unexpected! Ayaz Amir writing something quite smart and right, and my agreeing with him!
What classic opening lines :k:***
Yeah, a classic opening of a great article, but you seem to have forgotten to mark the crux of the article. Let me do it for you…
***Gen Musharraf was very much the usual military product, extolling ‘jihad’ and the philosophy underpinning it until his forced conversion to a different mode of thinking post-Sept 11, 2001. Had he been the Ataturk he imagined himself to be, he would have lost no time in reshaping the political landscape and doing away with the nonsense-in-the-name-of-Islam Pakistan had accumulated since the Zia years and which none of his immediate successors — Benazir Bhutto, Nawaz Sharif — had had the courage or vision to sweep away.
If nothing else, the whole of the Hadood Ordinance should have been thrown into the dustbin. But he didn’t do so, losing the momentum every incoming leader enjoys. The result is that he is trying his hands at being a social reformer, donning the mantle of Ataturk — albeit, in truth, a tinpot version of Ataturk — six or seven years too late, that too in small, hesitant doses. The battle now being fought with the mullahs, and indeed precipitated by their own folly, should have been initiated long ago.