Taste Of The Torment

Profanity of a materialistic mind, seeing the things through only western spectacled ‘law of cause and effect’ and mundane reasoning may not let someone be convinced but it is a fact that as a community we the Muslims, and as a nation we the Pakistanis, have earned the wrath of our Creator to such a great extent that the opprobrium and disgrace incurred by us is nothing else but a torment from our Creator due to continuously dishonouring His commandments and deliberately choosing the way of His disobedient. We failed to put our house in order in the light of the teachings of the Quran and our Holy Prophet, peace be upon him. We are following a political and social system, which leads us to the direction entirely opposite to establishing a welfare state on the basis of Islamic social justice, equality of status and opportunities we have split the society into imbalanced social stratums.

Only the religion was and still is the major factor with the capacity to consolidate different ethnic and linguistic diversities into an integrated entity. But by putting it behind our backs we got diverted to the state of confusion and fragility. Unity remained only a dream or a part of famous quotation of the founder of Pakistan in the syllabus books of the children. A little after its establishment the country became an arena of the conflicting political cliques. Corrupt and inefficient politicians bothered only for their vested interests and making fortunes for their generations. They kept on quarreling on petty issues of only their personal concern causing split and disunity. Religious and ethnic groups also fractiously arose to ravage our solidarity. We were badly in loss of a collective thinking and consideration about cumulative effects of distortedness in our ranks. Selfishness, greed and nepotism never let the leadership care for the deprived and wronged classes of the society.

There remained neither God fearing in the hearts nor any foreboding of accountability at any level proving a barrier to the wrongdoings of the moral or political criminals. The fruit gradually got ripe and now we are reaping it. Incessant happenings of cold-blooded target killings, leaving at the rate of not less than half a dozen bodies daily on the roads and streets of our biggest port city, Karachi is nothing but a taste of violence of one another a tragic matter. The cases of theft and robberies are on high. The stories of the influential politicians having their own gangs of dacoits or their backing such vicious elements are not myths of the olden days but live facts of our times. A new phenomenon of suicides, both the men and women, with their innocent children is another rapidly rising worrisome problem now. Feeling vexed because of joblessness, debts, poverty and other social difficulties, the trend of losing the lives is at the rise.

We took the embers of so-called ‘War On Terror’ which we had nothing to do with, and put our own house on fire, just to appease a super power. Before we became the front line ally in the ‘War On Terror’ there never had been any trouble in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan and we never had needed to deploy such a huge number of our forces there. In result we are under suicide bombing, unending killing of our own citizens and getting heavy casualties of our military personals in retaliation. Drone attacks have become a routine practice with a horrific loss of the lives.

What has gone wrong all at once to push us in such a grave situation? It is not but our reaping as we have been sowing, in the light of a famous proverb: ‘As you sow, so shall you reap.’ Heedlessness and going against the commandments of Allah, the All- Mighty is resulting now in our sufferings. We have closed the doors of the Divine Blessings to us by ourselves. So, we have to taste the torment. “Say (O Muhammad ) He (Allah) has power to send torment on you from under your feet, or to cover you with confusion in party strife, and make you to taste the violence of one another.” See how variously We explain the Ayat so that they may understand.” (Al-Anam: 65)
“ And if the people of the towns had believed and had piety (Taqwa), certainly, We should have opened for them blessings from the heavens and the earth, but they belied (the teachings sent through the Messengers). So We took them (with punishment) for what they used to earn.” (Al-Araf: 96)