http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2011\11\07\story_7-11-2011_pg3_2
Monday, November 07, 2011
ANALYSIS: Of qurbani, ritual and religion... —Dr Moeed Pirzada
Today we have unique challenges: we have the Islamists but without the spirit
of Islam; we have democracy without the democrats and we have liberals without
liberalism
My parental home was like most homes in Pakistan. Each year just before
Eid-ul-Azha or ‘bari Eid’ we talked of the prices of goats, of lambs, and how
such and such corrupt official, thekedar (contractor) or smuggler (basically
everyone our parents hated) has bought a big fat healthy cow for qurbani
(sacrifice). And each year we meekly purchased a goat or a lamb, for
remembering Abraham and Ishmael and for fulfilling our responsibility to God
and to society. As children we joined our parents and other elders in touching
the heads of these goats and later in the day gleefully consumed the best part
of their meat in biryani or roast; carefully saving many valuable chunks in our
deep freezer before distributing the rest among neighbours, rich friends and
poor folks around the town. And I remember rushing to the front gate dozens of
time to receive and collect the sacrificial meat from all friends and family
and city notables, including the same smugglers we hated. And on our dining
table we often discussed which maulvi or madrassa will extract the black, brown
or the white sheepskin.
But then came a strange year. Our mother, for reasons best known to her,
decided to buy a goat many weeks before Eid. All my siblings fancied that black
goat with big eyes and a furry mane. We joined our servant and took turns in
feeding her, cleaning her shed and in walking her around. She even fell ill
before Eid so we called a vet who took care of that. And then came the day of
the sacrifice. I do not know how animals have an intuition of what is about to
happen or there is a thing called ‘animal ESP’. But from the night before Eid,
our goat’s usual baah’s and meh’s changed to moans. In the morning when the
busy and much sought after ‘man of the day’ — the butcher — arrived, we had to
drag a reluctant, resistant, protesting goat to the front of our lawn for the
butcher’s knife. During my CSS examinations I had read that the mother of King
George III used to admonish the shy would-be monarch, “George be a king,” but I
remember that day my mother shouting at me and my brother, “Be a man, go assist
the butcher.” I still remember the helpless look of surprise and horror in that
goat’s eyes as she lay there moments before the moving of the knife looking at
me; someone she had internalised as the caretaker and someone who had betrayed
her. On that Eid, my siblings ensured that no meat was served on our dining
table and nothing went into our mother’s deep freezer; all of it went to the
neighbours and to the poor.
It was the first day in my life when I had to grapple with the spirit and power
of the biblical parable of Abraham and Ishmael (some sources argue it relates
to Isaac). Though we all profess to love children but I had to wait many more
years in my life before I held my own child in my arms and to experience the
joy and to understand what it might have been for Abraham to have Ishmael or
Isaac. My religious beliefs were never akin to those of a bishop or a maulana
and in years of traversing through life and absorbing a bit of Voltaire here
and Russell there like most of us do, I might have come to understand things a
little differently. But despite all this, in my own way, I have always been
religious and looked and searched for greater meaning in all the divine
religions and their parables.
No doubt rituals have been important in defining, orchestrating and deepening
religious experiences. I do not want to spend time describing how today on TV
and radio we will consume endless hours discussing the price inflation of
sheep; or that today we purchase goats one day before Eid or how across the
world we get certificates of our financial share in a qurbani. Societies have
held together and shaped themselves around rituals but I wonder what happens to
a society when it loses its power to interpret and reinterpret and all it is
left with is rituals. We know that when ideas lose their spirit, words lose
their meaning and thus their power and effect but have you wondered that
something more than that may also happen.
So please forgive me for going totally berserk and refer to something very
unusual and bizarre for this kind of discussion. A few years ago while studying
‘Media and Internet Regulation’ at the London School of Economics, I came
across a very provocative book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace by Professor
Lawrence Lessig who has taught Internet Law at both Harvard and Stanford and
who in my judgement is to Internet Law what Steve Jobs is to computation.
Lessig, at one point, while trying to explain how statutes and constitutional
enactments of an early age may not only lose their original intent and meaning
but if interpreted literally in a different age and context may end up meaning
the opposite.
To help explain Lessig takes us to a 1928 US Supreme Court case, ‘Olmstead vs
the United States’. The US government was fighting prohibition era alcohol
cartels; it had just become technically possible for the government to tap
telephone lines and record private conversations from its telephone exchanges
without physically going into private property; and using this newfound power
the government used such phone recordings to convict alcohol smugglers. Lawyers
of the defendants argued before the Supreme Court that such recordings, without
a warrant, constituted ‘trespass’ and ‘invasion of privacy’ and that the
government had violated the US constitution and the Fourth Amendment that
guarantees citizens their right to privacy.
What do you think happened? The US government argued that since the police
never physically entered the premises, merely recorded phone conversations from
exchanges, so trespass never happened. In 1928, Justice William Taft agreed
with the government. However, another judge on the panel, Justice Brandeis,
wrote a note of dissent arguing that newer technologies had made it possible
for the government to violate the privacy enshrined in the Fourth Amendment
without the need of a physical trespass. And that the court, grappling with
challenges of a different age and time and context, needs to reflect beyond the
words of the Fourth Amendment to preserve the original meaning and the spirit
of the framers of the Fourth Amendment.
Lessig relieved us by telling that 40 years later, in ‘Katz vs the United
States’, the US Supreme Court was able to understand what Justice Brandeis was
arguing, and it overturned the judgement of ‘Olmstead vs the United States’
Now let’s come back. Lessig was obsessed with Internet Law and how the
200-plus-years-old US constitution’s original meaning can be preserved in
defining laws and governance for cyberspace. And I was thinking of religions
and Islam. Today we have unique challenges: we have the Islamists but without
the spirit of Islam; we have democracy without the democrats and we have
liberals without liberalism. If on this auspicious bari Eid day, I have made
you pause and reflect that words and statutes may not only lose their meaning
in a changed context, but may end up meaning the opposite, then maybe I have
succeeded. Eid Mubarak!
The writer is a political analyst and a TV anchorperson. He can be reached at
[email protected] and www.facebook.com/MoeedPirzada
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