The Bottomless Pit – Asrar Qureshi’s Heartfelt Post #965

The Bottomless Pit – Asrar Qureshi’s Heartfelt Post #965

Dear Colleagues! This is Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post 965 for Pharma Veterans. Pharma Veterans Blogs are published by Asrar Qureshi on its dedicated site https://pharmaveterans.com. Please email to aq.pharmaveterans@gmail.com for publishing your contributions here.

Credit: Alena Darmel

Credit: Gül Işic

Credit: PNW Production

Credit: Sami Abdullah

Spoiler: This is not a regular blogpost. It is a heartfelt post. Eid is a time to celebrate and to take stock of where we are. Eid ul Adha is even more of such occasion when we fervently talk about sacrifice, its spirit, and its relevance to real life.

We are on the third day of Eid ul Adha. The rush of animal sacrifices has died down and has been replaced with the preparation of special meat dishes and meeting relatives and friends, more ‘meating’ than meeting. There is nothing unusual this year, the same things have been happening year after year. 

The Buildup

The buildup starts just before the day of expected moon sighting. Everyone reminds everyone to stop shaving, getting haircut, and clipping nails if they want to sacrifice an animal, until after the qurbani has been done. WhatsApp is abuzz with these forwarded messages and YouTube and social media is red hot with this. Fasting is highly recommended in the first ten days of ZilHajj and is observed widely. There is a semblance of piety around, but corruption, bribery, hoarding, overcharging, cheating, and all routine activities are carried on unabated. 

The next few days are spent in discussing the rising cost of animals, the difficulty of getting good butchers for sacrifice, and so on. The more enthusiastic people start taking rounds of animal markets and share information with others. Even for buying one small animal, they will scour the 50-mile radius and see hundreds of animals. The result is total confusion. For buying bigger animals, the radius increases proportionately. What are we trying to find? The sacrifice is in the name of Allah, and we can trust His Help, get the first suitable, available animal and bring home and pray that our sacrifice is accepted. But we trust our judgment and our preconceived notions better. Negotiations for butchers is also underway.

Family members are busy in shopping for Eid clothes from the offerings of various brands. I saw a large billboard displaying three guys wearing Kurta suits from a famous brand. My God, they didn’t look like gentlemen, not even guys. The line between men and women clothing is becoming more and more blurred in designs, colors, and cuts. Is this the effect of LGBTQI+ campaign?

The Eid Day and Later

Great beginning with shower and new clothes and recitation of Takbeer and going to mosque to pray early and come back early. Prayer done, back home, and the wait for butcher, or whatever arrangement is there. More affluent people offer several small and large animals for sacrifice. Poor people line up outside their gates, hoping to get few pieces of meat; they get scolded every now and then, and in the end get the poorest parts which have little meat, if at all. The middle-class single animal people are in a great fix. They want to follow the three-portions principle, but it would leave too little for their own self, so they keep thinking of schemes to circumvent the three-portions principle. Own children may be counted as relatives so that is one less portion to worry. The portion for the needy gets under the greatest scrutiny. Pieces are added and deleted many times to save the choicest pieces for self. Finally, after satisfying the conscience, the meat distribution is done and closed. Meanwhile, cooking has begun with the basics like liver frying and then more elaborate dishes. Some more zealous people keep a fast like thing on the Eid day and break it with the meat of the sacrificed animal. 

The day goes into the evening of high social activity. The festivities continue for three Eid days.

This is not the scenario in Pakistan only, it is all over the Muslim world. In every country, the same scenes are repeated. Muslims display perfect unity in these things.

The Spirit

The maulvis cry hoarse from their pulpits about the spirit of sacrifice, that the act of sacrificing animal is symbolic, and that the real lesson is to develop the spirit to sacrifice beloved things in the name of Allah. The speakers speak without their heart in it, the listeners hear without getting it in their minds, and the spirit never gets a chance. Ultimately, we mimic the act and get satisfied that we did a great job. 

The Bottomless Pit

Any sane person can see that we are being sucked into the bottomless pit every day, and there is no respite from it. When a landlord cuts the leg of a poor man’s camel, the government protects the landlord and promises to pay the poor man. How do they justify this? Every day, we see examples of how heartless, purposeless, useless, meaningless, clueless, remorseless we have become. We do the worst acts with greatest impunity. Our social media is filled with hundreds of speakers preaching religion, the number of our mosques and imams runs into hundreds of thousands, Our madrassas are multiplying, many regular schools are offering Hifz-e Qura’an, there are grand religious gatherings where hundreds of thousands of people attend, we have the largest number of people performing Umrah every year, and couple of hundred thousand people get to perform the greatest ritual of Hajj, but nothing is stopping our falling into the bottomless pit.

We see new forms of crimes every day. Children are being raped and murdered, men are making videos of women with spy cameras in hostel washrooms, one guy just had the audacity to make video from the exhaust fan opening while a girl was taking shower, murders are everyday matter and done without any feeling of guilt. Scams of all kinds, the biggest of them are housing scams, are looting people, society is fragmented to tatters, and social values have died completely. 

Law and order are absent. People are getting killed on the roads by armed robbers and no one bothers. Dissension forces of many shades are killing polio workers, law enforcers, army jawans and officers, and there is no action. Traders are fleecing people in every which way and then go to Umrah and Hajj and sacrifice ten animals and hope to get expiated. The government has become the biggest enemy of people and keeps devising plans for sucking the last drop of blood.

This is the bottomless pit we are falling into. Whatever we are doing is accelerating our fall, though we somehow feel we are doing all the right things. The biggest problem with any person occurs when he thinks he can do certain acts to compensate for all the heinous crimes he is committing. This is where we are individually, and collectively. We know where we are going but choose to continue. This is entirely our own doing.

A piece of poetry by Akhtar Hussain Jaffery is presented here. Read and Think.

اب نہیں ہوتیں دُعائیں مستجاب

اب کسی ابجد سے زندانِ ستم کھلتے نہیں

سبز سجادوں پہ بیٹھی بیبیوں نے پَو پھٹے تک

جس قدر حرفِ عبادت یاد تھے

انگلیوں پر گِن لئے، اور دیکھا

رِحل کے نیچے لہو جاری ہے، اور

سطرِ مستحکم کے بست و در ہیں بند

یا اِلٰہی مرگِ یوسف کی خبر سچی نہ ہو

ایلچی کیسے بلادِ مصر سے

سُوئے کنعاں آئے ہیں

اک ہجومِ بے تماشا گلیوں بازاروں میں ہے

تعزیہ بر دوش انبوہِ ہوا

مانگتی ہیں جس سے مائیں منتوں کا اجر

بیٹوں کا حساب

سبز سجادوں پہ بیٹھی بیبیو!

اب کسی ابجد سے زندانِ ستم کُھلتے نہیں

لو سمیٹو مشک و عنبر، ڈھانپ دو لوح و قلم

اشک پونچھو اور رِدائیں نوکِ پا  تک کھینچ لو

کچی آنکھوں سے جنازے دیکھنا اچھا نہیں

(اختر حسین جعفری)

Concluded.

Disclaimers: Pictures in these blogs are taken from free resources at Pexels, Pixabay, Unsplash, and Google. Credit is given where available. If a copyright claim is lodged, we shall remove the picture with appropriate regrets.

For most blogs, I research from several sources which are open to public. Their links are mentioned under references. There is no intention to infringe upon anyone’s copyrights. If, however, it happens unintentionally, I offer my sincere regrets.