Praying behind a cross dresser – a fully ‘equipped’ one at that, with stilettos his size and matching pair of socks, is what earns my sympathy for these naïve and innocent madrassah goers (I’ll refrain from calling them students). However, what disturbs me is the hypocrisy with which the cult leaders lure and seduce; poor and illiterate parents and their children alike, under the banner of Islamic teachings.

Everyone was quick to criticize the government, in taking what appeared to be a public demanded and much needed action against terrorists of Pakistan; who had killed security personnel of Pakistan, who had kidnapped, accused and publicly humiliated citizens of Pakistan and its friend and ally – China.

However, no one gives voice to the cries of those little boys who are abused and violated physically (there is no way to assess the amount of mental and psychological damage that is being caused to these subjects) everyday under the minarets of these same mosques and madrassahs, around the corners of those same shelves which carry copies of the Quran. According to various human rights watchdogs and NGOs working in Pakistan – the HIV virus is spreading the most through religious seminaries in NWFP and Balochistan, where all preventive measures and respective education are not lent a minute’s heed as they are thought to be part of a much bigger and more ‘evil’ Western ‘agenda’. An imam of a mosque in Mansehra was caught and released on bail just last month because he had raped his own niece in the mosque.

Where did all the gun-totting mullahs go when this happened right in the heart of their so called Islamic dominion, those same mullahs who need an excuse to burn and murder and loot and plunder NGOs who are helping them rebuild and relocate and improve their non-existent standards of living?

For the past 20 years, many a reports by various international drug trade watchdogs, show that madrassahs and mosques are safe heavens for all kinds of illegal substances being smuggled through Afghanistan, as there are no rigorous security checks, for no one would dare touch our merchants of Islam or their ‘burqa’ clad soldiers of Shariah. An important question now arises, is prayer, education or the food supplied to the students in these places even halal? After all, it is provided through money earned by selling poison to the youth of this country and the rest of the world.

The list of these double standards which are characteristic to our religious clergy are endless; while they were quick to offer absentia funeral prayers for the cowardly terrorists who fought behind little boys and women, but seemed to have lost their tongues as not even a single word’s worth of condolences for the jawans and officers of the Pakistan Army were offered.

While on the one hand they accuse the British Government of following an anti-Islamic agenda, but then pay the British government to allow them a visit to the United Kingdom with the same hand. Don’t these people feel any shame or sense of hypocrisy, when they hold meetings to save their “Land of the Pure” in a country they accused of following an ‘Anti-Islamic’ agenda just a few weeks ago?

Pakistan will never come out of this darkness until and unless it becomes a secular state. Did not Mohammad Ali Jinnah in his address to the constituent asembly on the 11th of August 1947 wish it to be a secular state when he categorically stated this fact and further elaborated the fact that as such religion will have no place in politics:
“…Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State.”

Is this address so difficult to understand ? There is no room for an Islamic Rebuplic of Pakistan. It could have been the Islamic Kingdom of Pakistan, but it is not. So, either we make it a monarchy and enforce whatever the bloody hell the monarch wants or we make it a secular state. Look around yourself, Europe only emerged out of the dark-ages when it separated the church and the state. Even at the centre of the Islamic Khilafat – Atatürk realised the need to throw out the garbage that the clergy was; for Turkey and the entire Muslim world.

Let us save this ‘Land of the Pure’ and throw out these bastards, who called Jinnah – ‘Kafir-e-Azam’ and have now become the self-appointed saviours of Islam and this country.

I will never enter a mosque, I will never shake hands with a man who sports a religious beard, I would rather listen to an atheist prostitute than any one of these imams or clerics and I would happily pay a homeless person for his alcohol than pay a single penny towards the construction of yet another four walled ‘complex’ for these low life merchants of an ignorant cult.