I wonder whether Islamic extremism is the future of Pakistan, it surely seems the case in the northern and western parts of Pakistan, where ‘Taliban-like’, long bearded people have made their government, who have the education and civilization level of a B.A. passed caveman. Where daughters are still forced by their parents to get married to the Holy Quran if the father cannot afford to give dowry to his daughter or to prevent the family land and property from going out of the family in case of a marriage, where policemen are allowed to stand by law in internet cafés to keep an eye on the youth surfing the World Wide Web so that they are not corrupted by the ‘evils’ of the internet. This can also be prevented by website filters and restrictions applied by the Internet Service Providers as in the Middle Eastern Muslim states thus eliminating the policeman in the café but somehow those religious fanatics ruling those unfortunate provinces like to relate and impose religion with a beating stick, and the poor internet surfer is scared like anything even when he is just checking his emails on ‘Yahoo’ because if the surely uneducated policeman sees a ‘Weight Loss’ advertisement on the screen which often appears on ‘Yahoo’, featuring a slim lady in a swimming costume, the poor surfer is in trouble. I am sure that surfer does not feel like the citizen of a free country while he is inside that internet café.

In NWFP and Balochistan, the government raised an issue of banning music in public transports because it is prohibited in Islam, which is not even a proven fact in Islam and is highly debatable since it is not said anywhere specifically that music is banned. I find it funny that our leaders actually waste their time on making laws like that. Instead of making laws for instance the copyright laws related to genetic combinations where scientists can get a patent in their names if they come up with a new DNA sequence, they make laws such as the prohibition of the famous “Double Sawari” to combat terrorism and crime. Someone even mentioned that if the 9/11 incident had happened in Pakistan the first action the government would have taken would be to impose the ‘Double Sawari’ law once again. But what else do you expect from people who probably cheated or bribed their way out of B.A., who sit in the assembly and argue that they do not want the Kala Bagh Dam to be made because they do not want to drink water from which the electricity has been ‘taken out’. This ‘joke’ literally cracked me up but the saddest part is that it is not really a joke, and those people sitting in the national and provincial assemblies who say those things, really mean it and they really think that electricity is literally ‘taken out’ from water, they should feel very lucky that they do not live in Holland otherwise they would have had to breathe air from which the electricity has been ‘taken out’ since Holland uses windmills to generate electricity.

These ‘holy’ people also wanted to ban men and children from wearing western clothes like pants, shirts and jackets in government offices and schools because these clothes are un-Islamic. It is a shame that these leaders are more concerned with what children wear to school rather than what they learn in schools. Technically speaking, since ‘Shalwar Kameez’ as we know it, was originated in India, it is not an Islamic dress either.

Our former President Mr. Tarar who I am sure is a very good Muslim, having an appearance of a religious cleric, a beard and a “mehrab” on his forehead guaranteeing his piety and righteousness, just watched as the country’s economy deteriorated under the Nawaz Sharif rule and our foreign exchanged reserves were drained down to less than a billion dollars. In contrast the Indian president Dr. P. J. Abdulkalam, also a Muslim, is concerned about the future of the whole mankind and not just India as he drew the world’s attention and encouraged scientists of India and the rest of the world to do something since the earth is due to collide with a huge meteor or a comet somewhere around the year 2880, after more than eight hundred and seventy five years from now, since it has a considerable probability of collision, all the living things are on the verge of extinction.

It is about time we realized that being a good Muslim is not necessarily equivalent to being a good ruler, and the days of fighting on camelback in the Sahara desert are over. These people who waste their precious time in the assemblies, arguing over Islamic dress code for men and electricity being taken out from the water they drink, do not really have anything else to spend their time on, because they do not have the intellectual level required to see the enormous amount of things that need to be sorted out and the endless fixing this country and its system need, which even a 21 year old common man like myself can point out. I am sure they would know from which hidden aspect is ‘birth control’, portraits and sculptures un-Islamic and ‘Haraam’, but they would not know who Albert Einstein is, what cloning means, what are the terms biotechnology and nanotechnology and what is a Nobel Prize. Who knows, since it is equivalent to idol worship according to these Islamic gurus, we might not even see the picture of Quaid-e-Azam Jinnah in government offices the next time we go to the secretariat!