OF MICROBES AND MULLAHS

https://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2020/02/08/of-microbes-and-mullahs/

Salma, a cook in one of the cities of Pakistan spent one morning cutting up strawberries and apples for jam. Her employer showed her how to sterilize bottles and their covers, and to make sure the spoon she used for stirring the jam was washed and sterilized with boiling water. Just as Selma was about to spoon the jams into the jars her employer asked her if the ladle she was using had been sterilized as well. It had not. When the employer asked why this was so, Salma protested.

“You asked me to do the spoon and the jars,” she said. “Not the ladle.”

Salma’s employer tried to explain the reason behind the whole exercise, but Salma threw up her hands and said, “Why do you get so worked up about such things? What difference does it make, all this boiling? Allah maalik hai, baji, kuchh nahi ho ga.” God is in control, ma’am. Nothing will happen.

It has to be wondered where this attitude, so pervasive as it is all through the country will lead us, now for example, on the brink of the spread of the new coronavirus that has started in Wuhan.

The coronavirus is used as an example because it is topical. It is not meant to scare. Most of those who died as a result of this virus, about two percent of those infected, were already not in good health. Your usual ‘flu has half the infection rate but kills about 400,000 persons annually. SARS and MERS were both varieties of coronavirus. SARS, when it occurred in 2002, infected about 8,000 persons and killed more than 750, about 10 percent of those infected. MERS, when it struck, killed 35 percent of those infected.

The repercussions of attitudes such as Salma’s lie not just in relationship to health and safety, but to almost everything.

There is no doubt that “Allah Maalik hai” but nowhere does it state that Allah’s creation must cease to help itself. Yet, that is the common understanding.

People– such as Salma’s employer– have tried to explain the relationship between sterilization and microbes and viruses, but a rough verbal explanation is not enough. Practical demonstrations are important and must be provided. Because microbes and viruses are not visible to the eye, the usual perception is that educated persons make a fuss about such things and make life difficult for others with their new-fangled notions. It is strange in a society that firmly believes in an unseen Deity, but perhaps that space has already been taken.

Of course it is a question of education, of what schools teach, and how they impart this information. But it is also a question of who else teaches out there in society, and whose teaching has the greater impact upon the public.

In a country like Pakistan, teachers in most schools hold no teaching qualifications. Nor do schools aspire to anything more than marks. Schools in fact are a business with aspirations such as ‘turning out billionaires.’ Knowledge is imparted by means of rote, not by demonstration or by relating knowledge to life. Students may hear about things such as viruses from their teachers, but that information is not reinforced either at home or around them in society. The reason is more than a lack of education. It is because of the second source of education in this society, which is madressahs, and the people who teach there.

If few schools possess qualified teachers, almost no madressah can boast of such a staff. The enrolment in madressahs is high, and students here are not taught about microbes, much less about how to combat them. They are taught in such seminaries to scorn ‘Western’ knowledge, in other words science. Yes, it is sad how far we have fallen and how utterly we have handed over the torch.

In the case of the coronaviruses, people are struck by how right religion has been in providing guidelines regarding what can be eaten and what cannot, but rarely is it examined why those guidelines exist, and the science behind it. Because science and religion are considered to be mutually exclusive.

And so we get directives regarding preventive measures against disease being ignored.

And we get acts such as the one calling for the public hanging of offenders and murderers, which has now been passed by the National Assembly, without questioning the morality of such a thing in the light of the modern world. It also results in the head of the CII (a brain-child of Ayub Khan, strengthened by Zia-ul-Haq) endorsing underage marriage, because it is (mistakenly) believed that a major religious personality in Islam married an underage girl.

If anyone finds the microbe vs madressah example silly, they should note that the CII in 2016 ruled that DNA evidence cannot be used as primary proof in cases of rape, but as supplementary evidence only.

Any debate about education in Pakistan must take into account these deficiencies in our system. It must provide training to teachers both academic and religious, it must insist on practical demonstrations, and relating education to life. And very importantly, it must combat the misconceptions against science and modern knowledge so rampant among those who claim to specialize in religion and teach it.