Pandemic reading.

Byline: Muhammad Ali Siddiqi

I AM using the 'work from home' opportunity provided by Covid-19 for two delightful purposes - one, to get to know my wife and grandchildren (who cares about sons and daughters-in-law?) and, two, to swot up on my reading. The problem is the limited capacity of the two bookshelves I have. So books lie scattered everywhere, much to my wife's spoken and unspoken annoyance, when she discovers them on drawing room sofas, under bedroom pillows or - the most provocative of all - on her dressing table. I love this tome chaos.

Lying on one of the tables and seeking my attention was a biography of Grand Mufti Amin Al-Husayni. Here is a sentence that shouldn't surprise you: 'A few months later, however, Winston Churchill approved a proposal to assassinate the Mufti.' The author is British, Philip Mattar.

The turn for reading the biography of this remarkable Palestinian came late because another book left me wondering how someone could be so critical of Pakistan's powerful establishment to which he himself once belonged. The author of Diversity in Islamic Thought: Coming to Terms, retired rear admiral Zakaria Asghar, remains unrecognised because he is not a TV anchor. The book speaks the truth about our society and questions the establishment's concept of 'strategic assets'.

Pakistani society's yardstick of morality, says author Asghar, 'is either the length of one's beard or the furrows made [... on] one's forehead through prolonged prostration or by how far up the ankle one's lower garment is hiked, all physical characteristics for a metaphysical condition.'

The Grand Mufti's life seemed straight out of a James Bond novel.

The mariner turned author repudiates an absurd belief very popular among Pakistanis - that we need only the West's technology, for morality is with us. Instead, Asghar writes what to many Pakistanis would be virtual blasphemy. The 'parameters of morality', he says, are 'heavily tilted [... to] the West's favour [...]: openness, pursuit of knowledge, welfare orientation, adherence to truth, ethical behaviour, rule of law, human rights, and adherence to laws of the land.'

But back to the Mufti, whose life seems to come straight out of a James Bond novel, with the difference that he was a statesman and freedom fighter. Ignoring the book haunted me, because I had the honour of seeing him as a Class 8 student in Bahadur Yar Jang High School in Karachi. Aware of South Asian Muslims' pan-Islamic sentiments...