Catch-22: Situation of Dual Immoderations

If we compare the figure of the people victimized by the two extravagances the latter would overshadow the former one. Both these immoderations are due to driving the wedge between the spiritual and the physical aspect of man due to individualism, materialism, secularism and authoritarianism. Sarcastically, man has reduced himself to a cheap Charlie physical grunge while turning a blind eye towards his irreplaceable spiritual aspect. He is perpetually treading on suicidal course by trampling moral principles and ethical values, which can trammel the torrent of erratic emotions.

Materialism engrossed in sensual pleasures is the key factor, which has driven the last nail in the coffin of all sorts of social institutions, which are mandatory for proper socialization of human to groom them to enlightened and moderate cool cats of the international community. Due to degeneration of family, political, educational and religious institutions mercurial emotions are domineering the human personalities to make them carrot-crunchers. Thus both extremisms are eyeball to eyeball and their hardhead custodians are at dagger drawn everywhere. The binary extremisms and their tough customers are hunting down each other all over the world. This bleak picture can be seen in the streets of Islamabad where from the last six months religious extremists were battering the owners of video shops, houses of ill repute, etc., whose reputation was in tatters and which were the breeding grounds of vulgarity extremism.

Ultimately, the government crossed the Rubicon and the Lal Masjid prolonged standoff thick with tension exploded into violence and culminated in bloodbath. The bullet operation inundated the streets of the federal capital and spattered the ambulances ferrying causalities with fresh red blood gushing out from the scattered dead and damaged bodies. Both sides held responsible the other for the carnage. The shootout followed months of apprehensions and uptight situation over the mosque’s increasingly barefaced challenges to the authority of the government. Most recently the kidnapping of seven Chinese citizens as part of an anti-vice campaign mounted further tension. One of the mosque’s main goals was to make Pakistan an Islamic state along the lines of Afghanistan under Taliban rule, which lasted from 1996 until the US-led invasion in October 2001.The government suspected that suicide bombers from an Al-Qaeda-linked Islamic militant group were taking sanctuary in the mosque.

The administration faced swelling criticism at home and abroad over the failure to crack down on the mosque. It is strange that Lal Masjid and Jamia Hifsa have been working for many years. But all of sudden Maulana Abdul Rasheed Ghazi, and Maulana Abdul Aziz Ghazi became crasher nosy parkers by throwing down the gauntlet to the writ of the government and got international fame by threatening to launch suicide bombing in case of operation. These wrinkly were never so well known even within Islamabad. They never so bragged and challenged anyone since the birth of these institutions. How it happened within short duration of six months, which fomented when the Baton-wielding male and burqa-clad female students swarm over a public library in January 2007, and climaxed into bloodshed?