The Rukhsati of a Son

 Shared by Dr. Syed Ehtisham

‘Congratulation s,’

I said to my wife.   ‘You have finally managed to produce an export quality child.’  This was almost six years ago; we had just received the news that my son, Ahmed, had been offered a place at Aga Khan Medical University. My wife was over the moon, busy phoning our relatives and friends, Karachi and abroad, to share the good news. Good news is always shared knowing some people will genuinely feel not-so-good after hearing it. Fanning the feelings of those who are jealous is so satisfying for most women; my wife being no exception to this weakness. Watching her talking animatedly, I sat coolly, calculating the inflated telephone bills I would be expected to pay at the end of the month. Train of thought followed me to wonder how I was going to meet the additional expenses and tuition fees of Aga Khan Medical University.     AKU, as it is affectionately referred to as, is an expensive set up. I remember, a few years ago, I saw a patient who had initially been under treatment at AKU. I asked him why he had left a good hospital like Aga Khan to come to my mediocre clinic. He replied,  ‘Doctor Saheb, three days in AKU was enough for me. It is so expensive, I don’t think even Aga Khan himself could afford treatment there.’  There was no point sharing my financial worries with my wife. I knew her usual, ‘Who told you to have so many kids,’ answer only too well. At times like these, a verse by Mairaj Faizabadi haunts me:

مجھ کو تھکنے نھیں دیتا یہ ضرورت کا پھاڑ

میرے بچے مجھے بوڑھا نھیں ھونے دیتے

‘What do you mean by export quality?’ My wife interrupted my thoughts.  ‘I mean, after five years he will be so well educated and well groomed, he will be sought after by the whole world,’ I said gloomily.  ‘All my children are export quality material,’ she announced proudly, ‘and mind you, the credit does not go to you. You hardly took any part in their upbringing&# 39;.  This was also one of her favorite lines. Needless to say, any faults in them would have been attributed to me. There was no point in arguing with her, because I knew I would end up losing. More than 25 years of marriage had taught me the virtues of being silent at the right moments; this being one of them. But the fact was, that I was feeling a bit down at the time. It was dawning on me that for the next five years I will be preparing my son to leave us and settle in a foreign country.    The dilemma every upper middle-class educated family is facing these days, in Pakistan, is what to do with their next generation. The safest solution for them at present, it seems, is to settle them abroad. USA, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand are the favored destinations. Anywhere in the world, except Pakistan, is equally acceptable. One does not need to be of extra intelligence to know the reason for this obscure behavior. Pakistan is not new to crises, but the type of uncertainties facing us today is beyond any comparison. Political instability, rampant terrorism, widespread nepotism, unrepentant corruption, blatant lawlessness and absence of security have never been so obvious and inexplicable as they are nowadays. These maladies are increasing day by day with no end in sight. Desperately, we look to our leaders for a way out, but as always our hopes are quashed, as they turn out to be pathetic lesser mortals than us. Even their association with the human race is questionable at times.   As an old pediatrician friend of mine, Dr Abbas Ghani used to say,

 پاکستان میں تو جس کی دم اٹھاو،مادہ نکلتی ھے

In this polluted atmosphere, only the corrupt can survive and prosper. It is but natural that we want our children to escape this imbroglio; send them to any place where there is a semblance of normalcy; where at least some values and principles for a decent living are being practiced. It is painful to nurture a child for twenty five years, rear him into a bright young man and then send him to a foreign land to serve an alien culture and society. In due course, he might excel there, to be the brightest of the bright. But then, what good is that for his country or people?

 جنگل میں مور ناچا،کس نے دیکھا    

After his admission, time passed quite quickly. It was almost three years ago, when one day my wife suddenly disclosed,     ‘You know Ahmed has to go to USA soon, for his electives.’    ‘What is an elective?’ I asked.  Everyone at the dinner table, including my seven year old daughter, gave me a look suggesting there is something seriously lacking in my general knowledge. One of the children explained what ‘electives’ were.    ‘Why can’t he do his elective here’, I asked.  Again everybody looked at me as if I am dim.  ’If you do your electives in USA, it improves your chances of getting a job there,’ my son replied.  I was trying to figure out the finances involved in this endeavor, when he dropped the next bombshell,  ’After the electives I’l take my Step One exam next year. I have to sit for two more examinations after that. The exam fee is roughly 1400 dollars for each.’    ‘And where will you be going for your electives?’ I asked, still reeling from the financial shock I just received.  ‘San Diego,’ he replied.    ‘Where is San Diego?’ I asked.    I have never been to USA; therefore, I did not know the geography of the land.  ’I have been accepted to do an elective in a hospital there dealing with AIDS patient. It’ll be a very good learning experience.’ My son replied, without bothering to explain the location of San Diego to me.    ‘If you happen to know, San Diego has one of the largest gay communities in USA,’ my younger son chipped in, making sure that I remain uncomfortable and sleepless for the next few weeks.  One elective and three examinations later, it was time for my son to go for his interviews to USA again. His itinerary looked as if he was going on a sight-seeing trip across USA, travelling from the East to the West Coast. I agreed to send him alone. Travelling is fairly safe in America, I was told. I remembered a time when my son wanted to go to Peshawar for a few days, to visit one of his class mates hailing from there. I did not give him permission to go, for security reasons. I felt bad at that time for not allowing him to go to a city in his own country. After all, had I not gone on an all-Pakistan tour at age 18 with my cronies? Retrospectively, it turned out to be the right decision. One of the questions the American immigration officer asked, after grilling him for two hours was, ’Have you ever been to Peshawar?’  Finally, the day arrived when I was at the airport to see him off for the final time. He was going to join his residency programme in the US. From now onwards he will only be a visitor, coming to us for brief blissful periods on his holidays. I was so happy for him. But then why did I feel a lump in my throat as I hugged him, bidding him farewell? I had the same feeling when my daughter was leaving our house, at her Rukhsati, to live with her husband. Suddenly it dawned on me. It was the Rukhsati of my son…

ھم سادہ ھی ایسے تھے کی یوں ھی پذیرای

 جس بار خزاں آی سمجھے کے بھار آی

Shahab

Interesting and worth reading article in NYT about moving beyond Einstein’s Classic Physics to Quantum Physics where empirical evidence may not be necessary, but it may be the only path to further explain the mysteries of universe (f.sheikh)

DO physicists need empirical evidence to confirm their theories?

You may think that the answer is an obvious yes, experimental confirmation being the very heart of science. But a growing controversy at the frontiers of physics and cosmology suggests that the situation is not so simple.

A few months ago in the journal Nature, two leading researchers, George Ellis and Joseph Silk, published a controversial piece called “Scientific Method: Defend the Integrity of Physics.” They criticized a newfound willingness among some scientists to explicitly set aside the need for experimental confirmation of today’s most ambitious cosmic theories — so long as those theories are “sufficiently elegant and explanatory.” Despite working at the cutting edge of knowledge, such scientists are, for Professors Ellis and Silk, “breaking with centuries of philosophical tradition of defining scientific knowledge as empirical.”

Whether or not you agree with them, the professors have identified a mounting concern in fundamental physics: Today, our most ambitious science can seem at odds with the empirical methodology that has historically given the field its credibility.

How did we get to this impasse? In a way, the landmark detection three years ago of the elusive Higgs boson particle by researchers at the Large Hadron Collider marked the end of an era. Predicted about 50 years ago, the Higgs particle is the linchpin of what physicists call the “standard model” of particle physics, a powerful mathematical theory that accounts for all the fundamental entities in the quantum world (quarks and leptons) and all the known forces acting between them (gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces).

But the standard model, despite the glory of its vindication, is also a dead end. It offers no path forward to unite its vision of nature’s tiny building blocks with the other great edifice of 20th-century physics: Einstein’s cosmic-scale description of gravity. Without a unification of these two theories — a so-called theory of quantum gravity — we have no idea why our universe is made up of just these particles, forces and properties. (We also can’t know how to truly understand the Big Bang, the cosmic event that marked the beginning of time.)

This is where the specter of an evidence-independent science arises. For most of the last half-century, physicists have struggled to move beyond the standard model to reach the ultimate goal of uniting gravity and the quantum world. Many tantalizing possibilities (like the often-discussed string theory) have been explored, but so far with no concrete success in terms of experimental validation.

Today, the favored theory for the next step beyond the standard model is called supersymmetry (which is also the basis for string theory). Supersymmetry predicts the existence of a “partner” particle for every particle that we currently know. It doubles the number of elementary particles of matter in nature. The theory is elegant mathematically, and the particles whose existence it predicts might also explain the universe’s unaccounted-for “dark matter.” As a result, many researchers were confident that supersymmetry would be experimentally validated soon after the Large Hadron Collider became operational.

Click link below for full article;

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/opinion/a-crisis-at-the-edge-of-physics.html?ref=opinion

Shared by Tahir Mahmood

People are often curious about my role as a female teacher and speaker in the male-dominated field of “traditional Islam.” [3] “What does a woman scholar-in-residence do?” I am often asked. To the non-Muslim questioner, my role is seen as a bit of a curiosity, especially given the stock, standard media image of the oppressed Muslim woman. To the Muslim questioner, the question goes deeper. For some women, I am a potential role model for their daughters and a mentor to them. For some men, I represent the rare woman in the circles associated with traditional Islam who is willing to speak in public. I am simultaneously called upon to speak for the women in the audience, while defending the Shar’i (Islamic legal) basis for my presence on stage. Event organizers, typically quite gracious, believe that I contribute to the diverse perspectives they hope to offer to audience members. Often the only woman in a lineup that is otherwise exclusively male, I represent, supposedly, a continuation of the tradition of the scholarly Muslim woman.

For more of this article use the following link

http://muslimmatters.org/2015/05/27/blurred-lines-women-celebrity-shaykhs-spiritual-abuse/

Editor: The comments after the article are very interesting.

Submitted By Mirza Ashraf

ABSTRACT: History does not account top-down oppression as terrorism while retaliation to such oppression from bottom-up is described as violence and terrorism. Though religion-inspired terrorism has appeared on the fringes of all major and minor religions, today it is more frequent than other religions among Islamic groups from West Africa to Central Asia and Philippines. Is this mere accident or could a pattern be detected? In this article I have attempted to break the stranglehold from within illustrating that in Islam, though there is no such term as terrorism but the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were perpetrated by some non-state Muslim actors. … Terrorism seems to be in the interest of the Western powers helping them to turn the Islamic ideology against itself. It derives its impetus from the flaws of previous century’s nation-state system in the Middle East. The fate of its course depends upon the response of Western Powers. The West is viewed by the Arabs responsible for dividing the Arab world into small nation states, and appointing or supporting corrupt rulers as its agents. Therefore, for some zealous Muslims, targeting and charging mortal threats to the Western world and their agent rulers, is a freedom seeking tactic of the followers of Islam. Whereas they believe Islam is a faith of peace, a bottom-up struggle, even by raising arms for freedom and justice, is a rational crux in pursuit of their just objectives. . . . For the revolutionists, terrorism prompts justice for those who are oppressed and is an emanation of virtue. Since the concept of prompt and ready justice is at the core of Islamic Shari’ah, such justifications further embolden the religiously zealous jihadists. They are further inspired by the argument of Sergius Stepniak, a Russian-born fighter for democracy that “the terrorist … is noble, terrible, irresistibly fascinating, for he combines in himself the two sublimities of human grandeur: the martyr and the hero.” Within this context as the revolutionary Europeans justified or authenticated the use of terrorism as a struggle for the restoration of human liberties, it also provided a justification to the Muslims parallel to just war theory. Muslims under colonial rules adopted it as a form of new technique of revolutionary struggle wherever a dysfunctional relation showed up between the state and society. Just as the political sensibility of the French Revolution justified violence and terrorism as an important avenue leading towards a political progression, Muslims maintain that violence today, whether conducted with a religious commitment or an ideological determination, is “a politics by other means.” . . . Terrorist tactics, thus, have been learned by the Muslims from the Europeans, not from the Qur’an, which does not contain any injunction promoting terrorism. In Islam the term “terrorist” or an act defined as “terrorism,” has never been adopted by an individual or a group. It has always been applied to them by others, either by the governments of the states they target or by the societies practicing oppression. . . . The problem can be overcome, only if the Muslims think rationally and instead of presenting terrorism as a misinterpretation of Islam they need to view it as a mortal danger to Islamic civilization. It is time that Muslims need to accept the truth that we all live in a common and increasingly mixed global community where we share a common global history. Today, modern technology has connected us with each other irrespective of our faiths and beliefs. Because of scientific-enlightenment, day by day nonviolent forms of social and political changes are overtaking violent forms and actions.

For complete article please click at: https://independent.academia.edu/MirzaAshraf