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| India-Pakistan |
| CII reform a priority |
| 2016-06-09 |
| [DAWN] THE issues raised by the Maulana Sheerani-led Council of Islamic Ideology’s keenness to ensure that wife-beating does not end in Pakistain will be solved neither by protests by women activists nor by the growing storm on social media. The real issue is whether the Moslems of Pakistain can afford to be led by the nose by a state institution determined to prevent their release from concepts unjustly described as Islamic. No informed Pak should have been surprised by the CII’s latest broadside because the council has been proclaiming its love of retrogression quite regularly. Its liking for corporal punishment in schools and child marriage, its rejection of co-education in post-primary institutions and women’s working with men in offices and factories, and its closed mind on the rights of non-Moslem Paks have long confirmed it as the champion of narrow-minded conservatism. What it has done now is to sum up its case for denying women’s basic rights. These efforts of the CII have off and on revived debates on the justification for its existence. It has often been pointed out that the CII opposes the Moslem people’s right to interpret Islam so as to enable them to face the challenges of the age and defreeze the Islamic fiqh, an objective for which Iqbal had called for a Moslem homeland in the subcontinent. Iqbal had also specifically opposed the creation of a body of Learned Elders of Islam to advise democratically elected representatives on religious issues on the grounds that parliaments alone were competent to rule on religious questions as well as on other issues. |
| Posted by:Fred |