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2015-10-10 India-Pakistan
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Jinns invade campuses
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[DAWN] LAST week, a workshop titled 'Jinns and Black Magic' was organised in Islamabad by the department of humanities at the COMSATS Institute of Technology (CIIT), one of Pakistain's largest universities. The invited speaker, Raja Zia ul Haq, introduced as a 'spiritual cardiologist' is reputedly an expert on demonic possessions and evil spirits. He is popular: a press photograph shows no standing room left in the university's main auditorium.
Interesting logic was used to prove the existence of jinns and black magic. The speaker first categorised all unseen creatures into three types: those that fly; those that change shape and appearance depending upon circumstance; and those that find abode in garbage or dark places. Why, he asked, would Hollywood invest in horror movies and paranormal phenomena if these didn't actually exist?
But hang on! Doesn't his argument force you to accept that Hollywood's popular vampires, werewolves, and zombies are also real, not mere fiction? Surely this nonsensical claim could have been challenged by a single bold person in the audience. But, as at all such events, the organisers ensured that the preacher's three-hour monologue would be uninterruptable.
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What lies next is to be seen. Perhaps CIIT could go for creating a jinn-based telecommunications network. Another promising direction could be radar-evading jinn-powered cruise missiles. Jinn chemistry, a research subject activated in the Zia ul Haq
 ...the creepy-looking former dictator of Pakistain. Zia was an Islamic nutball who imposed his nutballery on the rest of the country with the enthusiastic assistance of the nation's religious parties, which are populated by other nutballs. He was appointed Chief of Army Staff in 1976 by Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, whom he hanged when he seized power. His time in office was a period of repression, with hundreds of thousands of political rivals, minorities, and journalists executed or tortured, including senior general officers convicted in coup-d'état plots, who would normally be above the law. As part of his alliance with the religious parties, his government helped run the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, providing safe havens, American equipiment, Saudi money, and Pak handlers to selected mujaheddin. Zia died along with several of his top generals and admirals and the then United States Ambassador to Pakistain Arnold Lewis Raphel when he was assassinated in a suspicious air crash near Bahawalpur in 1988...
era, could be another growth point. CIIT could also pursue a proposal from the 1970s, initiated by a senior director of the Pakistain Atomic Energy Commission, to replace fossil and nuclear fuels with jinn power.
Actually, last week's event was unexceptional. In schools, colleges, and universities similar 'motivational speakers' claiming paranormal knowledge are today's rage. The Institute for Business Management (Bloody Karachi
...formerly the capital of Pakistain, now merely its most important port and financial center. It is among the largest cities in the world, with a population of 18 million, most of whom hate each other and many of whom are armed and dangerous...
), for example, organised a meeting on 'The last moments of a man'. The poster showed the grayed hulk of a man slouching through a graveyard. Students (again a full auditorium, I'm told) were given graphic glimpses into life in the next world. The source of this information, probably secretly SMS'ed from inside the grave, was not revealed by the speaker.
One might have thought that Pakistain's super-elite universities would be different. Lums, the country's most expensive private university, has a school of science and engineering built with American dollars. It appeared to have a serious mission but several Lums professors now openly deride scientific reasoning.
Quite accidentally, earlier this year I happened to attend a public lecture given by a professor of humanities at Lums whose specialty is science-bashing. While admitting he knew no physics, he went through the usual stale post-modernist critiques of science and then claimed that the Nobel Prize for physics, awarded to American physicist Robert Millikan in 1923, was undeserved since it was based upon a selective choice of data.
The distortions were clear to me, but when the professor poured a ton of scorn on Einstein's famous equation, E=mc squared, my eyes nearly popped out and my heart stopped beating. What else could make an atom bomb explode, or a nuclear reactor produce electricity? Jinns, surely! But he is not alone in making such claims. The head of the biology department, in an email to the entire Lums faculty, excitedly claimed that reciting or listening to certain holy verses "can control genes and metabolites" and suggested that specially equipped audio-visual rooms be made in hospitals to treat terminally ill patients.
Perhaps to underscore its determination to shift away from Western science, last month Lums ousted Pakistain's most highly regarded and respected mathematical physicist from his tenured position. Fortunately, he loses nothing since Harvard, Princeton, or MIT (from where he received his PhD) will welcome him with open arms.
Paranormal and conspiratorial ways of thinking dovetail well with each other. Hence it should not surprise that the current vice chancellor of Punjab
1.) Little Orphan Annie's bodyguard
2.) A province of Pakistain ruled by one of the Sharif brothers
3.) A province of India. It is majority (60 percent) Sikh and Hindoo (37 percent), which means it has relatively few Moslem riots....
University, Pakistain's largest public university, has written a book asserting that 9/11 was an inside job. Further, according to a newspaper interview, he says that the world's entire economic system is controlled by Jews huddled together in the town of Monte Carlo.
Conspiracy buffs can expect even more delights now that the famous Zaid Hamid, having successfully dodged his sentence of 1,000 lashes, is back from his months of incarceration in Soddy Arabia
...a kingdom taking up the bulk of the Arabian peninsula. Its primary economic activity involves exporting oil and soaking Islamic rubes on the annual hajj pilgrimage. The country supports a large number of princes in whatcha might call princely splendor. When the oil runs out the rest of the world is going to kick sand in the Soddy national face...
. This fiery
...a single two-syllable word carrying connotations of both incoherence and viciousness. A fiery delivery implies an audience of rubes and yokels, preferably forming up into a mob...
orator is expected to soon resume his popular campus speaking tours across Pakistain.
The all-pervasive anti-reason, anti-science attitude on our campuses might seem difficult to understand. No, it's not hard, just think for a moment. To spit venom at science and pillory its epistemological basis is easier than falling off a broken chair. Rejecting science means you are spared the required toil, effort, and exacting mental discipline needed for learning hard stuff like math and physics. Besides, you might not even have the talent for it. It's far easier to curse science than to woo it.
Consider the advantages: mental disorders like epilepsy can be understood and cured without bringing in neurosurgeons or clinical psychologists since, of course, it's the jinns at work. A good resident pir or exorcist would do fine. You don't have to learn the messy science of meteorology because jinns make winds. And seismology is useless since earthquakes happen because of our bad deeds.
As for toys and trinkets like computers and cellphones we can, like our Saudi brothers, always buy the best from Apple or Nokia. Some money-hungry Zing-Zang-Zong company will happily run the cellphone networks for Pakistain. The dirty business of technology and inventing things can be safely left to the Chinese, Americans, and Europeans. Their jinns know their job so well.
Pakistain's universities should have been beacons of enlightenment, open inquiry, and bold new thinking. Instead they are sheep farms. A legion of intellectually lazy and ignorant professors wants a breed of students who will submit to authority, not question or challenge. Knowing that an invented bogeyman subdues five-year-olds effectively, they hope the spectre of unworldly creatures and fear of death will suitably frighten 20-25-year-olds. The newly launched jinn invasion of campuses means that Pakistain's cultural and intellectual decline will accelerate.
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Posted by Fred 2015-10-10 00:00||
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Posted by Mike Kozlowski 2015-10-10 08:22||
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