Rekindling from the Forgotten

By Minhaaj Rehman

Rekindling from the Forgotten is a collection of Op-Eds and Columns published by me during last couple of years for numerous newspapers and magazines. Warm reception and requests to turn this into a book was overwhelming and i could see how it can be beneficial for the posterity. The tone is solemn, bitter, euphoric, inquisitive, informative, malicious and melancholic and yet never wavers from the search for truth. For all its worth, my wanderings and ramblings are for the world to castigate, discard, cherish or internalize. All i am doing is, rekindling the history from the forgotten.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Minhaaj Rehman
• Release date: Sep 11, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463546239

Book preview

Rekindling from the Forgotten

MINHAAJ REHMAN

Preface

Beyond the Budget

Myths and facts about One Belt One Road

The Macabre Wealth

By All That You Hold Dear!

Is Qingzhen diplomacy faux friendship?

Brexit: EU’s Epitaph and Take-aways for Pakistan

Zia ul Haq’s legacy: An inconvenient truth

Kashmir — Dead to the Last Man

The Lutheran Nightmare

The Stranger

The Pied Piper of the Dreams

Ranks of the Mystics

The Kosher Holocaust

The Chinese Whisper

Ignoble Laureate and the Armageddon

The Pygmalion of Modern Schools

The Divine Logic

The Poem of the Scarf

Prophetic Medicine

Lost Faith in Eldorado

The Feminist Trap

Sufism and Islam — The Garbed Men

The Sect-less Religion

Civilizations and the Moral High Ground

Turkey’s Erdogan — Out of Young Turks into the EU

Islamophobia: For the love of Euros!

Eid and the Muslim World

The Villainy you Teach Me

Corsica, Cairo and St Helena

Vikings and Arabs – The Welfare State

Forgotten Martyrs of Kala Pani

The Great Success by Shah Walli Ullah RA

Preface

It was summer of 2016, I got to meet a journalist from Pakistan Today on a dinner. The conversation rifted from politics to ethics, philosophy, history and education by the time we were done with all the courses and many cup of teas. He asked me with his amusing non-chalance, ‘Why don’t you start writing for our paper?’. I have been writing pieces, pre-dominantly for my blog that no longer exists and my freelancing work but I wasn’t ready to wade into the world of sensational and spineless commentaries on what was going around in the world. At least that is what i believed was my competition and by scratching the surface a little bit one can’t think otherwise. I didn’t give it much thought.

Later in the week, I was reminded of the idea and was requested earnestly to jot down our conversation in an op-ed that he believed would make a fantastic piece. One-off inconvenience wouldn’t be the end of it anyways. I did write a piece and dropped him a line. Op-Ed was published and the response was overwhelming unlike my expectations. My kind of writings are rather outdated, too heavy and frankly less enthralling for a nation that has passing interest in deeper conversations of the soul and the matter. I had to write yet another piece. From then onward, I gained momentum and wrote for some years with reasonable consistency. I find it particularly hard to write on a schedule and a deadline like professional writers because it is not my full time job and I find inspiration to be a moody commodity that comes with its own whims, quiet often without knocking the door. Churning out pieces of quality writing work with regular frequency is rather cumbersome task when matched with run of the mill chores and my productivity spells.

I finally took a respite from it some time ago to travel and get some inspiration. I have been a road warrior most of my life or at least periods of it where feeling of stagnancy became all encompassing. This diversion from producing to imbibing refills me with information to analyze and form an opinion only to share it with my students, readers and friends. This time on my way back from Africa, I felt a bit coerced by own conscience to publish. What I have seen and done there is yet another book but it filled me with gratitude and tears at the same time, having seen how pristine life can be. Oddly, it hasn’t been a tale of woe, misery and plastic smiles for me in Africa, rather very inspirational in many ways. It challenges our preconceptions of success and failure in life.

I have been asked to publish a book with the collection of Op-Eds and columns from my time so that it doesn’t get lost in the browsers. It could have easily been put off had I not been through much of emotional turmoil during my travels and this travail finally got me on the project. A rather very unpleasant incentive for most.

Like my other books, it’s a self-published book so allow for the errors a professionally published book might not have. The tone is solemn, bitter, euphoric, inquisitive, informative, malicious and melancholic and yet never wavers from the search for truth. For all its worth, my wanderings and ramblings are for the world to castigate, discard, cherish or internalize. All i am doing is, rekindling the history from the forgotten.

Yours Sincerely,

Minhaaj Rehman

Beyond the Budget

The national budget for the fiscal year 2017 and 2018 has been announced. The drill remains the same. Paperwork can’t be called anything less than stellar. All fundamentals of economics are razed to ground. This deftness can only be expected from someone with a history of being economical with truth, our finance minister Ishaq Dar. Loans are primarily the source of developments and debt servicing. GDP targets missed as always. All mega projects like orange train, metro buses, laptops, power plants, motor ways constructions, and literally every project is set up by foreign loans or against an indemnity.

None of it unfortunately came as surprise. This was just as expected as it could be. For the next month or so statistics and numbers will be muckraked and thrown at each other in TV shows, Newspapers and parliament eventually to settle in yet another embarrassing fiasco. The debate however is misplaced and utterly futile. Question that should be answered honestly is how long is this going to be tolerated? Thomas Picketty, the famous French economist, has written arguably the most influential book on income and capital in our times. The amount of historical data he draws his conclusions from is phenomenal. He argues that inequality has increased throughout history alongside the amount of capital we have been able to generate. At some level, Karl Marx’s prophecy of private wealth generation ending up in fewer hands is already a reality.

The invisible hand of Adam Smith, as acclaimed as it is, has failed to explain the fiascos of trade liberalization. In third world countries like ours where law sides with the powerful, litigation stands no chance against the monopolistic cult. By all standards of acceptable economics, Pakistan is following the road to nowhere. Loans on top of loans on top of tax cuts to foreign companies while agonizing the middle class with regressive taxes is unprecedented except in autocracies. While our prime minister paints a rosy picture out of this oligopoly facts speak for themselves.

Luckily history is not only the source of embarrassment but also the hope. In Poland around mid 16th century the wages for workers were paid. By the end of the century only half of the wages were paid rest of it was landlord’s. Mecklenberg, Germany was a lot of worse than that. People got paid only four days a week and their children worked for free. Irony is the fact that this all was legislated. Something that becomes a law does not automatically become an evidence of it being justified and even ethical. In England it was as early as 1381 that peasant’s revolt began and took over London. They demanded an end to extortions and Statute of Labourers to be put in effect. Wat Tyler the heroic leader however was captured and executed in a tragic turn of events but the momentum it gave to reformation movement was irreversible. Apartheid by definition was legal, holocaust was performed under Reich’s orders and Spanish colonization of Latin American was normal trade. Today these are the dark chapters of human history.

Year 2000 was a special one for Zimbabwe. Story became a laughing stock for international community by for Mugabe It was just another windfall. A lottery was organised for everyone who held atleast 5,000 USD in bank accounts. Is it a coincidence that Mugabe won it after he had been organising mock elections for 40 years? The country in 2008 topped the countries where unemployment ratio has hit 94pc. Pattern is same in all countries at the top of this index. Chad, Libera, Nepal, Sudan, etc. John Perkins writes at length in his bestselling book ‘Confessions of an Economic Hitman’ about under the table perks these ‘orchestrated’ leaders of developing nations enjoy. This exploitation of domestic resources in the name of trade liberalisation happen under shameful terms using these countries as funnels for the foreign loans that end up in their own pockets.

The historical and rhetorical speech of Shahbaz Shareef still resonates where he would cut open President Zardari’s stomach and bring back the looted money from the Swiss Banks. Once in power it turned out that instead of cutting other people’s stomach a ‘wise man’ feeds a bigger one.

The historical and rhetorical speech of Shahbaz Shareef still resonates where he would cut open President Zardari’s stomach and bring back the looted money from the Swiss Banks. Once in power it turned out that instead of cutting other people’s stomach a ‘wise man’ feeds a bigger one.

Is it then incredible that young children of our beloved prime minister in their tender ages have outsmarted business tycoons around the world when we look at their income declarations? Apart from this rampage, do we not see the similarities with what we call first world nations in their days of misery and penury? Less bread and more mouths to feed. Serf labor, child labor, lawlessness, extravagance of the nobles, illicit arrangements between the aristocracy and regressive taxation.

What lies at the core of all this is an inspirational change and source of hope and solace. Facts today themselves reflect the message that this all can be overcome with collective effort. Human civilizations did not move from parasitical hunting societies to producing societies and then knowledge societies in a matter of years. This thought evolution took centuries and informational building blocks. European history took a violent and individualistic path to development.

History of the orient has a different trajectory from its Caucasian counterparts. The region between the Fertile Crescent to the subcontinent had always been an intellectually rich one. Many have argued that the reason foreign invasions on these