Taliban vs. Jaahilan!

The world is a funny place. As they say, truth is stranger than fiction. Life never ceases to amaze you, always coming up with surprises, phenomena that you least expected occur and things that were beyond your wildest imagination suddenly become a part of your life.

Who could have imagined that our dear country, formed in the name of Islam and then abused in the name of the same religion for more than sixty years, would one day be under attack by fundamentalists with their own version of the same religion. 

Then again, maybe it is not that surprising after all. Maybe we asked for it. Yes, the Taliban are a threat, but to what? They cannot be a threat to our freedom, our peace of mind, our ideology, our religion, our unity or our march towards better times. It can’t be an attack on any of these things simply because none of these things exist here. We’re still slaves to centuries old fallacies in the name of traditions, culture and religion, we have no intention of striving to develop and instead spend all our energies fighting against ourselves, we have never agreed on our definition of better times, we are still to develop the tolerance and sense to coexist despite the differences in our thinking and culture. In short we are an idle, indifferent and sleeping nation.

I feel that this purposeless existence, which most of us have become used to and do not want to change, is the very thing under attack. We fear the Taliban, not just because they have a fundamentalist, illogical and violent outlook on Islam, but more so because they are a force that would make us gets off our butts. Whether we support them, oppose them, follow them or block them, we just cannot stay asleep. And that is what scares the living hell out of us.

I am not a supporter of the Taliban but I am an even bigger opponent of the Jaahilan. In the possibility of the approaching battle between the Taliban and the Jaahilan, victory will probably not grace the one who is right or even the one who is more powerful but the one who is readier to move his ass. The Taliban might stop short of Islamabad, but our own lethargy is the enemy that has already entered our gates.

Historically, we have never required an external enemy to defeat us; we are pretty self-sufficient in that. It is about time we put an end to this. Open our eyes and see the life we lead, the things we believe and the shame we put our religion and ideology to.

One cannot succeed if he does not know what he wants to achieve, can’t grow if he doesn’t have an idea of what growth is and can’t fight unless he knows what he is fighting for.