[Qnnoshxj]

Asslamo Allaikum,

To Protect Islam and Muslim identity of Muslims of India when things like this were being implmeneted and suggested by the likes of Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay


Musharaf, Zardari, Hamid Karzai and the likes are now doing the same things in the name of Educational Reforms but are we upto the job as our predecessors were? Its one thing praising them and another trying to be like them and studying their lives to learn strategies and tactics.

• It is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.[2]

• We are free, we are civilised, to little purpose, if we grudge to any portion of the human race an equal measure of freedom and civilisation." [1]

• "I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia."


• (From Edinburgh Review, 1830) "If any person had told the Parliament which met in terror and perplexity after the crash of 1720 that in 1830 the wealth of England would surpass all their wildest dreams, that the annual revenue would equal the principal of that debt which they considered an intolerable burden, that for one man of £10,000 then living there would be five men of £50,000, that London would be twice as large and twice as populous, and that nevertheless the rate of mortality would have diminished to one half of what it then was, that the post-office would bring more into the exchequer than the excise and customs had brought in together under Charles II, that stage coaches would run from London to York in 24 hours, that men would be in the habit of sailing without wind, and would be beginning to ride without horses, our ancestors would have given as much credit to the prediction as they gave to Gulliver's Travels."

• "It would be, on the most selfish view of the case, far better for us that the people of India were well governed and independent of us, than ill governed and subject to us; that they were ruled by their own kings, but wearing our broadcloth, and working with our cutlery, than that they were performing their salams to English collectors and English magistrates, but were too ignorant to value, or too poor to buy, English manufactures. To trade with civilised men is infinitely more profitable than to govern savages." [2]

• "Copyright is monopoly, and produces all the effects which the general voice of mankind attributes to monopoly. [...] Monopoly is an evil. For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil; but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good."[3]

• "To punish public outrages on morals and religion is unquestionably within the competence of rulers. But when a government, not content with requiring decency, requires sanctity, it oversteps the bounds which mark its proper functions. And it may be laid down as a universal rule that a government which attempts more than it ought will perform less." "Leigh Hunt" (1841), in Critical...Essays 2:509.

• "There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church. The history of that Church joins together the two great ages of human civilisation. No other institution is left standing which carries the mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian amphitheatre. The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday, when compared with the line of the Supreme Pontiffs. That line we trace back in an unbroken series, from the Pope who crowned Napoleon in the nineteenth century to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth; and far beyond the time of Pepin the august dynasty extends, till it is lost in the twilight of fable. The republic of Venice came next in antiquity. But the republic of Venice was modern when compared with the Papacy; and the republic of Venice is gone, and the Papacy remains. The Papacy remains, not in decay, not a mere antique, but full of life and youthful vigour. The Catholic Church is still sending forth to the farthest ends of the world missionaries as zealous as those who landed in Kent with Augustin, and still confronting hostile kings with the same spirit with which she confronted Attila. The number of her children is greater than in any former age. Her acquisitions in the New World have more than compensated for what she has lost in the Old. Her spiritual ascendency extends over the vast countries which lie between the plains of the Missouri and Cape Horn, countries which a century hence, may not improbably contain a population as large as that which now inhabits Europe. The members of her communion are certainly not fewer than a hundred and fifty millions; and it will be difficult to show that all other Christian sects united amount to a hundred and twenty millions. Nor do we see any sign which indicates that the term of her long dominion is approaching. She saw the commencement of all the governments and of all the ecclesiastical establishments that now exist in the world; and we feel no assurance that she is not destined to see the end of them all. She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished at Antioch, when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's."

[RaicickKida]

Why we need to protect our traditional centres of learning that produce "real" intellectuals
posted by NA
Just came across this excerpt from a book A Sense of Seige: The Geopolitics of Islam and the West here, about the pseudo intellectuals, which sadly Pakistan is rife with:
This is a real tragedy. These intellectuals are unable to question their positions and their assumed mission because they have no intellectual, academic or informative resource other than the West to rely on. Western sources are their only assets; and once their link to these sources is lost, they will be abandoned in the middle of a desert. Sadly, these intellectuals are unable to find the spiritual energy and intellectual courage necessary to save themselves and their countries, to preserve their roots, because that would mean denial of what has become their identity. In this case, “the decisive hour,” as defined by Marx -- a concept that evolved into “class suicide” -- takes place, when a part of the ruling class separates itself and joins the revolutionary class. These intellectuals ultimately expect the support of military coups and dicta regimes. The Middle East has the most unfortunate examples of intellectual class suicide. The obstacle to democracy in this region is not Islam, or Muslim people; it is the intellectuals. A thought provoking excerpt, indeed. Pseudo intellectuals have become a bane of my country's existence. Or is it the case with the entire Muslim world, in general? The only real intellectuals are those who are directly involved with the acquisition and imparting of traditional Islamic learning because they still hold on to the "academic and informative sources other than the West." Pakistan, as one of our teachers used to say, is a very unique country. It is one of those countries where we still find a "mullah" sitting on a straw mat and deriving his "spiritual and intellectual courage" necessary to save his deen, which he "still" equates with his country that emerged on the map of this world in the name of Islam. Despite all the attempts to secularise the nation, defame the "mullah" and Islam, Pakistan is one Muslim country which still has people who consider their religion as being far superior to everything else in life. They are those who, when told their country won't survive the pincer movement against it and would disintegrate, quietly retreat into seclusion and pray for their country, and yet at the same time say that no matter what happens, a Muslims's allegiance is primarily to his deen and if that stays intact all losses are recoverable. May Allah protect Pakistan and the people of deen who still make survival possible in this country. Source : Musafir-e-Dasht