Player Power plus Religion minus Ethic by Khaled Ahmed

Pakistan's First Independent Weekly Paper Player Power plus Religion minus Ethic

by Khaled Ahmed Lack of ethical conduct in the Pakistani team is of long standing. Like Pakistan itself, this lack of ethic took place together with the rise of religiosity in the national cricket team

Pakistani cricket team prays in Mohali Stadium

A court in England has found three Pakistani cricketers - skipper Salman Butt, pace bowler Muhammad Asif, pace bowler Muhammad Amir - guilty of cheating in the game. Because there was solid justiciable evidence based on a sting operation complete with marked banknotes, the case became criminal and the three were found guilty. If the nation was in doubt and wanted to plead international conspiracy, it was taken care of by Amir who confessed to spot-fixing.   Saqlain Mushtaq coaching Saeed Ajmal   The Cricket Board in Pakistan tried half-heartedly to fight 'player power' before giving in and letting the world outside break this dominance of errant sportsmen destroying discipline and ethic. Public opinion was behind player power, facilitated by that lowest form of life in the media called sports reporter, adept at blackmailing the Board through tainted reporting to gouge concessions for himself, but in the process empowering the recalcitrant players. Player Power that killed cricket is still there: Afridi had resigned asking the chairman of the Board to go before he would play again. He has returned after the exit of Ijaz Butt. Lack of ethical conduct in the Pakistani team is of long standing. Like Pakistan itself, this lack of ethic took place together with the rise of religiosity in the national cricket team. As the world watches the three players preparing to go to jail in the UK, it wonders at the coincidence of unethical behavior and religion in Pakistani state and society. It is the Pakistani emerging from a deeply religious society who gets caught in the dragnet of the world's non-religious scrutiny of character. Religion and ethic seem to be two opposed values in Pakistan. Religion and ethic seem to be two opposed values in Pakistan The Pakistani Cricket Board watched helplessly as teams selected by it misbehaved abroad. Reports came in about the 'night life' of the players led by the likes of pace bowler Shoaib Akhtar. There were reports of infighting and hostile grouping in the team. The players conspired against their captains, took oaths on the Quran one group against the other, and then losing matches which they should have won. The world outside became suspicious of this behaviour. Pakistani cricketers playing county cricket in the UK were hounded by Scotland Yard and the ICC started routinely asking the Board in Pakistan to take action. The Board was helpless in the face of Player Power with nationalism attached to it. The fault lay not with religion but players who began to mix religion with cricket like so much else In another symbolic event, the terrorists started threatening the game as anti-Islamic pursuit of pleasure but the state of Pakistan kept denying that it was losing its control over terrorist outfits that opposed all kinds of cultural activity including cricket. The sportsmen of the world started shunning Pakistan till the Boards in other countries formally declined to visit because it was unsafe to be in Pakistan. And when Sri Lanka thought it could trust Pakistan and sent its team it was attacked in Lahore and nearly kidnapped for ransom. In 2009, the National Assembly Standing Committee on Sports thought it should set things right. It thought it should inquire into the match-fixing reported during a recently concluded ICC Champions Trophy in South Africa. It summoned the team captain Younis Khan but he decided to resign from the captaincy rather than appear before the Committee. (One chairman of the Board was so disgusted over lack of character of Younis that he resigned!) Then it tried to get the chairman of the Board Ijaz Butt to come before it only to find that he had ignored the summons. Religiosity and fall of ethical character coincided in the team. We know that it all started with our great opening batsman Saeed Anwar. He turned to Islam and appeared in the World Cup sporting a flowing beard. It is a pity that after going bearded, and after much acclaim from the religious community in Pakistan, he didn't do well in the game. The fault lay not with religion but players who began to mix religion with cricket like so much else. Our great spin bowler Saqlain Mushtaq too sprouted a religious beard. We were told by Saeed Anwar that he had persuaded a lot of otherwise worldly members of the national team to turn to religion and keep the mandatory beard, and one person deeply affected by his advocacy was Saqlain Mushtaq. Once again, beard was not followed by performance. Saqlain was thrashed all over the place in the Multan test that followed, yielding 200 runs in an innings to India's non-Muslim batsmen. Ironically, a clean-shaven Muslim bowler in the Indian team, Irfan Pathan, proved to be the bane of our batsmen in the last one-dayer that we lost to India. Saeed Anwar going religious was all right, but he should not have tried to convert the only Christian cricketer in Pakistan's national team, Yusuf Yohanna. Yusuf looked good crossing himself every time he scored well and that gave Pakistan a good image. Cricketers sporting flowing beards gave Pakistan a bad image as a country of wild fanatics. This is of course the doing of foreign hostile media because terrorists who spread mayhem in Pakistan were also bearded. Canada once refused visa to a player because he had earlier gone there and called on an Islamist organisation under surveillance. In 2007, under skipper Inzamam, the team had come under suspicion of Islamic radicalism, neglecting cricket practice in favour of proselytising activities in the Caribbean. Coach Woolmer had actually objected to the team letting prayer cut into game discussions. The team's media manager had accused the team of neglecting the game during the 2007 World Cup and spending all the time on trying to convert people of the West Indies. Like most terms defining human beings, character too is abstract and differently understood in different cultures. In our society, character is defined in the light of religious commandments. Good character must be informed by piety because if you have piety, you can do nothing wrong. Since there is no objective criterion for judging piety except the rituals, it is the outward appearance of the man that helps us decide his personality. The word we use for character is kirdaar. It simply means behaviour. It should be accepted as a precise term because it is not through pieties but through acts or behaviour that character must be adjudged. Funnily however, when we say badkirdaar we invariably mean sexually promiscuous. Morality is the focus, not ethic. If you listen carefully to the habit of speech you will find that it is applied more often than not to women. We also make (or used to make) cryptic remarks about the West: real Islam exists in the West while we have only the worship. Does the remark point to character? Max Weber in his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism wrote something that persists in the world as a great classification. It is significant in our discussion because it talks of the work ethic. He thought that ethic as a judgement on the fulfilment of contract came only after the break-up of the Church. (Ethic is related to work which cannot be defined unless it is related to contract.) He thought that work ethic developed only among the Protestants after they had broken from the Roman Catholic Church and its sacramental authority. The Islamic state of Pakistan and society are corrupt. So are our cricketers and other sportsmen. This is different from the corruption found in soccer and other sports in the West. Religion does not cover up there the way it does here. The main reason is that Muslims confuse piety with ethic and give no importance to ethic which is related only to work and contract. The words we use for the two are confusing too: ikhlaqiat (ethic) is placed in the same context of application as piety (ibadat). The separation took place in the West at the inauguration of secularism in daily life. The Muslim rejection of secularism has given us a pious cricket team that thinks nothing of breaking contracts in violation of the regulations establishing sporting ethic.

The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler

The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler

1910-2008

 

 

 

    

 

 

 

The story of Irena Sendler, a social worker who was part of the Polish underground during World War II and was arrested by the Nazi's for saving the lives of nearly 2,500 Jewish children by smuggling them out of the Warsaw ghetto.

The Holocaust - the systematic annihilation of six million Jews - is a history of enduring horror and sorrow. The charred skeletons, the diabolic experiments, the death camps, the mass graves, the smoke from the chimneys ... In 1933 nine million Jews lived in the 21 countries of Europe that would be occupied by Germany during the war. By 1945 two out of every three European Jews had been killed by the Nazis. 1.5 million children were murdered. This figure includes more than 1.2 million Jewish children, tens of thousands of Gypsy children and thousands of handicapped children. Yet there were acts of courage and human decency during the Holocaust - stories to bear witness to goodness, love and compassion. This is the story of an incredible woman and her amazing gift to mankind. Irena Sendler. An unfamiliar name to most people, but this remarkable woman defied the Nazis and saved 2,500 Jewish children by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto. As a health worker, she sneaked the children out between 1942 and 1943 to safe hiding places and found non-Jewish families to adopt them. For many years Irena Sendler - white-haired, gentle and courageous - was living a modest existence in her Warsaw apartment. This unsung heroine passed away on Monday May 12th, 2008. Her achievement went largely unnoticed for many years. Then the story was uncovered by four young students at Uniontown High School, in Kansas, who were the winners of the 2000 Kansas state National History Day competition by writing a play Life in a Jar about the heroic actions of Irena Sendler. The girls - Elizabeth Cambers, Megan Stewart, Sabrina Coons and Janice Underwood - have since gained international recognition, along with their teacher, Norman Conard. The presentation, seen in many venues in the United States and popularized by National Public Radio, C-SPAN and CBS, has brought Irena Sendlers story to a wider public. The students continue their prize-winning dramatic presentation Life in a Jar.  Irena Sendler Irena Sendler was born in 1910 in Otwock, a town some 15 miles southeast of Warsaw. She was greatly influenced by her father who was one of the first Polish Socialists. As a doctor his patients were mostly poor Jews. In 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and the brutality of the Nazis accelerated with murder, violence and terror. At the time, Irena was a Senior Administrator in the Warsaw Social Welfare Department, which operated the canteens in every district of the city. Previously, the canteens provided meals, financial aid, and other services for orphans, the elderly, the poor and the destitute. Now, through Irena, the canteens also provided clothing, medicine and money for the Jews. They were registered under fictitious Christian names, and to prevent inspections, the Jewish families were reported as being afflicted with such highly infectious diseases as typhus and tuberculosis. But in 1942, the Nazis herded hundreds of thousands of Jews into a 16-block area that came to be known as the Warsaw Ghetto. The Ghetto was sealed and the Jewish families ended up behind its walls, only to await certain death. Irena Sendler was so appalled by the conditions that she joined Zegota, the Council for Aid to Jews, organized by the Polish underground resistance movement, as one of its first recruits and directed the efforts to rescue Jewish children. The Warsaw Ghetto To be able to enter the Ghetto legally, Irena managed to be issued a pass from Warsaws Epidemic Control Department and she visited the Ghetto daily, reestablished contacts and brought food, medicines and clothing. But 5,000 people were dying a month from starvation and disease in the Ghetto, and she decided to help the Jewish children to get out. For Irena Sendler, a young mother herself, persuading parents to part with their children was in itself a horrendous task. Finding families willing to shelter the children, and thereby willing to risk their life if the Nazis ever found out, was also not easy. Irena Sendler, who wore a star armband as a sign of her solidarity to Jews, began smuggling children out in an ambulance. She recruited at least one person from each of the ten centers of the Social Welfare Department. With their help, she issued hundreds of false documents with forged signatures. Irena Sendler successfully smuggled almost 2,500 Jewish children to safety and gave them temporary new identities. Some children were taken out in gunnysacks or body bags. Some were buried inside loads of goods. A mechanic took a baby out in his toolbox. Some kids were carried out in potato sacks, others were placed in coffins, some entered a church in the Ghetto which had two entrances. One entrance opened into the Ghetto, the other opened into the Aryan side of Warsaw. They entered the church as Jews and exited as Christians. "`Can you guarantee they will live?'" Irena later recalled the distraught parents asking. But she could only guarantee they would die if they stayed. "In my dreams," she said, "I still hear the cries when they left their parents." Irena Sendler accomplished her incredible deeds with the active assistance of the church. "I sent most of the children to religious establishments," she recalled. "I knew I could count on the Sisters." Irena also had a remarkable record of cooperation when placing the youngsters: "No one ever refused to take a child from me," she said. The children were given false identities and placed in homes, orphanages and convents. Irena Sendler carefully noted, in coded form, the childrens original names and their new identities. She kept the only record of their true identities in jars buried beneath an apple tree in a neighbor's back yard, across the street from German barracks, hoping she could someday dig up the jars, locate the children and inform them of their past. In all, the jars contained the names of 2,500 children ... Nazi Genocide But the Nazis became aware of Irena's activities, and on October 20, 1943 she was arrested, imprisoned and tortured by the Gestapo, who broke her feet and legs. She ended up in the Pawiak Prison, but no one could break her spirit. Though she was the only one who knew the names and addresses of the families sheltering the Jewish children, she withstood the torture, that crippled her for life, refusing to betray either her associates or any of the Jewish children in hiding. Sentenced to death, Irena was saved at the last minute when Zegota members bribed one of the Gestapo agents to halt the execution. She escaped from prison but for the rest of the war she was pursued by the Nazis. After the war she dug up the jars and used the notes to track down the 2,500 children she placed with adoptive families and to reunite them with relatives scattered across Europe. But most lost their families during the Holocaust in Nazi death camps. The children had known her only by her code name Jolanta. But years later, after she was honored for her wartime work, her picture appeared in a newspaper. "A man, a painter, telephoned me," said Sendler, "`I remember your face,' he said. `It was you who took me out of the ghetto.' I had many calls like that!" The Holocaust Irena Sendler did not think of herself as a hero. She claimed no credit for her actions. "I could have done more," she said. "This regret will follow me to my death." She has been honored by international Jewish organizations - in 1965 she accorded the title of Righteous Among the Nations by the Yad Vashem organization in Jerusalem and in 1991 she was made an honorary citizen of Israel. Irena Sendler was awarded Poland's highest distinction, the Order of White Eagle, in Warsaw Monday Nov. 10, 2003, and she was announced as the 2003 winner of the Jan Karski award for Valor and Courage. She has officially been designated a national hero in Poland and schools are named in her honor. Annual Irena Sendler days are celebrated throughout Europe and the United States. In 2007, she was nominated to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. At a special session in Poland's upper house of Parliament, President Lech Kaczynski announced the unanimous resolution to honor Irena Sendler for rescuing "the most defenseless victims of the Nazi ideology: the Jewish children." He referred to her as a "great heroine who can be justly named for the Nobel Peace Prize. She deserves great respect from our whole nation." During the ceremony Elzbieta Ficowska, who was just six months old when she was saved by Irena Sendler, read out a letter on her behalf: “Every child saved with my help is the justification of my existence on this Earth, and not a title to glory,” Irena Sendler said in the letter, “Over a half-century has passed since the hell of the Holocaust, but its spectre still hangs over the world and doesn’t allow us to forget.”  Irena Sendler This lovely, courageous woman was one of the most dedicated and active workers in aiding Jews during the Nazi occupation of Poland. Her courage enabled not only the survival of 2,500 Jewish children but also of the generations of their descendants. The Nobel Prize recipient, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, has dedicated his life to ensuring that none of us forget what happened to the Jews. He wrote: "In those times there was darkness everywhere. In heaven and on earth, all the gates of compassion seemed to have been closed. The killer killed and the Jews died and the outside world adopted an attitude either of complicity or of indifference. Only a few had the courage to care ..."