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.
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Saqlain Mushtaq coaching Saeed Ajmal |
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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. |
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