There were only a few minutes to one when I heard a stranger’s voice on my mobile phone. The speaker seemed to be full of apprehension, agony and terror as he said in a trembling voice. “Jamia Al-Rasheed’s van has had an accident. Come quickly.”The stranger had found my cell number on a card in one of the victim’s pockets.
I at once notified the Jamia authorities and within minutes an ambulance had arrived. The distance hadn’t been more than a furlong! It was a horrifying scene. On the road passing through a settlement, a brand new double-cabin Hilux traveling at 160mils per hour had rammed into the fragile Hi-roof and torn it to pieces.
In our beloved country the cheapest commodity is human life. A person is burnt alive, another one’s body is riddled with bullets and yet someone else is crushed to death hy racing mini-buses, cars and trucks. There is usually a violent demonstration when such accidents occur cars and buses are torched buildings are set afire, some more lives are lost and then life back into its usual routine. Accidents and demonstrations go band in hand.
Neither is there a decrease in accidents nor in the violent protests that follow. Yet the family and spiritual survivors of the people who had become shaheed or wounded in this particular accident, believed neither in going up obeying an order of Shariah.
The habit of following the happy mean is so ingrained in their natures that emotions are not allowed to rule over sense and sense does not turn emotions into a useless limb. For it is truly the characteristic of a Mumin that he proves to be as hard as iron in the battle field but s soft as silk in his daily life. When such emotion-inflaming accidents take place it is then that people are tested and if they are not strong deep down inside them, then the contradictions in their nature,
between word and deed come to the surface and are there for everyone to see.At a distance of about 100km. from the Ahsanabad Police Post, the crushed and broken van, the splattered blood, the bodies of the shaheed, the torn and bleeding forms of the wounded provided enough reason for blocking roads, pelting stones at vehicles, and creating an uproar but nothing of the sort happened. No one picked up a stone or a stick; there was no baton-charge or police-firing.
Those who say madaris are breeding grounds of terrorists should think that had such a school or college van met with such an accident would there have been such silence, such peace? Oh no. Dozens of cars, buses would have been torched, people would have been killed; roads would have been blocked by the raging protestors.
And then the demands of the protestors would have been gladly met by the stiff-necked higher-ups. Intoxicated with power, wealth , a brand new, expensive car and perhaps with wine, little did the owner know that he had not killed just some people but crushed to death the living symbols of knowledge magnanimity and sincerity honesty and nobleness.
