Opinion

Readers might have noticed my infatuation with the past. I often relate my childhood experience to a modern day issue. I often drag my school or university days when I write about today’s youth. I love my past, but sometimes what worries me the most is what if these memories disappear or fade gradually. As we age, our memory becomes weak and we start forgetting the past events. Occasionally, I struggle to remember the name of someone who I met a couple of weeks ago. I still have several friends who narrate a two decade old event with minute detail. I envy their brain health. Now I find this excellent blog on Minute Mirror site which says something that gave me real comfort. It said forgotten memories may not be gone at all. They may just be sleeping. Scientists studied fruit flies, of all creatures, and found something remarkable. When they placed these tiny flies back in an environment similar to where a memory first formed, that memory came alive again. It was not dead. It was only quiet, waiting for the right door to knock on. Now I am no scientist, friends. I am just a man who spends too much time looking backward. But when I read this, something in my chest loosened up a little. Because I always feared that my old memories were leaking out of me, drop by drop, the way water leaks from a cracked clay pot. I feared that one day I would wake up and my childhood street would be gone from my mind, my mother’s voice reading me stories would be gone, the smell of my school canteen would be gone. But this research tells a gentler story. It tells me that memory is not a candle that simply burns out. It is more like a lamp switched off in a room I stopped visiting. The lamp is still there. The bulb still works. I only need to walk back into that room, and somehow, the light comes on again. Think about it, friends. Have you ever caught a scent, maybe of rain falling on dry earth, and suddenly you are eight years old again, standing on your grandmother’s veranda? Have you ever heard an old song on the radio and felt your whole childhood come rushing back in one breath? That is not magic. That is your brain finding the right key for a door it had quietly locked. Of course, the article is honest enough to admit that scientists still do not fully understand everything. Sometimes the brain brings back memories that are not entirely true. It mixes things up. It adds a little color here, removes a little detail there. Human memory, unlike a fruit fly’s, is a complicated thing. But even with its flaws, I find this idea beautiful. Our memories are patient. They do not vanish just because we stop visiting them. They simply wait. I think of my old friends, the ones who can recall an event from twenty years ago as if it happened yesterday. I used to envy them, thinking their brains were simply built better than mine. Now I wonder if maybe they just keep walking back into those old rooms more often than I do. Maybe remembering is not only about a strong brain. Maybe it is about visiting. So here is what I plan to do, friends. I plan to walk old streets again. I plan to visit my old school gate, even if it now sells mobile phone covers instead of candy. I plan to play those old songs my father used to hum while shaving in the morning. I plan to open every quiet room in my mind, one by one, and let the light back in. Because somewhere in me, my mother is still calling me in for dinner. Somewhere in me, my school bell is still ringing. Somewhere in me, a boy is still running home before the streetlights come on. They are not gone. They were only sleeping. And tonight, God willing, I intend to wake every single one of them up.

For years, people uploaded photographs, videos and voice recordings believing they were sharing moments or building audiences. What many did not realise was that public material could become training data for artificial intelligence. Large AI systems may be developed using datasets containing personal information collected from websites and platforms. European regulators acknowledge that AI models can be trained on personal data, while the UK Information Commissioner says developers still need a lawful basis even when information comes from the open web. Training a general model and cloning a person are not identical. The first learns patterns across datasets; the second uses targeted samples to reproduce an identifiable voice or appearance. Yet both raise the same question: who authorised the use? A new proposition is emerging: instead of companies quietly collecting human material, people may knowingly license their faces, voices and movements for AI development or commercial digital replicas. In return, they could receive a one-time payment, royalties or a fee whenever their synthetic identity is used. This is beginning. Shutterstock operates a contributor fund that compensates contributors when material from its library is licensed for AI model development. SAG-AFTRA has negotiated protections for digital replicas. The voice platform Narrativ allows performers to set prices and advertising preferences for AI-generated versions of their voices, with payment for approved uses. At first glance, this is progress. People’s data has already been feeding digital systems, often without their knowledge, meaningful choice or financial benefit. A transparent marketplace could be fairer. At least individuals would know that a voice sample or facial scan was being collected. There would be a contract, and some value created from human identity could return to the human being. It could also create work. A person might license a recorded voice for educational narration in several languages. A model could approve a digital replica for advertisements without attending repeated shoots. People far from production centres might gain opportunities previously unavailable to them. But payment is not the same as protection. A person offered a modest amount may sign away far more than they understand. A broadly written agreement could allow a company to reproduce a face or voice for years, transfer it to other businesses, train additional models and place the replica in contexts the person would never endorse. The human receives one payment; the synthetic version may generate revenue indefinitely. Faces and voices are not ordinary digital products. A password can be changed after a breach. A face cannot. A cloned voice can imitate a family member, support a fraudulent request or manufacture a statement that was never made. The US Federal Trade Commission has warned that scammers can create convincing voice clones from short audio clips found online. The answer is not to ban every voluntary AI licence. It is to establish non-negotiable human protections. Consent must be specific, informed and renewable. Companies should state whether material will be used for training, identity replication or both. Agreements must define the product, audience, country, platform and time period. Permission for an educational video must not silently become permission for political advertising, gambling, medical claims, intimate material or religious messaging. Compensation should continue when the replica continues earning. Where a digital identity is repeatedly used, the person should receive royalties or per-use payments, not merely a small initial fee. Individuals should be able to set minimum prices, reject industries and see where their replica appeared. There must also be a genuine right to stop future use. Companies should delete source files, block new generations and notify third parties when a licence ends. Independent audits should test compliance. Strong security and penalties for leaks are essential because biometric material cannot simply be replaced. Every synthetic performance should carry visible disclosure and a machine-readable marker. The European Union’s transparency rules, applicable from 2 August 2026, require certain AI-generated or manipulated material to be identifiable and deepfakes to be disclosed. Labels will not prevent every abuse, but they help preserve the distinction between human action and machine-generated imitation. Children need stronger protection. Parents should not be able to permanently commercialise a child’s future identity. Any limited agreement should expire and require the individual’s fresh consent upon adulthood. Pakistan should treat this as urgent. As of 2026, the country still lacks a comprehensive enacted personal data protection law. This creates vulnerability just as international companies may seek diverse and comparatively inexpensive populations for AI training.  The greatest risk is not that humans will earn from AI. Fairly sharing value could correct years of silent extraction. The danger is that people will exchange permanent control for temporary payment. As AI advances, societies must recognise the face, voice and digital personality as extensions of the human person, not raw material waiting to be harvested. Without consent, continuing compensation, traceability and the power to say no, we may lose more than jobs or privacy. We may lose the trust that allows us to believe what we see, hear and recognise. AI should expand human possibility, not gradually replace human ownership of the self.

The poor nation has been treated like a naïve fool—or like a buffalo standing idly in Anarkali Bazaar, merely watching the spectacle—while the only person truly entitled to everything has been the one holding the stick. In such circumstances, lamenting that “our system has collapsed” amounts to nothing more than crocodile tears. May one dare ask these distinguished representatives of power: who is the greatest beneficiary of this collapsed system today? Surely, it is not that poor, powerless figure who constitutionally occupies the office of Prime Minister but is widely perceived as nothing more than a flatterer, a “Cherry Blossom,” or a bootlicker. Even the authority to reprimand one of his own unruly cabinet ministers has been taken away from him. Before the real power brokers, the poor man has no option except to bow or prostrate himself in deference. Yet even this symbolic arrangement seems intolerable to those who wield the stick. They ask: Why should this weak individual even occupy this ceremonial chair? If we are the real source of power, why are these sheep and goats sitting here at all? And who does the Eighteenth Constitutional Amendment think it is, making us dependent upon these provincial “sheep and goats”? If we require funds for “protecting the people,” why should we have to seek the approval of these so-called political parties? Why not simply dismantle the provinces, divide them into thirty pieces, and grind them down, just as our revered elder, the “true believer” of the Zia era, once envisioned—that politicians would come crawling to lick our feet with their tails tucked between their legs? But these are not our real issues, despite the crocodile tears now being shed over them. The system has produced poverty, unemployment, despair among the youth, and unbearable inflation. Our country is being humiliated across the world. The begging bowl has become our national symbol. Even our Prime Minister has admitted that whenever leaders of friendly countries see us, they think, “Here comes the beggar.” Our young people, exhausted by poverty and hunger, want nothing more than to leave this country. Many die while attempting the dangerous Dunki route to Europe, drowning in overcrowded boats. Is there any system here that offers them hope? You criticize the distribution of laptops. Although laptops are a useful technology, today the world has advanced from artificial intelligence to cutting-edge digital technologies. Compare our condition with that of India. Where are the modern industries that can provide educated and capable young people with respectable jobs and salaries that match their abilities? When will our society become not only modern in agriculture but also genuinely industrial? All this has resulted in the destruction of democracy, lawlessness, the systematic killing of merit, inequality, oppression, and the transformation of the country into a breeding ground for crime. Bribery, favoritism, and nepotism are everywhere. Why has our country repeatedly experienced martial law? Why is there neither respect for nor supremacy of the law? Why has our Parliament become nothing more than a rubber stamp for the powerful? Why does our judiciary continue to place boots above the Constitution? To what extent has our society been destroyed because of this, and who is truly responsible? The absence and destruction of these values have killed the spirit of tolerance and coexistence in our society. They have nurtured the snakes of religious hatred and made it impossible for ordinary people to live with dignity. This oppressive approach has created and nurtured countless forms of extremism. It has robbed our younger generations of their emotions and independent thinking. What is taught in our religious seminaries in the name of sanctity, and the hatred propagated there, as well as the fanaticism promoted in modern educational institutions under the labels of Pakistan Studies, theology, and religious education, leaves little room for disagreement. Anyone expressing an alternative viewpoint faces severe restrictions. It is not only conservative society that reacts harshly; the country’s blasphemy laws also loom threateningly over dissent. In such an environment, how can freedom of expression and intellectual liberty flourish? In such suffocating conditions, where is the space for fresh and critical thinking? In a society eaten away like wood infested with termites, how can any humane system possibly develop? Much of our society’s religious intolerance is a direct consequence of this repression. Both our media and our educational curriculum have been damaged by this suffocating approach. Without freedom of expression, how can an effective system of accountability based on critical inquiry ever emerge? How can social, political, and religious bullying, superstition, and corruption within society ever be eliminated? It has turned not only the powerful into tyrants but even an ordinary clerk into a little Pharaoh. The more authority someone possesses, the more they begin to think of themselves as a god. This culture of oppression has hollowed out our society from within. Our Chief Minister seems to believe she is all-powerful. Not only Maryam Nawaz, but every member of her cabinet—men and women alike—behaves like a dragon, intimidating not only the public but even members of their own provincial assembly. As for the members of the assembly themselves, they appear to consider hardly anyone other than themselves to be worthy human beings. (To Be Continued)

As Pakistan prepares to celebrate another Independence Day, standard national rituals will once again take center stage. Flag-hoisting ceremonies, parades, and patriotic broadcasts will dominate the public square. Yet, nearly eight decades after gaining political freedom, a quiet but deeply uncomfortable question persists: can a nation truly consider itself sovereign if its collective mind remains dependent on the ideas, technologies, and scientific outputs of others? ​True independence has never been merely a matter of drawing borders, raising flags, or maintaining standing armies. History teaches a relentless lesson: physical sovereignty is only a shell. It requires intellectual and scientific self-reliance to give it genuine substance and endurance. Without a thriving culture of critical inquiry, rigorous research, and technological innovation, political freedom gradually degrades into a ceremonial phrase. ​Today, Pakistan faces a severe, structural crisis within its higher education system—one that poses a direct threat to its national sovereignty and economic survival. Not a single Pakistani university currently features among the top 200 or 300 institutions in major global academic rankings, such as QS or Times Higher Education. This is far more than an embarrassing statistic for university administrators. It is an alarm bell signaling deep vulnerabilities in national security, economic resilience, and the country’s collective capacity to navigate a complex world. ​We live in an era where global power and national influence are defined by knowledge economies, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and rapid technological innovation. Meanwhile, Pakistan’s universities are collapsing under the combined weight of severe budget cuts, outdated curricula, heavy-handed bureaucratic interference, and deeply flawed research incentives. Unless our academic institutions move away from acting as simple credential-issuing factories and transform into centers of genuine learning and problem-solving, Pakistan’s economic and political sovereignty will remain precarious. A country that relies permanently on foreign intellect, imported technology, and international financial institutions to address its core domestic problems cannot claim to be truly self-reliant. ​This decline is not a matter of subjective opinion; it is confirmed by hard empirical evidence. Over 250 public and private universities operate across Pakistan, yet the state allocates a meager 0.24 to 0.28 percent of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to higher education. This represents a small fraction of the 2 percent minimum recommended by UNESCO for developing nations attempting to build sustainable economies. Regional peers made strategic investments in research and technology decades ago, turning their universities into powerful engines of industrial growth. In contrast, persistent funding cuts in Pakistan have left public-sector universities financially paralyzed, with many administrators openly struggling to pay staff pensions or procure basic laboratory chemicals and equipment. ​Even more damaging than the financial deficit is the systemic decay in research quality. While university faculty publish thousands of papers every year to meet promotion targets under the Tenure Track System, the vast majority of these publications carry little to no global impact or citation value. A desperate chase for publication numbers, driven by artificial metrics and a reliance on low-tier journals, has fostered a superficial academic culture disconnected from real-world application. Our university research rarely addresses the pressing structural challenges facing the nation, whether in climate adaptation, agricultural productivity, public health, water management, or industrial manufacturing. ​The most tragic consequence of this intellectual and institutional stagnation is the unprecedented wave of brain drain draining the nation’s potential. According to official emigration statistics, over two million educated and skilled young Pakistanis—including doctors, software engineers, data scientists, chemists, and academics—have left the country in recent years. They are not emigrating simply in pursuit of higher salaries; they are fleeing a system characterized by political nepotism, lack of merit, poor infrastructure, and a hostile environment for creative thought. When a state fails to retain its best minds, it surrenders its future. Universities continue to churn out hundreds of thousands of graduates annually, but a vast proportion remain unemployable because their education has failed to equip them with critical thinking skills or modern technological competencies. Without a functional, collaborative link between universities, local industry, and government policymakers—the classic Triple Helix model—talks of economic self-reliance remain empty political rhetoric. ​Reclaiming intellectual sovereignty requires a candid national assessment and decisive, structural policy changes. First, state funding for higher education must be incrementally raised to at least 1.5 percent of GDP over a defined roadmap. Crucially, at least half of these new funds should be explicitly ring-fenced away from brick-and-mortar civil construction and directed toward modernizing scientific laboratories, subscribing to international scientific databases, and establishing dedicated national centers for artificial intelligence, biotechnology, renewable energy, and cybersecurity. ​Second, university governance requires immediate, radical overhaul. The Higher Education Commission and individual university senates must be insulated from bureaucratic red tape and political appointments. Vice-Chancellors and senior academic leaders should be selected through transparent, merit-based international searches, prioritizing proven scientific achievement and visionary management over political connections or administrative seniority. ​Third, the criteria for evaluating faculty performance must be completely overhauled. The current practice of rewarding sheer publication volume should be replaced with a system that prioritizes research quality, international citations, industrial patents, technology transfers, and solutions that solve tangible domestic problems. ​Finally, Pakistan must systematically engage its vast academic diaspora. Rather than lamenting brain drain, the state should build a structured “Brain Gain” program. By offering competitive joint research grants, flexible digital teaching platforms, and adjunct faculty positions, Pakistan can enable its top scholars abroad to transfer cutting-edge global science back into domestic universities without requiring them to relocate permanently. ​Patriotism in the twenty-first century cannot be measured by emotional slogans, ceremonial rallies, or flag-hoisting displays. It requires building objective competence in science, technology, and critical thought. If our universities fail to become spaces of innovation, inquiry, and problem-solving, Pakistan will remain perpetually dependent on foreign aid, external loans, and imported knowledge. Modern national defense is built not only along physical borders, but within classrooms, research laboratories, and libraries. Reforming higher education is not a luxury or a secondary policy goal; it is the single most logical path toward securing a dignified, sovereign, and prosperous future for the nation.

“Remember your humanity, and forget the rest”— Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, The Russell–Einstein Manifesto, 1955   On the morning of August 6, 1945, Hiroshima was a living city. Children were preparing for school, workers were beginning another day, meals were being eaten, conversations remained unfinished and countless ordinary plans had been made for an evening many would never see. At 8:15 am, a single atomic bomb changed all that. In seconds, a city became an inferno and human ingenuity demonstrated what it was capable of when divorced from human conscience. Three days later, Nagasaki suffered the same fate.   More than eight decades have passed, yet the mind still struggles to comprehend what happened. Not merely the scale of destruction, but the extraordinary contradiction it represented. Human beings had acquired sufficient knowledge of physics to split the atom but apparently insufficient wisdom to prevent that knowledge from being used to incinerate fellow human beings. This raises an uncomfortable question: is man the cruellest animal?   Animals kill. Nature is certainly not a sentimental place. Predators hunt for food, animals fight over territory, mates and dominance, and some species occasionally kill for reasons other than immediate survival. Yet no creature other than Homo sapiens has transformed killing into an organised industry. No animal constructs factories to manufacture weapons capable of destroying entire cities. None develops elaborate ideologies to justify mass slaughter, calculates acceptable casualties or decorates members of its species for becoming exceptionally efficient at killing others. Only the supposedly “wise man” has achieved such sophistication.   The atomic bombings cannot, of course, be examined outside the horrors of the Second World War. Nazi Germany had perpetrated the holocaust. Imperial Japan had committed horrific atrocities across Asia. Cities had already been devastated by conventional and incendiary bombing. Millions of soldiers and civilians were dead. Defenders of the decision to use atomic weapons maintain that the bombs accelerated Japan’s surrender and avoided an invasion that could have caused enormous casualties on both sides. Critics have long questioned whether alternatives existed and whether the second bombing, in particular, was necessary.   Historians may continue debating these questions. Humanity must confront another. At what point does military necessity cease to provide moral shelter for the deliberate infliction of unimaginable suffering upon civilians? Perhaps the most disturbing legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is not simply that atomic bombs were used. It is that humanity had reached a stage where the destruction of enormous number of ordinary people could be incorporated into strategic calculation. Human beings had become numbers. Therein lies the first requirement of organised cruelty: dehumanisation.   Before we can inflict unbearable suffering upon others, we must somehow stop seeing them as ourselves. They become the enemy, an alien race, religion, nationality, sect or ideology. Children become unfortunate collateral damage. Dead bodies become casualty figures. Destroyed neighbourhoods become strategic targets. Language performs the anaesthesia that conscience might otherwise refuse. Once human beings are converted into categories, almost anything becomes possible.   History is littered with evidence. Colonial atrocities required subject populations to be regarded as inferior. Ethnic cleansing requires neighbours to become enemies. Genocide requires individual faces to disappear behind collective labels. Modern warfare similarly becomes easier to tolerate when suffering is viewed through satellite images rather than through the eyes of a mother holding her dead child. Perhaps that explains one of the strangest contradictions of our species. The same human hand that tenderly caresses a newborn can press the button that launches a missile towards somebody else’s newborn.   The same species that produces Mozart and Rumi, builds hospitals, writes poetry, explores distant planets and risks lives rescuing strangers from disasters also constructs concentration camps, torture chambers, chemical weapons and nuclear warheads. How can such tenderness and such barbarity inhabit the same creature?   We proudly call ourselves civilised. Yet civilisation cannot merely mean technological advancement. If anything, technology without corresponding moral advancement makes human beings more dangerous, not less. A primitive weapon can kill one person. Human intelligence created weapons capable of killing millions. Science gives us power. It does not necessarily give us wisdom. That distinction should haunt us.   The scientists who unlocked the secrets of the atom demonstrated one of humanity’s greatest intellectual achievements. But when knowledge becomes separated from ethics, achievement can become catastrophe. Ten years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, together with other distinguished scientists, issued their famous manifesto warning humanity about nuclear war. Their appeal was breathtakingly simple: “Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.”   What an extraordinary plea to have to make to human beings. Remember that the person across the border is human. Remember that the child beneath the rubble is human. Remember that the mother screaming outside a hospital is human. Remember that beneath uniforms, flags, religions, ethnicities and nationalities beats essentially the same vulnerable human heart.   Yet eighty-one years after Hiroshima, humanity still maintains nuclear arsenals capable of inflicting destruction on a scale those who witnessed 1945 could scarcely have imagined. Governments speak comfortably of deterrence, strategic balance, tactical nuclear weapons and acceptable responses. Behind this sophisticated vocabulary lies an elementary reality: we have created instruments capable of annihilating ourselves and entrusted their possible use to human beings subject to anger, ambition, miscalculation and fear. What could be more absurd?   Perhaps the problem lies in our understanding of civilisation itself. We measure progress through economic growth, scientific discovery, technological innovation and military capability. We celebrate artificial intelligence, space exploration and machines capable of performing tasks once thought impossible but are we becoming better human beings? Can technological advancement truly be called progress if our moral consciousness remains primitive?   The jungle may be brutal, but it possesses no Hiroshima, no Nagasaki, no Bosnia, no Rwanda and no Gaza. Animals do not convene conferences to plan genocide. They do not manufacture propaganda to persuade millions to hate strangers. They do not teach generations to inherit ancient hostilities. Above all, they have never developed

The preceding part of this series ended with a limit that productive finance cannot cross. Illness, unemployment, education, disability, orphanhood and temporary distress cannot always be converted into profitable investments. Human vulnerability itself cannot become another financial product. That is where a riba-free order must move beyond banking. A society may successfully redesign murabaha, musharakah, salam or ijarah and still remain unjust if a family facing cancer treatment must borrow at any cost, a student must enter adult life under debt, or a widow depends upon a local patron for survival. Prohibition of riba becomes socially meaningful only when basic human need is protected from financial extraction. Pakistan does not have to invent the institutional vocabulary from zero. It already has Pakistan Bait-ul-Mal, established under the Pakistan Bait-ul-Mal Act, 1991. Its official mandate includes assistance to the destitute, widows, orphans, persons with disabilities and other needy citizens, with support extending to medical treatment, education and rehabilitation. Its official position is that assistance is available to the poorest without differentiation of religion, creed, sect or region. This is an important foundation. It is not yet the structure required for a just financial order. Bait-ul-Mal should cease to be understood primarily as an agency dispensing discretionary relief to the “poorest of the poor”. Its larger purpose should be to guarantee a legally defined social floor. Food in destitution, essential healthcare, basic education, protection of children without support, disability assistance and temporary subsistence during involuntary unemployment should become matters of entitlement under transparent criteria, not favours obtained through political access. This distinction is fundamental. Charity depends upon the generosity of the giver. Entitlement rests upon the responsibility of society. It is one of the most emphasised Quranic directive on this idea. The directions given in the holy Quran need not be accepted in totality. This principle is accepted in all the classical juristic traditions. The practical discussion on this is important. In the transitional phase, all the scholarly works envisage gradual movement rather than an overnight abolition of existing economic arrangements. Individuals progressively devote more of their resources to collective purposes while organised society assumes responsibility for the basic necessities of life.   The transition, in any pragmatic scheme, is institutional rather than merely charitable. That insight deserves attention. An Islamic polity cannot measure success by the number of ration bags distributed after deprivation has occurred. Its test is whether institutions progressively remove the conditions that force citizens into dependence upon creditors, property owners, political patrons or charitable intermediaries. Bait-ul-Mal should therefore form the first pillar of social finance: the guarantee against destitution. The second should be waqf. Waqf historically converted wealth into enduring social capital. Whatever the juristic differences concerning its precise legal character, its institutional genius lies in removing an asset from ordinary private consumption and dedicating its benefit to a continuing purpose. Land, buildings and income-producing properties can support hospitals, schools, hostels, water systems, vocational institutions, research centres, shelters and community infrastructure across generations. Pakistan already possesses statutory waqf institutions. Punjab’s Auqaf Department, for example, operates under the Punjab Waqf Properties Ordinance, 1979, for the administration and regulation of waqf properties. Income arising from properties under its control is credited to the Auqaf Fund under the statutory framework. The potential is much larger than administration of shrines and mosques. Pakistan should develop professionally governed public waqf institutions—waqf lillah—at national, provincial and local levels. Public land lawfully dedicated for community benefit, voluntarily endowed private property and other permissible assets could constitute permanent pools of social capital. Their corpus should remain protected while their income finances clearly defined public purposes. This cannot become another avenue for bureaucratic or political capture. Every waqf property should be digitally registered. Its title, purpose, valuation, income, expenditure and beneficiaries should be publicly accessible. Independent audit, professional management and strict conflict-of-interest rules are indispensable. No minister, shrine manager, political family or local notable should be able to convert property dedicated for public benefit into an instrument of patronage. The third pillar is zakat. It should remain distinct from both the ordinary budget and waqf. Its compulsory redistributive character and specified purposes give it an institutional identity of its own. Combining every form of social finance into one government account would destroy these distinctions. The fourth pillar is qard hasan. Not every person requiring temporary liquidity is destitute. A worker may face a medical emergency. A small farmer may need funds after a flood. A graduate may require equipment to begin earning. A household may need a short bridge between unemployment and a new job. Such circumstances do not necessarily call for a grant. They require finance without extraction. Revolving qard hasan funds administered through Bait-ul-Mal, public waqf institutions and local cooperatives could provide precisely that bridge. Principal would return when the recipient regains capacity, allowing the same pool to assist another household. The institution earns no commercial return from distress; society recycles solidarity. This connects directly with the cooperative model discussed in Part IV. The ultimate objective cannot be to create permanent classes of beneficiaries. Social protection should lead towards economic agency. A citizen receiving emergency assistance today should, wherever possible, become tomorrow’s producer, saver and member of a cooperative financial institution. Bait-ul-Mal prevents collapse. Waqf creates enduring social assets. Qard hasan provides a bridge back to economic activity. Cooperatives enable citizens to pool savings, own institutions and finance one another. These mechanisms should operate together rather than as isolated schemes. The structure can be visualised as a ladder. At its base is an enforceable social floor below which no citizen is allowed to fall. Above it are education, healthcare and skills supported partly through public waqf. Temporary setbacks are met through qard hasan. Productive citizens then move towards cooperative and commercial risk-sharing finance of the kind discussed in Part IV. The direction is from dependency to capability, not from one form of dependency to another. Governance will determine whether this succeeds. Pakistan has repeatedly created institutions in the name of disadvantaged citizens and then allowed

In the space of a single year, Pakistan has moved from the periphery of Middle Eastern diplomacy to its center. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and army chief Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir have positioned the country as both a mediator between Washington and Tehran and, more recently, a formal treaty partner of Saudi Arabia and Turkey. The result  the Makkah Joint Defence Agreement, signed on August 7 in Islam’s holiest city  marks one of the most consequential shifts in South Asian foreign policy in decades. Yet it also raises hard questions about who is really steering Pakistan’s course, and at what long-term cost.   A war that reshaped the region   The backdrop is a war between the United States and Iran that erupted on February 28, drawing in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, Iraqi militias and Yemen’s Houthi movement, and disrupting roughly a fifth of the world’s seaborne energy supplies through the Strait of Hormuz. Missile and drone exchanges reached Saudi cities, unsettling a region that had spent years trying to de-escalate after the 2015 nuclear deal’s collapse.   Pakistan, one of the few states with working channels to both Washington and Tehran, stepped into the gap. Sharif’s government hosted preliminary contacts that produced the so-called Islamabad Memorandum, under which Iran signalled it would not pursue nuclear weapons  a pledge it had already made under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the 2015 accord  in exchange for a mechanism allowing it to dilute stockpiles of highly enriched uranium. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian later thanked Islamabad for its “constructive engagement” in securing a ceasefire and agreed to send negotiators to further talks in the Pakistani capital. Analysts at the Washington-based Stimson Center have noted that Munir personally staked considerable political capital on the diplomacy, given how easily it could have collapsed.       The Makkah pact   That mediating role fed directly into last week’s agreement. Saudi Arabia, repeatedly struck during the war by Iranian missiles and by Tehran-aligned forces in Yemen and Iraq, had already signed a bilateral defence pact with Pakistan in September 2025  struck, notably, just over a week after an Israeli strike on Hamas negotiators in Doha rattled Gulf capitals’ confidence in American security guarantees. The Makkah agreement extends that arrangement into a trilateral pact with Turkey, declaring that an armed attack on any one of the three signatories will be treated as an attack on all.   Pakistani officials describe the pact as purely defensive. Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar said this week it was “not directed against any country” and remained open to other regional states. President Asif Ali Zardari called it a reflection of “shared resolve for peace and security,” while Sharif credited Munir’s “tireless efforts” in securing an arrangement he said had been years in the making. For Riyadh and Ankara, the pact offers a hedge against dependence on any single outside power at a moment when American commitments to the region look less certain than they once did. For Pakistan, it offers closer ties with two wealthy allies, a symbolic role as guardian of Islam’s holiest sites, and outsized influence for a country whose economy remains fragile.   Praise, and pointed scepticism   The agreement has been celebrated in much of Pakistan’s domestic media as evidence that the country’s leadership  civilian and military alike  is finally translating decades of geopolitical positioning into tangible strategic weight. Supporters point to a similar dynamic in May, when a brief but intense military confrontation with India ended within days, after which the government promoted Munir to the rare, largely ceremonial rank of Field Marshal, only the second officer in Pakistan’s history to hold it.   But that same promotion has drawn sharp criticism from analysts who see it as part of a broader consolidation of power by the military at the expense of elected institutions. Munir, appointed army chief in November 2022, has presided over a period in which  according to critics including jailed former prime minister Imran Khan’s supporters  courts, the media and Sharif’s own coalition have operated increasingly under military direction, a system some commentators have dubbed a “hybrid regime.” The Middle East Institute has described Munir’s elevation as “a thunderous declaration of the military’s unassailable supremacy,” while other analysts note that his growing role in foreign and economic policy  well beyond the traditional remit of an army chief  blurs the line between civilian governance and military command in a country with a long history of that line collapsing altogether.   What comes next   None of this diminishes the immediate diplomatic achievement: a ceasefire process that, however fragile, has held; a new pact that binds three influential Muslim-majority states more closely together; and a Pakistan that finds itself, for now, indispensable to great-power diplomacy in a region convulsed by war. Whether that translates into durable stability  for the Gulf, for the broader Middle East, or for Pakistan’s own democratic institutions  remains an open question. The coming months, as the Islamabad talks resume and the Makkah pact’s practical implications become clearer, will test whether this new era represents a genuine diplomatic breakthrough or a further tightening of military control dressed in the language of strategic necessity.

Our discussion of Bulleh Shah in Part IV concluded with a question: Who are we when power can no longer name us? Bulleh Shah dismantled the identities imposed upon the human person by lineage, orthodoxy and social hierarchy. Waris Shah takes the inquiry into the institutions governing everyday life. He shows what happens when two human beings attempt to live according to the freedom Bulleh imagined. Heer is celebrated as Punjab’s greatest love story. To describe it merely as a romance, however, is to conceal its intellectual achievement. Earlier poets narrated the sufferings of Heer and Ranjha; Waris Shah’s classic poetic work Heeer (1766) placed an entire social order on trial. Shafqat Tanvir Mirza rightly observed that Waris treated the story through the “politics, economy and cultural values” lived by the people of his period. His poem contains a devastating criticism of poor governance, institutional corruption, religious exploitation, arrogance of the wealthy and misery of those without power. Love provides the narrative, but power determines its outcome. Waris Shah wrote against the background of eighteenth-century political disintegration. Invasions, weakening imperial authority, struggles among local forces and economic insecurity had destabilised Punjab. Waris Shah was not attached to a royal court capable of insulating him from ordinary suffering. His Heer therefore became more than a reconstruction of an old legend. It preserved Punjab’s speech, customs and collective memory while exposing the institutions through which privilege protected itself. Heer is central to this achievement because she is not a passive beloved. She recognises Ranjha, brings him into her father’s household as a herdsman, arranges opportunities to meet him and openly asserts her choice when the relationship is discovered. She possesses intelligence, desire and moral agency. Her freedom is tolerated only while it remains invisible and does not threaten the authority of the family. The moment Heer chooses her own future, affection turns into surveillance. Her body becomes the bearer of family honour, and marriage becomes the means through which that honour is restored. Heer does not ask permission to feel. She declares a commitment already formed through conscience and love. Her language is especially significant. She does not present Ranjha as an object she wishes to acquire. She has offered her own life and accepted responsibility for that choice. In a society where marriage joins families, properties and status groups, such self-determination is revolutionary. The dispute is not simply between one prospective husband and another. Ranjha represents Heer’s autonomous choice; the Kheras represent the settlement arranged for her by others. Her family treats marriage as a transaction carrying consequences for lineage, reputation and power. Heer insists upon treating it as a union requiring the will of the persons whose lives it determines. میں تاں منگ رنجھیٹے دی ہو چکی اساں منگ درگاہ تھیں لیا رانجھا Main tāṅ mang Ranjheṭe dī ho chukkī Asāṅ mang dargāh thīṅ liyā Rānjhā I have already been pledged to Ranjha; from the divine court itself I received him. اساں جان رانجھیٹے دے پیش کیتی لکھ کھیڑیاں نوں چا گھولدی ہے Asāṅ jān Ranjheṭe de pesh kītī Lakkh Kheṛiāṅ nūṅ chā gholdī hai I have laid my life before Ranjha; I would sacrifice a hundred thousand Kheras for him. This is the political economy hidden within the romance. Property is not limited to land, cattle and wealth. Patriarchal authority extends the idea of ownership to women. A daughter may be cherished as long as she accepts the future selected for her. Once she claims ownership of her own will, love within the family becomes conditional. Research on Heer similarly identifies the family, property, mosque, qazi, feudal hierarchy and ruling elite as interconnected institutions shaped by economic interest. Kaido is the most visible agent of this system, though he should not be dismissed as a solitary villain. He represents social surveillance: the resentful custodian of conformity who observes, reports and converts private happiness into public scandal. Power does not survive through rulers alone. It recruits relatives, neighbours and self-appointed guardians of morality who internalise its prohibitions and enforce them upon others. Kaido’s triumph begins when Heer and Ranjha’s love is no longer treated as a human relationship but as an offence against collective honour. The family then requires an institution capable of turning its demand into a lawful and religious command. The qazi enters at precisely this point. Waris Shah does not attack faith. He exposes the appropriation of faith by those serving property and patriarchy. The qazi is called because parental pressure has failed to secure Heer’s consent. Religious vocabulary is employed to present submission as virtue and resistance as sin. Heer answers him from within the moral tradition he claims to represent. She insists that genuine faith cannot be separated from truth, and that her union with Ranjha possesses a reality no ceremonial decree can erase. The surviving text presents an extended confrontation in which the qazi invokes authority while Heer asserts conscience and consent. Unable to persuade her, institutional power reveals its coercive core. The qazi threatens punishment and demands that she accept the Khera marriage. قاضی بنھ نکاح تے گھت ڈولی نال کھیڑیاں دے دِتی تور میاں Qāzī bannh nikāh te ghat ḍolī Nāl Kheṛiāṅ de dittī tor miyāṅ The qazi bound the marriage and placed her in the palanquin; she was sent away with the Kheras. ہیر کھیڑیاں نال نہ تُرے مولے پیا پِنڈ دے وچ ہے شور میاں Hīr Kheṛiāṅ nāl na ture, maulā piyā Piṇḍ de vich hai shor miyāṅ Heer would not willingly go with the Kheras; an uproar filled the village. کھیڑے گھن کے ہیر نوں رواں ہوئے جویں مال نوں لے وَگے چور میاں Kheṛe ghin ke Hīr nūṅ ravāṅ hoe Jiveṅ māl nūṅ lai vagge chor miyāṅ The Kheras took Heer and moved away, like thieves driving stolen cattle. The comparison is Waris Shah’s own and is among the most revealing images in the poem. The final line strips the ceremony of its respectable appearance. There has been a qazi, a marriage procession, jewellery, property and public

KARACHI: Before the city wakes up, thousands of sanitation workers are already at work. They sweep roads, collect household waste, clean neighbourhoods and, in some cases, enter sewer lines and manholes to clear blockages. Among them are many workers from Christian and Hindu communities who perform some of Karachi’s most difficult and hazardous jobs. On August 11, Pakistan observes National Minorities Day. The occasion is usually marked with messages about equality, tolerance and the contribution of minority communities to the country. But for many minority sanitation workers in Karachi, the day will be no different from any other: they will be out cleaning the city, often while facing low wages, insecure employment, inadequate safety equipment and social discrimination. Their problems extend beyond poverty. They include workplace safety, access to healthcare, employment benefits and the stigma attached to the occupation itself. There is no reliable and up-to-date official figure showing exactly how many Christian and Hindu sanitation workers are currently employed in Karachi. A World Bank-linked environmental and social assessment, however, recorded around 11,400 sweepers and sanitary workers employed by the city’s district authorities. It also noted additional workers employed through SSWMB contractors and a large informal workforce involved in door-to-door waste collection and material recovery. The 11,400 figure therefore does not represent Karachi’s entire sanitation workforce. The actual number is considerably broader once outsourced, daily-wage and informal workers are included. Sanitation work in Pakistan has for decades been disproportionately associated with religious minorities. Research by Amnesty International has documented the concentration of Christians and Hindus in sanitation work and found evidence of discrimination in recruitment, employment and working conditions. The issue therefore begins well before a worker picks up a broom. It is also about whether people from particular religious and social backgrounds are being denied opportunities to enter other occupations. The question of wages is equally important. The Sindh government has announced a minimum monthly wage of Rs43,000 with effect from July 1, 2026. While the announcement is significant for low-paid workers, the more important question for sanitation workers is whether the amount actually reaches them. A substantial part of Karachi’s sanitation work is performed through contractors, outsourcing arrangements and daily-wage employment. Previous reporting has documented workers employed through SSWMB contractors receiving wages below the applicable minimum wage. In one reported case, a minor working for an SSWMB contractor was receiving Rs15,000 a month when the minimum wage for unskilled workers was Rs32,000. The new Rs43,000 minimum wage therefore requires more than a government notification. It requires effective enforcement and monitoring, particularly where public sanitation services are outsourced. If a worker performs essential public work through a contractor, there must be clarity about who is responsible for ensuring that he receives the legally prescribed wage and other employment rights. For sanitation workers, however, low wages are not the only concern. The nature of the work itself can be fatal. In September 2025, three sanitation workers died in Karachi’s Usmanabad area after inhaling toxic gases while cleaning a manhole. The victims were identified as 22-year-old Vishal, 19-year-old Shahir and 42-year-old George. A fourth worker survived after being rescued. The deaths were followed by further fatalities. In October 2025, The Express Tribune reported that six sanitation workers had died from suffocation while cleaning sewers in Karachi in just over a month. The deaths occurred in Sohrab Goth, Garden and Landhi. According to the report, the victims were privately hired daily-wage workers who lacked adequate safety equipment and training. On April 17, 2026, three private sanitation workers died in Surjani Town after inhaling toxic fumes while cleaning a choked sewerage line. Police identified the deceased as Wilson, Waqas and Nazeer and said all three belonged to the Christian community. Such incidents follow a familiar pattern. A worker enters a sewer to clear a blockage. Toxic gases overcome him. Another worker may enter in an attempt to rescue him and can suffer the same fate. Without proper protective equipment, gas detection devices, training and rescue arrangements, a routine cleaning operation can quickly turn into multiple deaths. The exact number of sanitation workers who have died in Karachi is difficult to establish because there is no comprehensive publicly available official database covering municipal, private, contracted and informal workers. In October 2025, activist Naeem Sadiq told Arab News that approximately 100 manual scavengers die every year in Pakistan, including around 30 in Karachi. He also warned that the actual number could be higher because of underreporting. The figure is an activist estimate rather than an official government statistic, but it illustrates the scale of the concern. At the national level, Amnesty International documented 80 sanitation workers who died in 50 manhole incidents between 2011 and 2023. Of these, 40 were Christians, 22 Muslims and 18 Hindus. Most of the deaths were associated with poisonous gases and asphyxiation. The figures highlight a wider concern: minority workers are disproportionately represented in some of the most hazardous sanitation jobs, while also facing social and economic disadvantages. A survey by the National Commission for Human Rights of 42 sanitation workers in Karachi provides further evidence of poor working conditions. Thirty-three workers, or 78.6 per cent, said they had never been provided personal protective equipment. Twenty-four, or 57.1 per cent, reported workplace injuries. The same number reported verbal or physical abuse, threats, non-payment or other forms of discrimination. These findings raise a basic question about Karachi’s sanitation system: the issue is not only who will clean the city, but under what conditions the people cleaning it are expected to work. Another study involving 400 sewerage and sanitary workers in Karachi found that 228, or 57 per cent, were sweepers and 172, or 43 per cent, were sewerage workers. The study found that 96.5 per cent had not been immunised against typhoid, hepatitis and tetanus, while 91 per cent were not using safety equipment at work. For workers exposed daily to sewage, waste and potentially toxic environments, protective clothing, gloves, boots, masks, vaccination, health examinations and emergency support should not

This 14th of August, as the green and white flags go up from Karachi to Khyber and the air fills with the crackle of fireworks, there is a question every young Pakistani must ask themselves: what exactly are we celebrating? Is it merely the fact that a nation was born at the stroke of midnight 79 years ago? Or is it something far more demanding — the unfinished promise of that birth, the dream that millions carried across blood-soaked borders, the conviction that Pakistan would be not just a homeland, but a beacon? Nisid Hajari’s book Midnight’s Furies does not let us off easy. It drags us back to the raw, unvarnished truth of 1947 — and in doing so, it hands our generation something precious: the tools to understand who we are, where we came from, and what we still owe to those who paid the ultimate price for our freedom. Hajari wrote that on 9 August 1947, a train pulls out of Delhi bound for Karachi, 800 miles away. Onboard are Muslim clerks and officials who had served the British-run government of India with distinction. With them are their families, their ribbon-tied files, their children’s toys, their prayer rugs, and the gold jewellery that represented their life’s savings. They are not refugees fleeing in panic. They are pioneers, volunteers for a great experiment — the world’s first modern Muslim nation. As the train whistles out of Delhi, cheers of “Pakistan Zindabad!” drown out the engine. These men and women believe they are building something unprecedented. Something magnificent. They never arrive. Sikh saboteurs — soldiers in all but name, their tiny community having supplied the Indian Army with fighting men far beyond their numbers — have laid gelignite charges along the tracks. The mine detonates. The Pakistan Special shudders. And in that moment, the euphoria of independence meets the savagery of Partition. Hajari, who spent over a year buried in archives across New Delhi, London, and Washington, D.C., reconstructs this tragedy not from myth but from the “demi-official record” — the diaries, army sitreps, embassy cables, and informant reports that tell the real story. And the real story is this: Pakistan was born not in a garden of roses, but in a furnace. The arithmetic of that furnace defies comprehension. One British official, working from casualty reports, put the dead at 200,000. Others, accounting for disease, starvation, and exposure, insist the figure exceeds one million. At least 14 million people were uprooted — the largest forced migration in human history. Western Pakistan was virtually emptied of Hindus and Sikhs; Indian Punjab lost almost all its Muslims. This was carnage on a scale unseen until Rwanda 1994. Yet here is what Hajari forces us to confront: the killing lasted only six weeks. The violence was contained. What was not contained — what metastasised — was the psychological wound. In those weeks, something broke between India and Pakistan that has never been repaired. Leaders on both sides began suspecting each other of complicity in genocide. Mutual mistrust pushed infant nations to war within a year. And Pakistan, flooded with refugees, its economy and bureaucracy teetering on collapse, developed what Hajari calls a ‘deep-seated paranoia’ about its larger neighbour that shapes our politics to this very day. Hajari’s book is unsparing about the failures of leadership that turned Partition’s trauma into perpetual conflict. Nehru and Jinnah — the very architects of freedom — allowed vanity, prejudice, and petty dislike to poison the well. Nehru’s reckless declaration in August 1946 that a strong government would make the Muslim League’s movement “go down” — what Viceroy Wavell called tossing “a match onto dangerously dry kindling” — helped trigger the Great Calcutta Killing, the dress rehearsal for Partition’s horrors. Five thousand dead. Ten to fifteen thousand maimed. The Statesman newspaper, grasping for words, called it “a fury” — a word from mediaeval history. This Independence Day, let us do something radical. Let us honour the dead not by reliving their fears, but by fulfilling their hopes. Jinnah’s address to the Constituent Assembly on 11 August 1947 was crystal clear: ‘You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan.’ He envisioned a secular nation where religion was private, not political. Where Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and Christians would be equal before the law. Where the state would be a servant of all its citizens, not a weapon of the majority. Hajari’s book ends on a note of hard-won wisdom: ‘Only once those mistakes are properly understood and acknowledged, perhaps, will India and Pakistan begin to bridge the vast and dangerous gulf that still divides them.’ Understanding does not mean surrender. Acknowledgement does not mean apology. It means maturity. It means the confidence to say: we know our history, we honour our sacrifices, and we refuse to let the furies of 1947 dictate our future. So when the flag goes up this 14th August, let it mean something new. Let it mean that Pakistan is done being defined by what it fears. Let it mean that we are ready to be defined by what we build — by our universities and our hospitals, our clean rivers and our fair courts, our poets and our scientists, our daughters who dream without limits and our sons who know that strength comes from justice, not just arms.