It all started during my first job which was for a world leading financial institution and the posting was in Singapore, my boss was from British aristocracy. Coffee machine was next to my cubicle, few months into the job and came Ramadan after two days my boss calls me up and ask me I haven’t seen you taking coffee for the last two days is everything OK and I told him it was our holy month and we fast during this month and this is for 29 or 30 days and after that we celebrate, same day the coffee machine was moved to a far off place and all my colleagues stopped eating drinking in near my cubicle. Mind you that I hadn’t completely overcome the prejudices which are programmed in our brains from childhood about people of other religions despite 7 years of education in UK and it was only few years after Zia’s death that I went abroad so his version of Islam was in full flow in Pakistan, This gesture was something which moved me deeply that people of other religions the Christians, the Buddhists, and others are giving so much respect to my religious believes, they didn’t stop there they threw eid parties for us and gave us (my family and I) gifts, it was the same when I was transferred out to North America (USA and later Canada) people honored and respect my religious believes.
When we decided to come back to Pakistan we were astonished to find that despite being a Muslim country, with over 90% population of Muslims and despite the fact that Islam by virtue of it philosophy teaches religious tolerance people looked down on other religions, used nasty words about them.
However, lately in the last couple of years it seems we are coming out of the sick, perverted version of Zia and his minion’s religion, as I say we the people pf Pakistan have always been tolerant of people from other nationalities/ethnicities and religions.
Anyways last year was my first year in my current organization, which does give out “Eidi”, “clothes” and eid Mubarak to all staff in the service area, meaning the office boys, the guards, the riders, the cleaning guys, drivers etc. Come Christmas I came to know no such tradition of giving official leave to Christians or “Eidi” for that matter, so I took initiative last year and gave all Christians staff “eidi” from my own pocket and arranged cake cutting in all offices where we had Christian staff and gave them official leave on 24th and 26th, it did not make us Christians if you know contrary to the jahileen who have been sending ridiculous messages on social media, just the way giving my fasting and eid respect did not make my colleagues Muslims.
Somehow or the other company came to know about it and this year the company decided to treat the Christian “eid” as our “eid” and gave away all the usual stuff which is given to all “service staff” on “eids” including the Christians, not only that my usual personal contribution was there and this motivated rest of the staff to pitch in and contribute some money, including cake cuttings. The office in which I myself operate from when we gave the money along cake I clearly saw the chap crying with tears and told us that he was over whelmed as he too had seen the worst the radicals threw at them few years ago. A point to note is that on an average in addition to company’s “Eidi” staff gift to our Christians colleagues (about 10 of them) was around 50K each, the smiles the tears the gratitude were worth a billion rupees.
Best thing was that I did not hear a single complaint from any quarter that why are we doing it for Christians, which led me to believe that we are going back to our roots of tolerance and religious freedom, we are not completely there yet but we are moving towards that. It will not be 100% every human society has its share of radicals but it the general populace that matter and we will Insha’Allah be there. This is the cultural shift which was need of the time, unlike the countries which claim of religious tolerance and yet are at the core extremist, we on the other hand have been labeled by the world as religiously less tolerant and yet we are demonstrating otherwise instead of just words. We are Muslims and we are proud of that, and demonstrating to the world this is how a Muslim society treats its citizens of other religion.
We are not secular and we will never be a secular state, we are Muslims and a Muslim state that's how our religion teaches us to treat people of other religion. Time to take pride in who we are.
@Mangus Ortus Novem ,
@The Eagle ,
@Dubious ,
@Shane
