Iraq doesn’t make front page news anymore. Kashmir is an old tale. Soon suicide bombings in Pakistan will cease to affect us. What does it matter if in some distant corner of the world our Muslim brothers are dying? Or even that our countrymen are dying, as long as our precious lives are safe? If you decide to ignore the Muslim brotherhood part, isn’t it enough that our fellow human beings are dying? The least relationship we can have amongst us humans is to atleast feel sorrowful when one of us dies.
Fragments of a poem I wrote in 10th grade, when the U.S invaded Afghanistan and the Palestinian Intifada raged on, flash across my memory…
Charred bodies strewn all across us
Little hearts crushed and then thrown away
Little souls flown away prematurely
Other souls imprisioned in cages
Prisons of the mind which are full of hate
Or driven to mad fury by helplessness
Prisons of the mind, enjoying splattered gore
Hearts of lead, seeing nor hearing
Destroying an entire nation for the satisfaction of seeing one man die?
Does it really give you so much pleasure to see innocent lives go to waste?
Seeing others fall makes you rise higher
Climb anothe rung of the worldly ladder
Why don’t you clasp the oppressed’s hand?
And lead him up with you?
It ended on a note of hope. Is it not unsurprising that I cannot remember those lines of hope anymore?
These verses are more relevant now than they were 7 years ago.
The war is at our doorstep.
And our hearts are becoming hardened to human suffering.
“And We have set a barrier before them and a barrier behind them and covered them from above, therefore they see nothing”
- Surah Yasin, Verse # 9
