Selling the religion — cheaply!

Saturday, July 21, 2012 - There has been a long and controversial debate over the role of religion in our lives. The orthodox school of thought states that religion is complete code of life and it can direct us in our individual and collective decision making, off course the latter is emphasized more vigorously. While their opponents believe that religion is an individual act and everybody should perform his religion according to the individual preferences. This is basically a secular perspective. Unfortunately, in Pakistan, this controversy has been politicized by the state who patronized one against other in the last sixty five years. In a nutshell, we ended up with a confused ideology about the religion at mass level. This is just preamble to the alarming situation of our religious beliefs which emerged as a result of the spread of electronic media. A new breed of religious scholars has emerged, who not only worsened the existing scenario by showing a unique way of preaching the religion i.e. their expensive dressing, fake smiles and tears, artificial dua etc, many of them have been exposed to the public. This scenario has taken another direction with advent of the model-cum actors becoming the pseudo religious scholars representing themselves as the true and modern Islamic preachers. For the media owners, off course, this is nothing but the business. The media owners know the fact very well that the masses buy the religious products. Particularly inRamazan, every channel has a special program in which every Pakistani is invited to pardon off their sins. Media owners are exploiting the fact that masses are fed up of the typical Mullahpreaching, at least the working and middle class fall into this category. So they are selling the Islam whatever it takes, without realizing the repercussions of such vicious act. Anchor Aamir Liaqat, Item girl Veena Malik, cricketer Shahid Afridi to preach Islam in Ramazan along with many other show business models and actors. It seems as we do not have a single religious scholar to perform this duty. Is it so?

—Via email