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Posts tagged with: Sharia
Jul 7, 2009    |       14 comments

Zakat Deduction dependent on Declaration of Fiqh

Can some thing be done to make the lives of citizens less miserable.

zakatThis is an appeal addressed to the State Bank Chairman and Members. The matter of compulsory deduction of Zakat could have been resolved had the State Bank not succumbed to an obviously unprofessional and illegal requirement imposed by the government. Alternately the state bank could have acted , in the light of Supreme Court decision (March 9, 1999), exempting all shades of Muslims to be exempted from Zakat, and stopped deducting compulsory Zakat. Alas, the State Bank is just as citizen unfriendly and insists on subjecting its clients to the yearly CZ-50 torture.

Every year ordinary citizens are asked to declare their ‘fiqh’ on a judicial stamped paper signed by a notary public and duly witnessed by two witnesses, so as to seek exemption from compulsory deduction of Zakat. This bureaucratic and misery adding document is called Form CZ-50. The zakat is not deducted if you state that your ‘fiqh’ is a recognized one (recognized by who?)
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Apr 6, 2009    |       69 comments

Misogyny, Patriarchy & Imperialism

Guest blog by Abira Ashfaq posted via the Peoples’ Resistance Mailing List

Pornography

flogging-in-swatI reacted with horror, and resisted seeing the flogging video on youtube, only to be bombarded with it later on television. I got angry with my mother who recounted the scene with full emotionalism, saying it brought tears to her eyes. I said it was upsetting me too much. By evening I was a bit more objective. But not really. The violent and ferocious messaging in the video was clear. Wars are carved on the bodies of women. Women are raped, tortured, and beaten to further military objectives. Only months ago, news surfaced about Zarina Marri’s torture in a military prison in Baluchistan. And now this whipping. The trauma of the girl is fathomable as the video’s purpose is to make you fathom what fate awaits the women of Pakistan: A naked and public display of fanatical male rage, backed by an authoritative and brutal ‘Islamic’ state.

Is the fear real?

Is this what will happen to Karachi? Our beloved Karachi — the city of lights, tambolas, musical evenings, film festivals, and dharnas? The reality is that Karachi is a schizophrenic city which contains class apartheid, and a gender one too. Most women of our city are in “closed doors” economic apartheid. There is rampant Islamization– the liberal kind that does not conflict with privatization, and the offensive kind that seeks to seclude women further in Hijab and the home.

This offensive kind is still the palatable extremism, one grown familiar on us since the 80s; the overt and militant kind displayed in the video is what we really dread. Is the fear real? Saqib is just back from Mithi in Thar, and reports of a new phenomenon of fresh madrassas with foreign students walking all over the place. A tidbit, sure. But perhaps the fear of it reaching Karachi is not a remote one.
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Apr 3, 2009    |       214 comments

Public flogging of a woman in SWAT – is this the Islamic way of handing out justice?

A shocking video which is making news across the local media in Pakistan of a women being publicly lashed in the Northern Areas of Pakistan. Her crime being that she was seen publicly with a man who was not her husband. I think merely watching this video makes me cringe at the skewed concept of ‘Sharia’ being enforced in our northern areas, I believe this is not what Islam preaches

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tgq5ymtAfBs[/youtube]

I agree with Faisal K when he says “All the women leaders in the assemblies of Pakistan upon seeing this should resign from their posts in protest” This is outrageous even in the light of the five women who were buried alive in Baluchistan. A search on Bloggers.pk shows that Meher Bokhari a show host on Samaa is planing to do a show today at 7pm on this controversial issue of public flogging. Also covered in The Guardian