The Courage of Imran Khan
Just Not Cricket
Imran Khan had a powerful vision of empathy for others: ‘Ehsaas’; a desire to bring equality of opportunities to those who were impoverished in his homeland of Pakistan. A vision that was steeped in the Islamic worldview. It was a sad day for Islam and the Pakistani judiciary when the sharia law was exploited as a political tool against both Imran Khan and his wife and spiritual guide, Bushra Bibi.
Friends from Pakistan are saying that the 2024 election is rigged. The election is not being conducted by an independent election commission; apparently, the military has their mitts all over it. The close alliance between the Pakistani and US military establishments is well documented. As newspapers prepare the way for World War III and the US paves the way for autocracy, it becomes increasingly valid to ask who really runs the governments of these countries: the military, civil institutions, or some other masters abroad?
The earlier cipher case implies that priorities in the USA are likely to be behind all of Imran Khan’s mounting convictions. This case involved a secret diplomatic cable communication two weeks after Khan had visited Moscow, on the day Russia invaded Ukraine. Donald Lu, the assistant secretary of state for the US Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs, is alleged to have raised concerns about Khan’s visit to Russia and Pakistan’s neutral stance on the Ukraine war.
“I think if a no-confidence vote against the prime minister succeeds, all will be forgiven in Washington,” Lu allegedly told a former Pakistan ambassador to the US, Asad Majeed Khan, who sent the details of the conversation to Islamabad through a secret diplomatic cable.
Does NATO Nurture War?
Why do we have NATO in a world where any war just accelerates our global ecological nosedive? We have NATO for the same reasons that we finance the global military machine. The global economy is built upon economic competition and ever-growing distrust; it is a pyramid scheme that results in an increasingly diminished and unequal distribution of natural resources. In this atmosphere of global distrust and competition over diminishing resources, war is inevitable.
Our global priority is making money, rather than our collective wellbeing. The Western education system is designed to perpetuate growth economics, so we teach our youth to exploit natural resources in order to make money. This aspect of education arises from economics; it does not reflect the Islamic worldview or the Judeo-Christian worldview. However, all these religions have been tainted with the need to finance their operations to maintain their influence, and so far they all promote pronatalism, which is a key cultural driver of economic growth.
The Pakistani judicial system originates from the UK, where the judicial system is designed to protect those who profiteer from nature’s resources. Techniques to make more money and to compete in the financial market are taught in the formal education system; the unfair distribution of wealth, land, and other natural resources that has historically arisen from this long-term practice is protected by any judiciary system that has a similar model to that in the UK.
An Aljazeera article explains why Putin and Zelenskyy are struggling to wind down the conflict in Ukraine and why there is suspicion that the US and the EU may have used Ukraine to pursue their own interests.
The USA and their pet puppet, the UK, are now anticipating World War III. They both sense that the global economy is in deep trouble and about to collapse. The global economy is in trouble because most countries rely on ecocidal growth economics to survive. This has created an insoluble paradox because humans also rely on healthy ecosystems to survive. Therefore, our global economic model, which is reliant on growth, is resulting in an increasingly comprehensive bloodbath as we fight for diminishing resources. For example, Gaza has legitimate claims on oil reserves in the Levant basin.
It was easy for the USA and UK to appear noble and generous when Earth’s ecosystems were still reasonably healthy. Nowadays, global ecosystems are in full-speed collapse. Geopolitics is all about controlling resources, including human resources. The average person does not see the inevitability of the global war ahead; everyone is still voting for growth economics.
There is no political party anywhere in the world that represents equitable IPAT Degrowth. Democracy is dying daily under the voracious needs of growth economics and coercive consumerism; democracy will morph quietly into autocracy when war is declared and emergency governments are required to ride roughshod over public opinion. Life on Earth will not fare well in this third World War because we are already at the tail end of the Holocene extinction event.
The global agents of war are joining up. During the war in Afghanistan, 2001–2021, the drug trade from poppy fields soared under the protection of the American military. The Afghan caretaker government has destroyed 1,100 drug labs since 2022.
World Wars do not arise out of a democratic vote; they creep up out of collective fear and economic instability. We have learned nothing from World Wars I and II. Xenophobia is on the rise in Europe right now. John Maynard Keynes warned that the peace after World War I was built on unstable assumptions. Keynes’ ominous warning applies as much today as it did in 1919:
Economic privation proceeds by easy stages, and so long as men suffer it patiently the outside world cares very little. Physical efficiency and resistance to disease slowly diminish, but life proceeds somehow, until the limit of human endurance is reached at last and counsels of despair and madness stir the sufferers from the lethargy which precedes the crisis. The man shakes himself, and the bonds of custom are loosed. The power of ideas is sovereign, and he listens to whatever instruction of hope, illusion, or revenge is carried to them in the air. … But who can say how much is endurable, or in what direction men will seek at last to escape from their misfortunes?
Keynes was wise enough to suggest that we should contemplate prosperity without growth. The challenge is coercive consumerism driven by advertising, and our pronatalist cultures. Is it fair to bring a new-born into such a sick world?
Shameful abuse of Sharia Law
A sharia Fatwa has been levelled at both Imran Khan and his third wife, Bushra Bibi, whom he married in 2018. Why now? Why six years after the marriage? The marriage between Imran and Bushra was widely recognised as a marriage of two fine minds, both focused on the collective good of Pakistan. During over three and a half years in office, Imran Khan introduced an initiative to provide shelter for the twenty million homeless in Pakistan. The Ehsaas program, literally meaning ‘empathy’, aimed to uplift those who were struggling, reduce inequality, invest in the masses, and lift the most impoverished districts in the country. The government also introduced the Sehat Sehulat Program, a health card for those who could not afford private health care.
As explained earlier, we need to challenge our secular judiciary, for it is designed to protect those who plunder nature for profit. In the mindset shift to equitable Degrowth, all our religious leaders will need to challenge the ethics of the past. Is Sharia still relevant? Is Sharia law open to abuse? Sharia law allows Muslim women to request a divorce. As the case against Imran Khan and his wife demonstrates, in such instances, a resentful ex-husband might successfully bend Sharia to punish a former wife by appearing to accept the divorce decision and then choosing to dispute the Iddat at a later date. This seems to offer a route to revenge for any rejected husband.
There is fierce cultural fervour attached to the execution of Sharia punishment. Perhaps it is time for Islam to question the frenetic mob-led persecution that accompanies a Fatwa? Has there never been a miscarriage of justice when Sharia law is involved?
In the same way, Judeo-Christian scholars must now question the relevance of bible passages like ‘Go forth and multiply’, as our planet continues rapidly on its man-made ecological nosedive. That instruction from God was appropriate at that time; is it still appropriate now? We seem to have achieved dominion, are we executing our responsibilities wisely? Have we stopped interacting with advice from God in the meantime? Does the bible say that godly advice in one era cannot be superceded? What is God advising us right now? The Pope has challenged the US for its overconsumption in his 2023 Apostolic Exhortation. Religious zealots in the US are driving the anti-abortion campaign. Surely it is a kindness to those unborn to prevent any unwanted additions to this dangerous powder keg that humanity has created with their obsessive pursuit of GDP growth?
Most religions consider life sacred, frowning on suicide. But which life are we talking about? Humans are killing all life on Earth with their global application of growth economics. In this context, a human suicide becomes a form of kindness to the rest of life on Earth. It also becomes a kindness to refrain from having children, for this is the only fool proof way to spare our unborn from the suffering ahead. If we are to maximise mitigation from this ecological nosedive, we urgently need to rethink our priorities and our ethics.
Imran Khan’s determination to stay in Pakistan to try to reform the unjust inequalities within that society can now be seen as the ultimate self-sacrifice; he could easily have retired to the relative safety of the UK with his first wife Jemima Goldsmith years ago.
In conclusion, the melodrama unfolding in the lead-up to the 2024 Pakistan elections on 8 February, particularly surrounding the challenges faced by Imran Khan, showcases not just the courage of a leader with a vision for empathy and equality, but also raises critical questions about the abuse of legal systems and the intertwining complexities of global geopolitics, emphasizing the urgent need for a paradigm shift towards equitable Degrowth and re-evaluation of religious doctrines in the face of our planet’s perilous trajectory.
Barbara Williams is the author of the Roadmap to Ecological Justice
