| EDITORIAL: Ban on wedding meals and other bad laws One bad law — ban on wedding meals — the citizens of Pakistan have tacitly resisted since its enforcement in 1997 has been amended by parliament with near unanimity. It was a bad law, as described in legal parlance, because it was steadily violated by the society on which it was imposed in the name of religion. Even the clerics in the National Assembly on Tuesday gave up applying the religious veto against "wasteful expenditure" (israaf) and thus accepted that a bad law, even when based on religious emotion, cannot stay on the statute book. The permission to serve a gravy, rice/bread, a sweet dish plus hot and cold drinks, neatly puts paid to the Ordinance that will now wither on the bough. The post-amendment news is that there will be an immediate investment of half a billion rupees in the poultry industry and a cascade of jobs for the poor.
But it has cost Pakistan. It has taken nearly a decade for the public representatives to debate and decide an issue that needed immediate attention. After 1997 the catering industry reeled under the blow of the prohibition and collapsed along with its ancillary industries. The wedding halls that brought in crucial investment in all cities and gave employment to millions of people had to shut down. The police swooped down on them to see that only soft drinks or soup was served, as allowed by the law. Big money changed hands and what was healthy and economically dynamic became an underground activity.
The real calamity befell the poultry industry. It lost billions of rupees of investment based mainly on the demand from the wedding halls. The rich went private and held their extravagant wedding functions in their residences. The middle class and the poor, who were supposed to be protected by the ban, had to spend even more to hold their 'valima' functions in the hotels where the police didn't interfere out of fear or for graft. In Karachi the police earned their illegal incomes mainly through bribes received from wedding halls. Rank hypocrisy pervaded the pious TV reports showing how the poor gorged themselves in the wedding halls. No one said clearly that a bad law was responsible for what was happening, not the people.
In 2004, recognising the shameful situation created by the Marriage Functions (prohibition of ostentatious displays and wasteful expenses) Ordinance, the Punjab government sought to allow one dish at wedding functions, but the Supreme Court stepped in to say that since the federal law was still in force the province could not "amend" it on its own. The bad law continued thereafter amid much spilling of pious ink by writers who pretended to speak for the middle classes, who were supposed to be crushed by their aping of the israaf of the rich. Why did a bad law stay on the books for so long? When all the realistic criteria and economic indicators were against it, why was Pakistan unable to repeal it?
The world agrees that Muslims are least able to scrap bad laws even after they are shown to be bad in practice. The basis of this Muslim trait is in the tenet that Revelation cannot be modified in the light of social condition; instead, it is society whose habits have to be suited to Divine Law. On the other hand, the tenet about bad laws is that any legislation that ignores the current mores is bound to fail. Muslims continue to defy the principle of intellectual mediation between revelation and society as posited by Pakistan's founding philosopher Allama Muhammad Iqbal in his famous Lectures. He wished to revert to the re-interpretive period of early Islam when the Rightly Guided Caliphs changed laws in the light of social conditions.
Because of our intellectual prostration and clerical dominance, we have an entire hamper of bad laws riding our statute books, providing opportunities of crime to the retrograde and bribery to state functionaries. The most glaring bad law in force pertains to Zakat and Ushr. The ordinance, carelessly imposed to earn fake religious praise, ignited sectarianism till the Shia community was exempted from it. Later, the Supreme Court saved the country from mass conversions to Shiaism by finally exempting the Sunnis as well! The law is still there, withering on the bough, as usual. One can add aspects of the Diyat law, the misused Hudood laws, the cutting-of-hand and stoning-to-death laws, which are bad but which we may be fated to bequeath to our coming generations. * |
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