Secularism, Capitalism and our Education System

A few weeks ago two of our students stole a multimedia projector. They were eventually caught and punished. Referring to that incident, the Director of our campus, Dr. M. A. Bodla said, “what are we teaching?” Following article is my response to his question.

Ukraine: Next Jihad in making and why should Pakistan care?

The results of the Crimean referendum planned for March 16^th by Putin & Co is a foregone conclusion. It will be decided that Crimea wants to join Russia and Russia will accept Crimea with open arms. What happens after that should be of great interest to us because it will most likely involve some of us. Why I say that?

Merging of Islamic and Pakistan Studies in Institutions of Higher Learning in Pakistan

A move is afoot in all institutes of higher learning to merge Islamic and Pakistan Studies into one course. Currently these two are being taught as two separate courses each being a 3 credit hour course. In the merged scenario there will be one 3 credit hour course. There are several reasons given for this move, I will present some of those reasons that I came across during my discussions with faculty members from different institutes of higher learning. But before I do that I would like to present a possible background/explanation that I think is the driving factor behind this move.

Freedom of ownership: the freedom to oppress, persecute and enslave

We are living in the era of industrial feudalism. Large capitalist corporations own and control almost everything on which the society depends. Building blocks of economy like oil, gas, electricity, sources of industrial raw materials and metal ores as well as human intellect are privately owned by large capitalist corporations.

What good can we expect when such basic things are monopolized in a few hands? This freedom of the capitalist to own whatever suits his profiteering transforms bulk of the society into a peasant worker class.

Islam does not allow this freedom to enslave the whole society. The Messenger of Allah (S.A.W) provided comprehensive guidance about who can own what. Sharia rules of ownership protected Islamic society against feudalism for more than ten centuries, until European powers colonized and enslaved Muslim ummah into the clutches of both agrarian and industrial feudalism.

Democracy & Capitalism : A deadly combination

democracyP1 from Nadeem Chaudhry on Vimeo.
This is still work in progress and as such the last couple of minutes needs modifications. I will do that soon. The partial transcript is available below:

Cloud Computing, baby milk & Nixon Shock

Trust me they are related! 
At the end of FIT-2012 (http://www.fit.edu.pk/)  there was a panel discussion in which cloud computing was presented as an excellent option for Pakistan to leap frog the problem of setting up expensive power consuming data centers. The fact that we have load shedding problem in Pakistan was presented as a very important motivating factor for move towards adoption of cloud computing. I have two objections to this solution in the current scenario which I present with historical background. 
http://www.babymilkaction.org/pdfs/babykiller.pdf tells how baby milk manufactures dressed their sales girls as nurses who persuaded unsuspecting mothers to abandon mother’s milk in favor of powder milk. Among the reasons given was the inadequate amount of milk that mothers were able to produce. Except for a very small percentage ( in single digit ) majority of mothers are fully capable of producing adequate milk for their babies. But once a baby is hooked up to something other than mother’s milk it is almost impossible to get back to mother’s milk for both the baby and the mother. This means that a single pack of free sample powder milk that the company provided made sure that they have a totally dependent customer for at least one year. Similarly if we get “hooked” on free or very cheap “cloud” now because we cannot produce enough electricity we can rest assure that we will pay a very heavy price in the long run. I am sorry but if any one doubts that then he/she does not understand capitalism. 
“In 1944, the Bretton Woods system fixed exchange rates based on the U.S. dollar, which was redeemable for gold by the U.S. government at the price of $35 per ounce. In other words, the U.S. dollar was based on the gold standard. But on August 15, 1971, Nixon issued Executive Order 11615, and unilaterally "closed the gold window", ending convertibility between U.S. dollars and gold.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_Shock This basically meant that the US government told other countries that it is no longer going to give them the gold which legally belonged to them. US being US did what it wanted and got away with it. If we put all of our data ( grades of our students, medical history of our families etc ) in US hands and expect not be exploited at some later point in time than we are fools who do not learn from history. 
I would suggest : 
The problem of load shedding should be fixed instead of making it as a basis of another much bigger problem. 
We partner with friendly/trust worth countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, China, Iran, Egypt etc and build our “cloud” by sharing/replicating resources. This will also solve the problem of under-utilization of resources when it is night in Pakistan. 
I am afraid that if we don't take practical steps to build our own cloud than in less than five years time almost all of data will be in US hands. Keep in mind what India does to the flow of our rivers and than imagine what US will do when all of our data ( CT scans, doctor's prescriptions, student grades etc ) will be in US control. At that point our doctor's won't be able to operate because the data needed to operate will be in US. Our universities won't be able to issue transcripts because student grades will be in US.

I hope people are not offended by what I have written. 

Thanks & AH

Transcript of Occupy Wall Street, End of Capitalism? Part2

Below is a transcript of my following presentation:

Slide #1

Every Ideology has a set of fundamental concepts known as “Creed” or what we call “Deen”. Specific Systems emanate from this Creed/Deen