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How Media Can Help To Fight
Religious Violence?
Bomb
blast at Nishtar Park in Karachi verifies the bitter reality
that there is a close connection between religion and violence.
The defenders of religion try to untangle
this relationship between religion and violence by saying that
criminals who commit violence in the name of religion have
nothing to do with religion. However, repeated violent events
remind us that mass religious events somehow trigger violence in
which a large number of people lose their lives. Sometimes, such
events are the result of mob frenzy or mismanagement of crowd
and sometimes, criminals take advantage of the situation and
explode devices which result in serious losses of human lives.
Unfortunately, Muslim countries have the
highest number of such occurrences, which call for serious
undertakings on part of each Muslim country’s government to
arrest such socio religious trends which culminate in such gory
tragedies.
Media channels such as radio, TV and
newspapers can also play an important role to reverse such socio
religious trends.
What these media channels need to understand
is that Pakistani society is already an overly religious
society. Some people still feel there is less religion in
Pakistan and they call for more, but the truth of the matter is
Pakistan has almost become a religious mad house. People are so
much involved in religion, they are losing sanity.
While the country is bleeding because of
these over zealous religious traits, leaders’ statements,
political and religious, made at such occasions have lost
meanings. No one gives a damn about who says what!
What these media channels need to do is to
stop telecasting religious functions. We don’t know about the
channels in Pakistan, but ARY, Geo and Prime TV dedicate too
much time to religious functions. These functions include all
type of religious presentations made by ladies behind the veil,
fire brand mullahs, teachers teaching Quran, naat khans and
qwalls singing naats and qwallis and so on so forth. To connect
some of the imagery and contents of such materials to Holy
Prophet in a way mounts to disgracing the prophet of Islam. This
is like imbibing and reinforcing religious values (some of them
sick) in an already overly religious society.
These TV channels are not serving Islam or
Pakistan by dedicating so much time to such (sick) events. Over
the time, these channels seem in a competition to dedicate more
and more time for such religious functions, which is a sickening
trend in itself and which needs reversal.
These powerful tools should be used to
improve peoples’ lives by making them more knowledgeable about
social, cultural, economic issues, natural environment,
universe, sciences, international and Pakistan’s state affairs.
Running naat competitions by ladies, men and
young boys, delivering religious sermons and showing religious
gatherings, may make the viewers of these channels more
ecstatic, but this all does not make any difference in their
lives. These presentations even do not make them better Muslims
or human beings.
These media channels can play a positive role
in fighting back religious violence by deemphasizing religion
instead of reinforcing or strengthening it.
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