Out of the Indus Deluge

So the Lord said, "I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth—men and animals, and creatures that move along the ground, and birds of the air—for I am grieved that I have made them."

Genesis 6:7




And it moved on with them amid waves like mountains; and Nuh called out to his son, and he was aloof: "O my son! Embark with us and be not with the unbelievers.

He said: "I will betake myself for refuge to a mountain that shall protect me from the water."

Nuh said: "There is no protector today from Allah's punishment but He Who has mercy; and a wave intervened between them, so he was of the drowned."

Sura 11:42-43

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It has recently come to the attention of various media sources that Western countries do not have a lot of love for the Pakistani people. Despite a flood of Biblical-Quranic proportions which has swept entire provinces away and left millions struggling to survive in makeshift camps ripe for epidemics, the response by Western countries has been described as "lukewarm", "sluggish", and "trickling". The BBC compared the response in the first 3 weeks to those of the recent earthquake in Haiti and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Mosharraf Zaidi does the same, looking at funding given per affected person. Clearly the Christian West -- headlined as usual by the United States, the supplier of the vast majority of the world's humanitarian and development aid, is not jumping to open its checkbooks for the inhabitants of the Indus Valley. But why?

Here's a question from a reporter at Thursday's U.S. State Department press briefing:

QUESTION: But why should the American taxpayer who just this morning got another horrible – more bad economic news be asked to contribute more than they already are to this when the results – as I said before, this is a country that has difficulty or is unable to collect tax money from its own people, the wealthiest Pakistanis who live there, and has not been entirely cooperative in going after people that attacked us.

Here we have the 2 top reasons given as to why donor aid is slow to Pakistan: their government is corrupt and not worth supporting, and furthermore has and continues to support terrorist organizations. Both quite true -- although Transparency International rates Pakistan higher than Haiti in corruption, and U.S. citizens seemed to have less trouble stomaching charity to Haiti -- which suggests that corruption alone can't account for the donor gap. Which leaves us with Pakistani support for terrorism -- and perhaps on a larger scale, a general distrust of the Pakistani government. In the weeks leading up to the flood we had the WikiLeaks episode and the David Cameron "gaffe", both cementing the perception that the Pakistani government isn't "on our side". During the first days of the flood the major story was Pakistani President Zardari's European tour, sleeping in fancy silk bedding while his people struggled to even find hard ground to sleep on. And now in the relative aftermath we have the story of the West's lack of compassion for poor Muslim Pakistanis.

Perceptions are key here, and as often in Muslim-West relations, they rarely reflect the truth. Americans perceive that Pakistanis support terrorism, and that keeps them from putting serious weight behind humanitarian efforts. The reality is that Pakistanis have suffered as much as any people from terrorism, and there is only a very small minority which actively support Al-Qaeda and its Western-hating ilk. Pakistanis perceive that Americans are uninterested in their problems and are willing to support any regional leaders that fight Al-Qaeda and its ilk even when those same leaders are causing the suffering which swells the radical Islamist ranks.

As long as these perceptions remain, the Pakistani-U.S. relationship will continue to get worse. The Pakistani government, corrupt as it is, needs U.S. support in the fight against growing radical Islamist groups -- the same groups that have provided timely aid to flood victims in places where the government and the international community has yet to reach. Simply tossing bags of rice embossed with the American flag at those communities won't be enough. The long-term Pakistan problem is essentially a P.R. problem for the United States, and we need to be at our most opportunistic in using this disaster to "re-start" relations with the Pakistani people. What better disaster than a flood to remind everyone about the commonalities in the Christian and Muslim traditions?

This is not the time to hedge aid on discussions over Afghanistan or the ISI. This is not the time to make a mockery of freedom of religion by denying American Muslims a cultural place in the post-9/11 world. This is not the time to avert our eyes to suffering, even -- maybe especially -- if those suffering don't agree with our world view. Let's helicopter in ten million pounds of rice and ten million mosquito nets to be handed out in mosques -- especially those mosques with half-burnt American flags lying under flood waters. Let's take the private contractors out of Iraq and get them building levees and community shelters in Pakistan, and setting up cricket pitches in the refugee camps for the kids who used to have Osama Bin Laden posters on their walls (more of a metaphor). Let's put together a 100,000 Urdu-English Qurans and send them to Pakistani madrassas with flooded libraries.

The Biblical/Quranic flood can be interpreted in many ways. What is clear in the story is that God was upset with how the world had progressed and was using the flood to wipe the slate clean. This story is almost identical in the Bible and the Quran. While to attribute a divine presence to the recent flood in Pakistan would be, at the very least, sacrilegious, the opportunity to wipe the slate clean is very real. We began to write the history of humanity in the fertile Indus Valley nearly 5000 years ago. How will the next chapter read?