CITY NOTES
The passing of Professor Khurshid Ahmad probably did not create as much of a stir as it would have once, for at 93 the world had moved on from his peak, as one of the Deputy Amira of the Jamat Islami. Though there was no formal title or other mark of recognition, he was the successor of Jamaat founder Maulana Abul Ala Maudoodi in the sense that he was the nearest the Jamaat had to a theoretician, especially after the departure of Dr Israr Ahmed to found his own party, following which he authored a body of work which allowed his followers to claim for him that he was a religious scholar, even though he was doctor by training.
Professor Khurshid also made a little more credible the claim that the Jamaat was like a Communist party. He was its theoretician. It seems parties based on someone’s writings usually have a theoretician, one who has studied those writings thoroughly, has a deep understanding, and has made his own contribution to that thought.
Communist parties are a good example, being based on Marx’s writings. The first theoretician was Lenin himself, who was a prolific writer too. After he died, there was a split, because while Bukharin was clearly the theoretician, Stalin had become party Secretary General. Stalin then purged not only Bukharin but also Trotsky. Stalin tried to prove that. Like Lenin, he wrote some books, which no one bothers with nowadays. However, the tradition persisted. The last famous theoretician of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was Mikhail Suslov, who was Second Secretary of the CPSU from 1965 to 1982, when he died.
In fact, his death preceded the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, but the fact that he was not replaced indicated that the CPSU was over. He was succeeded as Second Secretary, in a de facto sort of way, by Nikolai Chernenko, who then became General Secretary of the party after Leonid Brezhnev died. Now Chernenko might have been well acquainted with Marxist theory, by the was hardly a theoretician.
Similarly, while the Jamat leadership may consist of distinguished religious scholars, none can really be described as a theoretician. Is that the problem with the Jamaat? That it no longer produces theoreticians?
Then what about parties which have never had theoreticians”? The PPP may have had J.A. Rahim and Mairaj Muhammad Khan, and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto himself was formidably bright,
But now it has Asif Zardari. The PML(N) PM, Mian Shehbaz Sharif is an intellectual giant compared to his predecessor, Imran Khan, whose appeal was not based on his brightness, or even his literacy. There are even those who postulate that he was selected to be on the same page because he was one of the few people in the country actually dumber than Mian Nawaz.
I wonder how Imran would have done in T20 matches. There weren’t any in his time, with only one version of limited overs cricket, 50-over matches. Well, there also used to be 40-over and 60-over competitions. But the first T20 International was played in January 2005, which was about 12 years after Imran had hung up his boots.
However, the format is so well established that the Pakistan Super League is now in its 10th edition. It was one of those coincidences so beloved of film scriptwriters the world over that Hasan Ali broke the record for the most wickets taken in the PSL on the same day as Arshdeep Singh became the highest wicket-taker for the Punjab Kings in the Indian Premier League. Hasan has 117 wickets from 85 matches. He is 30, which means he has got a few years left in him. Arshdeep has 85 wickets from 72 matches, and at 26 has got quite a lot of cricket left in him.
Meanwhile, I see we’ve got a sort of ‘clash-of-the-less-than-Titáns’ in Sylhet, where Bangladesh is hosting Zimbabwe. It seems more their speed, though Bangladesh got bowled out for 191 and Zimbabwe reached 67 without loss at close. A chance for records?
