Titled Rawalpundi Express for his speed, former Pakistani cricketer, Shoaib Akhtar is spending his retired life as a cricket commentator, a YouTuber and a preacher of “Islamic righteousness”. Yes, you heard it right. The cricketer has now assumed the role of a religious guru peddling Islamic fundamentals to the world.
In one of his YouTube videos, the 44-year-old sportsman accused the Chinese of introducing this pandemic to the world by consuming toxic material from wildlife (not that we disagree with this part of his speech), and proceeded to slam them for feasting on “non-halal” animals as well.
“When Allah has given so many halal animals, why must you eat bats and spread the virus?”, Shoaib Akhtar asks. For the uninitiated, halal food items are the ones prescribed for consumption by Islamic law; anything that is excluded on the list is branded haram, or forbidden. The pig and its meat, pork, are categorized as the latter.
In his latest YouTube video, Shoaib likens the doctors and nurses fighting coronavirus to Islamic mujahidin, and dubs their tireless struggle against the virus, despite the odds of courting death by getting infected, as a jihad. A mujahid is a Muslim dedicated to the cause of jihad, and jihad is a religious war fought in the interest of Islam.
Here is our objection with what Shoaib said: as a sportsman, he has gone all around the world, and is well aware of societies and cultures that exist outside the periphery of Islam. Not all cultures believe in “Allah”; nor do all societies take his dictate as the final word. Shoaib may choose to shame the Chinese for their dining choices – which include almost everything in the ecosystem – but he should not pull out Allah’s commandments to indict them for wrongdoing, or impose halal food on people who are neither Muslims nor subscribe to the Islamic ideology.
It is both funny and offensive at the same time that he equates the lifesaving efforts of doctors to an imperative, jihad, that has claimed millions of lives for the expansion of Islam in the past 1,400 years. There is not an inch of this planet which has not been ravaged by jihad: All in the name of Islam.
Jihad was the ideology behind the destruction of the Twin Towers on 9/11. Jihad was the Beirut bombings of 1983 that left 307 dead. Jihad was the 2002 Bali bombings that killed hundreds of Australians, Indonesians and Britons. Jihad was the Islamization of Iran and Lebanon. Jihad was the taking down of the Taj Hotel of Mumbai, the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, and the plundering of thousands of Hindu temples in India and the adjoining Islamic countries. Thirty years ago, five lakh Hindus were driven out of their homes in Kashmir after those homes were looted and their sisters and daughters were raped and killed. This was done by Islamist hardliners who followed blaring commands coming from mosques in the name of jihad. Doctors, nurses, and a legion of health officials soldiering on in the face of death are not mujahidin, and neither is their battle against the lethal contagion a jihad. Earth is not an Islamic planet, and it is anything but universally acceptable to measure every phenomenon, action and service against Islamic parameters of morality.
An exhaustive study of Islamists in Pakistani sports exposes their self-righteousness and nauseating bigotry.
Back in December 2019, Akhtar revealed how players of the Pakistani cricketer team had victimized former spinner Danish Kaneria for not being a Muslim, but a Hindu. “Captain would raise eyebrows about him eating with us or taking the food from the same table,” he claimed in a YouTube video.
Mohammad Yousuf, formerly known as Yousuf Youhana, was the fourth Christian player on Pakistan’s international cricket team. He converted to Islam after attending meeting of the Islamic group, Tablighi Jamaat. Saeed Anwar, another former player, was an Islamic preacher at the group, which helped motivate Yousuf to convert. Though his mother had severed all ties with him, Yousuf asserts that his conversion to Islam has played a vital role in his professional success.
The former Pakistani skipper Shahid Afridi scores astonishingly high in levels of religious bigotry. In a televised interview, he expressed his forthright hatred of Hindus by deriding the Indic tradition of performing aarti. He also shocked the world by revealing how he flew into paroxysms and smashed the TV upon witnessing his daughter emulate the Hindu practice on an Indian show.
The reigning Prime Minister of Pakistan, the World Cup-winning cricket captain Imran Khan, is not only a known sympathizer of the jihadist organization the Taliban, but openly applauds their violence as a jihad justified by Islamic law also.