Pakistan’s Climate Crisis: A Peek Into The Apocalyptic Future That Awaits

One-Third Of Pakistan Submerged By “Monsoon On Steroids”

The world has faced much climate crisis devastation over the decades. However, in August 2022, the climate carnage in Pakistan brought this crisis into a whole new ball game. The image above is from the New Humanitarian, showing people attempting to flee the floods. The climate-induced flooding has affected over 50 million people. This disaster has left one-third of Pakistan underwater, with some parts resembling “a small ocean”.

The Pakistan Flood indicates the consequences of the universal and rapacious climate crisis unravelling at unprecedented speed. However, it seems that most of the world hasn’t considered Pakistan’s epic humanitarian crisis for what it represents.

Pakistan has a famine looming, $30 billion in economic loss, 50 million people internally displaced, and a high threat of a malaria epidemic present as floodwater lies stagnant. Furthermore, an entire generation in Pakistan is deprived of access to essential services in health and education. Deaths will rise with colder winter months approaching and millions left without homes.

Climate Crisis In Pakistan Is Beyond Bleak

For decades, Pakistan has seen record-breaking temperatures, torrential rains, glacial melt, droughts, and floods. This current weather disaster is the most extreme torrential rainfall and devastating flash floods Pakistan has seen in 73 years. Millions have fled their homes with little more than rags to protect them from scorching high temperatures of 40 degrees Celsius. Pakistan is one of the world’s top ten most vulnerable countries on the Climate Risk Index but only contributes to less than 1% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Authority updated the death toll from the crisis since mid-June to 1,545 people and 552 children. This disaster spurred the United Nations to issue its largest-ever disaster appeal, at over $2 billion.

The Plight Of Pakistani Children During A Climate Crisis

The flooding has adversely affected millions of children since the crisis started. Due to the extreme flooding, children in Pakistan are battling diarrhoea, malaria, dengue fever, and painful skin conditions. According to UNICEF, 3.4 million children urgently need immediate life-saving support and humanitarian assistance. Approximately 16 million children are without homes, lack access to safe drinking water, and live in unsanitary conditions. Millions of children are at increased risk of water-borne diseases, drowning, and malnutrition. In addition, the flooding exacerbates the threat of snakes, scorpions and mosquitoes, all of which carry life-threatening diseases.

The International Communities Response To The Climate Crisis

There has been silence from prominent international figures and western media outlets concerning Pakistan. In the first week of the floods, more newspaper articles covered the Finnish prime minister’s social life than the unfolding weather event. This questions the global outlook and prioritization concerning climate change.

The flooding has sparked an ongoing debate regarding broader issues of responsibility for loss and damage endured by nations affected by climate change. Global warming is primarily caused by the Global North’s disregard for the environment and excessive release of greenhouse gas emissions. However, despite the Global North’s overwhelming contribution to the crisis, there is still a complete disregard for the pain suffered by Pakistanis in its international response.

Double Standards And Racism In Response To Various Humanitarian Crisis‘

The international response to Pakistan is minuscule compared to Ukraine, where around 12 million people were displaced. Comparatively, this figure represents a third of the displaced people in Pakistan, reaching over 50 million. World leaders criticize the international community’s focus on the war in Ukraine. The same attention is not given to crises in other parts of the world. The mass media apply double standards to reporting depending on the race and nationality of those affected by the humanitarian crisis.

The international communities’ weak response is either a form of racism and ideology that terrible things happen in places like Pakistan or an utter failure of compassion.

Climate Change Discriminates Against Women And Girls

Women and children are facing a dangerous downwards spiral of hunger and malnutrition. In Pakistan, there are 650,000 pregnant women and girls. Moreover, 73,000 mothers are expected to deliver in the coming weeks. The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) says many women lack access to health-care facilities and support to deliver their children safely.

Climate change continues to exacerbate maternal and newborn health inequities. Aid groups report that many mothers are anaemic and malnourished and deliver very low-weight babies. In addition, mothers are too ill to breastfeed their children.

Pakistan has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in South Asia. The majority of Pakistani women give birth at home. However, with millions of homes destroyed, many women do not know where they will deliver their babies in the coming months or years.

The Pakistani crisis highlights how climate change disproportionately impacts women and girls. In Sindh province, more than 1,000 health facilities have been fully or partially destroyed. In Balochistan province, flooding damaged 198 health facilities.

“I am deeply concerned about the potential for a second disaster in Pakistan: a wave of disease and death following this catastrophe, linked to climate change, that has severely impacted vital health systems leaving millions vulnerable”

World Health Organization (WHO) chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

Political Instability In Pakistan

In August 2022, Pakistan had a 27% inflation rate. The Pakistani rupee crashed, and net foreign reserves fell to $8 billion. Pakistan continues to face political instability due to a showdown involving the government, the military, and ex-prime minister Imran Khan. This makes it difficult to carry out an effective flood response and begin rebuilding people’s lives.

Furthermore, political instability has resulted in food insecurity and electricity and fuel shortages.

1/3 of Pakistan remains underwater.

1500 reported deaths.

40 Million people effected.

15 million children face disease, famine.

Government Inaction And Lack Of Disaster Preparedness

The government should have done more in the past few decades to flood-proof communities within Pakistan and prepare.

Climate scientists warned that this situation would arrive. Moreover, it will take years to rebuild infrastructure and homes in Pakistan. The damage is worse than the 2010 flooding, which killed 1700 people. The death toll is expected to be higher, indicating that the Pakistani government did not learn anything from the 2010 flooding.

While climate change is the critical driver behind Pakistan’s extreme weather, policy experts held that the flooding was exacerbated by government inaction and mismanagement, structural inequalities in marginalized areas, and poor policy-based decisions.

Thousands of villages saw broken drainage systems and swamped roads. Although raising climate awareness is essential, we must shift the discourse to climate preparedness. Pakistani officials place much blame on climate change but use this as a scapegoat for their incompetence. Developed countries should be helping poorer nations to prepare for climate change disasters. This is the responsibility of more prosperous nations in the Global North, who are responsible for the level of greenhouse gas emissions currently in the atmosphere.

Concluding Thoughts

This humanitarian crisis has shown us that we must develop an impactful, inclusive, and holistic climate preparation plan to address future flooding. International assistance is essential to help Pakistan’s fragile political and economic environment.

This climate crisis should also serve as a wake-up call for world leaders in the Global North to reduce emissions drastically.

UN secretary-general António Guterres held that the world should stop “sleepwalking” through this climate crisis. We must start thinking more seriously about how to prevent such disasters in the future.

Today it is Pakistan, but tomorrow it could be your country.

Sheikh Yousef Al-Qaradawi :1926-2022

The Muslim world On Monday lost one of the most prominent and influential religious scholars of our time. He is Dr. Sheikh Yousef Al Qaradawi, widely viewed as one of the most prestigious Muslim A’lem in the Arab world. He died peacefully in Doha, Qatar, at the age of 96. 

Muhammed al-Hassan Walid al-Dido al-Shanqiti, a famous Mauritanian scholar, described Qaradawi as “one of the greatest Muslim scholars in the 20th century.”

He called him “heir of the Prophet Muhammed in our time.’

Fahmi Huwaidi, a noted Egyptian intellectual,  said “Qaradawi was greater than all words.”

 The eminent Egyptian scholar joins a constellation of top Muslim scholars whose legacies shaped intellectual currents throughout the Muslim world for over a century. We are talking about luminaries such as Abul Ala Maududi of Pakistan, Abu al-Hasan Nadwi of India, Malik Bin Nabi of Algeria, Sayed Qutob and Muhammad Gazali of Egypt and Said Nursî of Turkey.

Qaradawi was born in the village Saft Turab in the Gharbiya province in Egypt on September 9, 1926. He completed the memorization of the Holy Quran before he reached ten years of age. 

He received the international Diploma in the discipline of Sharia in 1954.  Several years later, he received a doctorate from al-Azhar, the prestigious Sunni Muslim Academy in Caro.

Fearless A’lem dedicated to promoting Islam

Qaradawi exemplified the character of a fearless A’alem who practised the paramount Muslim religious duty of al-Amr Bilm’arouf and an-Nahy anil Munkar,  (promotion of virtue and prevention of vice). 

His Sharia-inspired activism prompted the regime of former Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser to incarcerate him three times during which he was subjected to severe torture and maltreatment.

The harsh persecution which Qaradawi underwent, along with thousands of Muslim Brotherhood followers and supporters, forced the eminent scholar to seek safe haven in Qatar where he remained until his death on Monday.

Qaradawi was a vocal critic of autocratic Arab dictatorships which often use Islam to justify their tyrannical rules and strangulation of human rights and civil liberties.

In 2015, an Egyptian court acting on instructions from the Sissi Junta sentenced him to death in absentia for affiliation with the Brotherhood and opposition to the despotic Sissi regime.

Two years earlier, Sissi had carried out a military coup, toppling President Dr. Muhammed Mursi, the only democratically elected ruler in Egypt’s history. Mursi was a member of the now-outlawed Muslim Brotherhood. It is widely believed that the coup was carried out in collusion with the U.S. and Israel, with a strong financial backing from Saudi Arabia and UAE.

Similarly, the governments of Saudi Arabia and UAE barred Qaradawi from entering their territories, accusing him of apostasy for arguing that Islam and dictatorship are totally incompatible.

Al-Qaradawi was a strong supporter of the popular uprising against Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, who effectively destroyed Syria, killed hundreds of thousands of his own citizens, occasionally using chemical weapons,  and forced nearly half of the Syrian people to leave their homes, all in order to remain power.

Predictably, Al-Qaradawi supported the so-called Arab Spring uprisings in countries such as Egypt, Syria, Libya and Tunisia. He also strongly supported  Muslim resistance and liberation movements in places like Palestine, and Kashmir.

His strong advocacy of Palestinian rights and fierce rejection of normalization between some autocratic Arab regimes  and Israel  prompted the apartheid Zionist entity to call him the “Sheikh of Terror.” Moreover,  powerful Zionist circles in the West instigated the U.S. as well as several European states to consider him a persona non grata.

Advocate of Muslim Unity

Al-Qaradawi was a vocal prominent proponent of Muslim unity and pan-Islamic cooperation. He repeatedly argued that Allah wanted Muslims to be one Umma, not 55 states.

On many occasions, he argued that Muslim disunity, coupled with parochial secular nationalism,  which he labelled as an advanced degree of tribalism, was responsible for the enduring weakness of Muslims around the world, including the relentless persecution meted out to millions of Muslims in places like Palestine, India and Myanmar.

Qaradawi is credited for founding the International Federation of Muslim Religious Scholar (IFNRS), based in Qatar. This body, which includes prominent religious scholars from all over the Muslim world issues Fatwas or religious edicts dealing with novel subjects that were not known in the past.

Moreover, the council strives to find practical Islamic solutions bridging the gap between classical Islamic judgments, derived from the Holy Quran and Sunna of the Prophet and the requirements of  modernity.

Dr. Al-Qaradawil was a religious scholar, thinker, philosopher and poet. He enriched the Muslim library with as many as 177 books. Some of his famous books include “Halal and Haram in Islam,” and Fiqh Az-Zaka (the philosophy and understanding of Alms). May Sheikh Al-Qaradawi be in the company of prophets, saints, martyrs and righteous people in Jannat al-Ferdous.

The Killing Of Mahsa Amini And Other Crimes Against Women- Double Standards Of International Media

Iran has recently been in the news after violent protests have broken out in the country. These protests have led to the killing of at least 50 people till now. The protests have been going on since over a week over the killing of Mahsa Amini. The Iranian Police authorities detained Amini for not dressing what they deem as “modest”. 

Allegedly, Iran’s “moral police” called the “Basij” are believed to be responsible for Amini’s death. However, the Iranian authorities claim that the 22-year-old woman died of a heart attack while staying in a “guidance center”– a type of re-education center where women are taught how to follow Iran’s rules on female clothing. They also released a CCTV video clip in which Amini is seen collapsing “on her own”. 

Crimes against women that happened around the same time

Since August, there have been four alleged killings of women that are political in nature, including Mahsa Amini. However, the other incidents of killings neither made it to the international media nor did they evoke the same outrage from countries, particularly the US and Israel. These are the countries that released statements of condemnation and solidarity for Amini. But failed to mention or even acknowledge the women that were subjected to crimes around the same time. One can only wonder why the killing of Mahsa Amini in one part of the world evokes international political attention and outrage. But the killings of the other women don’t even make it to the news.

Iraq

On September 20, the US troops in Baghdad shot and killed a 15-year-old Iraqi girl Zainab Essam al-Khazali. The American soldiers were stationed at the Victoria military complex, which is close to the airport in Baghdad. The US bullet killed Zainab while assisting her father on the family farm. The first important question here would be why would American forces conduct their training exercises in neighborhoods that were obviously populated.

The US troops that killed the 15-year-old girl were practicing military training in Baghdad. The incident occurred close to the notorious Abu Ghraib jail. It is the same place where members of the US Army and the Central Intelligence Agency were implicated in a string of war crimes and human rights abuses against detainees during the invasion of Iraq in 2004. The murder, which was referred to as a “random shooting,” is the subject of an inquiry, according to a statement from the Iraqi Security Media Cell.

No Outrage From the Western Media

Zainab’s killing has received little to no attention from the western media. Apart from the local news, the main platform where people talked of this heinous crime was the social media site Twitter. Highlighting no media coverage of this killing, the users pointed out the hypocrisy of the western media. Twitter users claimed that the world would have gone insane if the crime had been done by a nation other than the United States.

India

On September 15, police found two Dalit sisters hanging in Lakhimpur Kheri district of Uttar Pradesh state in India. The police later said that they were raped before being killed. The Dalits belong to the most marginalized and persecuted caste in India. The police named six suspects Chotu, Junaid, Suhail, Hafizul Rehman, Karimuddin, and Arif. “The girls and all of the accused are from the same village. Two of the accused were the “lovers’ of the Dalit sisters. The accused strangled and hanged them later, when the girls began urging them for marriage, according to Lakhimpur police. “I demand justice, the culprits should be hanged,” says the father of the victims in the Lakhimpur Kheri murder case.

History of Crime Against Dalits, Particularly Women, And Negligible Media Coverage

India has been infamous for caste discrimination and violence against Dalits, particularly Dalit women. Caste and gender discrimination have doubly oppressed the Dalit women in India. However, despite a bloody history of patriarchy and caste discrimination against women, there has been negligible international media coverage or outrage against these crimes. Due to this, there has emerged a pattern of insensitivity as well as impunity regarding these crimes.  

Mississippi, USA

On August 22, a police-involved shooting in Biloxi, Mississippi killed Mable Arrington, a 42-year-old African-American woman. Crimes against African-American people get minimal and tokenistic global attention. The media gave little to no attention to the killing of Arrington. Even the local media coverage didn’t provide any extensive information. Even the name and status of the officer involved are currently unknown. But the Biloxi Police reported no injuries caused to the officers. What led up to the shooting is also unknown, a local TV station reported. The political leaders in the United Nations are yet to condemn this killing, while the family of Arrington awaits justice.

Double Standards of International Media

The incidents of violence against Dalit women in India have not gained any significant space in the western media. And the African-American murders barely garner any international attention. 

No other story has received the level of consideration and coverage by the international media that the killing of Mahsa Amini has. Israel, tweeting about it from its official account, is also one of Iran’s biggest geostrategic rivals. 

Burning of hijabs and cutting of hair by women during protests within Iran are being interpreted as progressive signs of “regime” change by western media. Western media has surfaced arguments regarding the hijab’s centrality to Islam. It has also highlighted the Islamic governments’ obsession” to enforce it. Meanwhile, Muslim women in India are currently protesting for the right to wear the hijab. But that never made it to western media’s narrative on women’s right to choose. 

The hijab-clad Zainab al Khazali is of no political significance to the politicians at a time when the US and Iran are renegotiating the nuclear deal. The war in Ukraine has caused Europe to be desperate for gas and materials, so condemning Zainab’s killing doesn’t serve anyone’s geo-political motives. 

Some women are forced to wear the Hijab, while others are forced to remove it. The forced veiling and the forced removal of a veil both have utter disregard for a woman’s agency. There is no middle ground where she could choose for herself. Perhaps the middle ground serves no one’s political interests.