Speak  Out

And I saw it today…

 By Hafsah Sarfraz

It was this close to us today. We could hear its noise, we could see the smoke, the chaos it produced. Had it been a few meters away from the spot, we could have been the victims of the blast, too. We were in our university when the blast at Islamic International University (which is right in front of my university) occurred. The mere thought that it could be us made us shiver; imagine what people who went through it experienced. We cannot understand their pain or sorrow and we cannot relate to their loss!

I always thought that nothing could harm me within the walls of my home and university and I could roam carelessly and freely, as nobody would be brutal enough to cause damage to residential areas and students at educational institutions. I have realised that I was wrong. They are here now. They can reach us anytime! They can harm us anytime! They can take away our lives, the lives of our loved ones in seconds.

There was a time when I believed my country to be the safest place on this earth, believed it to be my home, my sanctuary — where I felt protected and that no one could harm me.

Today, the reality has changed. What to do now? Where to go? From where I see, I can see two ways; one is to run away and look for greener pastures and the other is to stay back and fight. And as melodramatic and fake as it seems, I still want to say that I want to stay back and fight for I have emotional bonding with this country. And no matter where I go, there’s no place like home. Getting a citizen’s card will make me the citizen of a country, but their people will never treat me like one. There’s no other place in the world, which can be called home. Thus there’s only one way we have and it’s to fight the misled and the miscreants!

Suicide bombing has become a vicious trend in our country — from markets to other public places and now even educational institutions —no place is safe and these bombings can occur anywhere. We need to understand that whoever is doing it in the name of our religion is misusing the religion in the worst possible way. Islam doesn’t teach a person to take anyone’s life! Only God has the right to take a person’s life and it is totally His will when to do this. When a suicide bombing attack occurs, not only the attacker, but a lot of other people are also killed as well. This is plain murder. No matter how you sugar-coat this, it will remain what it is; murder of a lot of innocent people who have families to look after, responsibilities to them and loved ones to care for.

These miscreants are taking away our peace of mind and we can’t just sit and watch. I believe to mend something we need to find out the root cause. Similarly, in the case of suicide bombings, until the root cause is known nothing can be done. We need to find out what drives these people to blow up themselves, taking lives of innocent people along.

The second prong to my strategy is divine intervention. I pray very hard that these miscreants go away and never come back.

It’s past midnight and I’m penning down these words to express my pain and grief over what happened. I sit alone in my room with a hope in my heart that we can rescue Pakistan! I pray to Allah Almighty to give us the strength to fight the people who are destroying our country. Amen…