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A successful business man was growing old and knew it was time to choose a successor to take over the business.

Instead of choosing one of his Directors or his children, he decided to do something different. He called all the young executives in his company together.

He said, "It is time for me to step down and choose the next CEO. I have decided to choose one of you. "The young executives were Shocked, but the boss continued." I am going to give each one of you a SEED today - one very special SEED. I want you to plant the seed, water it, and come back here one year from today with what you have grown from the seed I have given you. I will then judge the plants that you bring, and the one I choose will be the next CEO."

One man, named Akram, was there that day and he, like the others, received a seed. He went home and excitedly, told his wife the story. She helped him get a pot, soil and compost and he planted the seed. Everyday, he would water it and watch to see if it had grown. After about three weeks, some of the other executives began to talk about their seeds and the plants that were beginning to grow.

Akram kept checking his seed, but nothing ever grew. Three weeks, four weeks, five weeks went by, still nothing. By now, others were talking about their plants, but Akram didn't have a plant and he felt like a failure.

Six months went by -- still nothing in Akram's pot. He just knew he had killed his seed. Everyone else had trees and tall plants, but he had nothing. Akram didn't say anything to his colleagues, however. He just kept watering and fertilizing the soil - He so wanted the seed to grow.

A year finally went by and all the young executives of the company brought their plants to the CEO for inspection.

Akram told his wife that he wasn't going to take an empty pot. But she asked him to be honest about what happened. Akram felt sick to his stomach, it was going to be the most embarrassing moment of his life, but he knew his wife was right. He took his empty pot to the board room. When Akram arrived, he was amazed at the variety of plants grown by the other executives. They were beautiful -- in all shapes and sizes. Akram put his empty pot on the floor and many of his colleagues laughed, a few felt sorry for him!

When the CEO arrived, he surveyed the room and greeted his young executives. Akram just tried to hide in the back. "My, what great plants, trees, and flowers you have grown," said the CEO. "Today one of you will be appointed the next CEO!"

All of a sudden, the CEO spotted Akram at the back of the room with his empty pot. He ordered the Financial Director to bring him to the front. Akram was terrified. He thought, "The CEO knows I'm a failure! Maybe he will have me fired!"

When Akram got to the front, the CEO asked him what had happened to his seed - Akram told him the story. The CEO asked everyone to sit down except Akram. He looked at Akram, and then announced to the young executives, "Behold your next Chief Executive Officer!

His name is Akram!" Akram couldn't believe it. Akram couldn't even grow his seed.

"How could he be the new CEO?" the others said.

Then the CEO said, "One year ago today, I gave everyone in this room a seed. I told you to take the seed, plant it, water it, and bring it back to me today. But I gave you all boiled seeds; they were dead - it was not possible for them to grow.

All of you, except Akram, have brought me trees and plants and flowers. When you found that the seed would not grow, you substituted another seed for the one I gave you. Akram was the only one with the courage and honesty to bring me a pot with my seed in it. Therefore, he is the one who will be the new Chief Executive Officer!"

* If you plant honesty, you will reap trust

* If you plant goodness, you will reap friends

* If you plant humility, you will reap greatness

* If you plant perseverance, you will reap contentment

* If you plant consideration, you will reap perspective

* If you plant hard work, you will reap success

* If you plant forgiveness, you will reap reconciliation

* If you plant faith in God , you will reap a harvest

So, be careful what you plant now;

it will determine what you will reap later and finally don’t fool the MASTER.

"Whatever You Give To Life, Life Gives You Back"

In the Western countries population in numbers of immigrant Muslims is increasing rapidly. UK alone house 2 million Muslims whereas the ratio in France is more, however looking at the issues of unemployment, ratio of education achievement, radicalisation, legal problems, extortion of under achievers and awareness of basic teachings of Islam, I am safe to say that community is developing individually but not as a group or a clan. There are many factors which contribute to that division, at some sectarian affiliation whether we are shia or sunny, or Pathan or Punjabi. If these prejudices or divisions are not enough, then political parties have added colour to divide Muslims through League(s) or PPP or overall in Tory and conservatives and due to such divisions, we have divided ourselves to restrict our ability to rule. Muslims with their 6% representation can create 25 seats in the parliament easily if they are united and are effective in UK alone, but thanks to the cosmopolitan indifferences, we are restricted to a dozen key seats, and most of them are to save face and to achieve political correctness. It was self evident in UK’s last Parliament that none could vote against the ’42 days detention bill’ in the commons when the crunch came for Muslim leaders.

With the way the problems are emerging, the role of mosque as a non political forum is emerging and is desirable all across Europe. If the matter is concerning the youth who are becoming victims at the hands of outlawed commodity who brainwash our children towards untrue interpretation of Islam and use annoyance and unease about foreign policy reservations, they key is in the hands of ‘Imams’ who can guide the parents to be vigilant and invite youngsters to listen, read and preach the peaceful teachings of Islam and highlight the salient features which prohibit damage to property, and personal belongings irrespective of faith and colour let alone killing someone which is considered a ‘death’ of whole humanity. We have problems of immigrants who are unemployed and are employable. Mosque can create opportunities where employer and jobless stand in one line and say salah every day. We have victims of extortion where employer donates millions to the mosque but employees cry out at their treatment, working on lower than minimum wage rate. Fair treatment can be preached to those who donate heavily but quieten dissent silently at their own shops and warehouses. We are also confronted moral issues, halal food, smoking, drinking and cohabitation are taboo areas and parents only say its ‘forbidden’ in Islam but logical reasoning are always missing. Mosque can guide young men and women alike about these provisions and pave way for better moral values which parents wish for their kids but have no way how to bring the best out in their children. It can even teach and create opportunities for boys and girls and revive the marriage as an institution. Mosque could be a way of teaching mother tongue and Arabic and the philosophy of Quran can be summarised through small lectures in English and the mystic values which are evaporating from the society may be revived.

Islam is confined to prayer mat and salah and narration of Quran for ‘sawab’, but there is more to it, it’s a blend of beautiful flowery bunch of rights attached with greater responsibilities. Emancipation through fairer, participation in daily life, and make acts and doings a fine example of satisfaction and pride for an individual and the whole community. There are issues such as forced marriages, domestic violence, rights of women, in particular wives and neighbours and disabled in the society which are hardly rehearsed and told by anybody. Chain and hundreds of mosques are not there to hold Jumma, Eid and funeral, it has a greater role of this society who is slowly alienating itself from the mainstream English community, as well as youngsters and old are slowly separating each other due to culture barriers. Of course it’s inevitable that young British Muslims will bring new innovation, values and traditions different from that of parents and pensioners who came in 1970’s. Or issues confronted with the new arrival immigrant Muslim community are quite different to that of people who are born as Brits or people who came as economic migrant for jobs four decades ago. But solution lies within, and it requires communal realisation of modern requirements and challenges we are faced with.
From Maghrib to Isha Salah, this new role must be assumed by the mosque in a non political fashion to offer the youth in their own language what they need, better guidance, role play, mentoring and training as to how to be a good Muslim and a good civil citizen of any society. Teachers can be their own congregates who attend for Salah and offer their services voluntarily. A bad workman quarrels with his tools, and Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) told everyone with his conduct how to learn, to do his own personal things, and how to be a leader, and how to do honest jobs, employment, or business. Quran clarified that to God the best is the one who is pious and piety will not automatically arrive at the door, someone will have to teach, and no better than the mosque full of volunteers can take that drive back where it started. I think new era desires the innovation, energy, commitment and devotion from mosques to lead before the future of our generation go astray. Forum is there, how and when to revive, and bring it some use is for the community to decide. and a word of wise, if there is a little doubt, they must go to local Jewish Senegal on any Saturday as 25 Members of Parliament do not increase in a day.

Barrister Amjad Malik, is a Chair of the Association of Pakistani lawyers (UK)

The ordinary everyday local Pakistani people, middle and lower class in particular, are facing a long list of serious crises which is making their daily lives a total misery. Unfortunately, these day to day problems are getting very little attention. The latest in the long list of severe problems is the Power crisis with Load-shedding, lack of water, Sui Gas and Flour or Wheat!

The Power crisis or Load-shedding has been so severe, during the last two weeks or so. that here in Islamabad and other cities, we feel like we are living in caveman’s era.

At every hour the electricity goes off and we have to sit in the candle light and wander around in the darkness. The only exception is the 5% who have generators.

There are many areas in the surrounding district of Islamabad which are often without any electricity, gas or water for the entire day in this extremely cold weather, dropping at night to generally 3C.

There have been difficult situations since the creation of Pakistan but I don’t think that ever before, that so many crises have hit us in such quick succession. During last two years, particularly, we have seen nothing but crisis, one after the other, and not one single one problem, handled properly by government.

The latest crisis that has Pakistan from all walks of life, up in arms is the lack of electrical power throughout the country. While rolling blackouts or load shedding as it’s locally known has always been a part of daily life in Pakistan, the problem has become acute in the last couple of years. In the second half of December 2009, the situation got so bad that WAPDA & KESC (power generation entities in Pakistan) resorted to draconian levels of load shedding. The power cuts during this time amounted to 20-22 hours a day in most small cities and even cities like Karachi and Islamabad were seeing 14+ hours of load shedding.

Notwithstanding the systemic issues, such as the failure to build new dams, and previous Government’s inability to add even a single megawatt of new power to the grid during 9 years of its rule, it seems that the present crisis is a result of bad management and the lack of foresight. The total installed capacity of WAPDA and KESC totals around 19,500 megawatts. Almost two thirds of this power comes from thermal power plants (fossil fuels), one third is generated by water and about 2% comes from nuclear power plants.

The demand for electricity in Pakistan during the winter months actually goes down and this winter has been no exception. Throughout the month of December, the electricity consumption in Pakistan hovered around 11,000 MW, down from the peak levels of 17,500 MW seen in summer. This demand was well within the installed capacity of WAPDA & KESC yet only generating a meagre one third (6500MW) of their maximum capacity during this period leaving a huge gap between supply and demand.

There are two main reasons for this:
1. The water flow from all major dams was halted starting mid December to allow the annual cleaning of canals in January. This action effectively took all the hydro power off line.
2. The thermal power plants were working far below their potential due to the lack of money caused by the circular debt between various government agencies reaching a staggering 400 billion Rupees.

None of these issues could have possibly come as a surprise to the present government yet they choose to do nothing until violent anti government protests erupted in all major cities. A couple of days ago the President of Pakistan finally convened a summit of all stakeholders and since then the situation has improved somewhat but this fiasco provides another example of the misplaced priorities of our democratically elected leaders.

Instead of issuing stamps and coins bearing Benazir’s logo and dedicating existing airports to her name, they should focus on the plight of everyday people and try to make their lives a little bit better. Everyone understands that Pakistan is facing serious problems requiring long term solutions and the present government can’t be expected to make significant headway in the short term, yet there are things where it can make a difference. Eliminating load shedding during the winter months could just be one of them.

BB’S LEGACY OF RECONCILLIATION LIVES ON!!

By: FAIZ AL-NAJDI
faizalnajdi@gmail.com

Just few days before she was brutally gun downed on that fateful day of 27 December 2007, Benazir Bhutto was able to finalize the manuscript of her last epic book, “Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy & the West. In the foreword note of the book per se, Mark Siegel – her friend of a long standing - mentions that this book was written under extraordinary circumstances and that this book was very important to her. He also adds that Benazir was convinced that the battles between democracy and dictatorship, and between extremism and moderation, were the two central forces of the new millennium. He also adds that she believed that under dictatorship, extremism flourished and grew, threatening not only her homeland – Pakistan – but also the entire world.

The whole of the last chapter of the book per se (from pages-275 thru 318) is dedicated to the subject of reconciliation - in broader sense and perspective. In this chapter she focuses on the ways and means of bringing about reconciliation on both the fronts. She theorizes that there is much that Muslims can do to reconcile the internal contradictions that badly divide their communities in the twenty-first century. According to her, it can be achieved by charting such a course so that the Muslims can again become one of the central forces shaping the future of humanity. She suggests that the West too can bridge the gap between itself and the Muslim community by taking some concrete and specific initiatives. According to her, it is this widening gap of perception, values, and sense of compatibility which what threatens to explode into that feared epic battle of the twenty-first century. “The Islamic states, in my view, can both accommodate and reconcile with one another and with the West. It is an ambitious undertaking, but it can be done”, she opinioned.

According to her, the perception of the West by the Muslims of the world is deeply problematic. The problem is particularly intense concerning their feelings towards the United States. An abundance of data shows a steady and dramatic deterioration of approval of the United States in Muslim societies spanning at least five years. Benazir mentions in her book per se that the Pew Research Center has done consistent work on this topic demonstrating how formidable the problem of reconciling Islam and the West will be, in particular Muslims and the United States. The more detailed data are equally disturbing. The U.S. led war on terror is perceived, right or wrong, in much of the Muslim world as a war on Islam. The long-range problem seems to basically occur on the restoration of trust.

It is however heartening to note that President Obama and his administration are quite alive to cognizant of all of the above. This is the reason soon after assuming the Presidency of the United States of America; he chose to address the Muslim nation at large – and which he did in his historic speech from Cairo-Egypt on 04 June 2009. The political critics had observed then that in his 55-minute address he was able to connect to the Muslim world largely because of the fact that he was bold enough to speak the truth. And, it was also so because of the fact that he was able to relay signal of reconciliation. It was also opinioned by some experts then that the entire tone & tenor of his speech was set against the theme of reconciliation with the Muslim world as is also suggested and focused in Benazir’s book per se.

Benazir Bhutto has always been a firm believer in and proponent of the policy of reconciliation. All her life she worked to prove the one fact that the politics of vengeance and vendetta was not her cup-of-tea. This is very true as can be witnessed from her endurance of pain and sufferings at the hands of General Zia (and his henchmen), the military dictator who had captured power on 04 July 1977, after toppling her father and the democratically elected Prime Minister of the country – Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. Ever since she, her mother and other close relatives were witch hunted against, jailed and maimed during the Zia regime so much so that she was even not allowed to attend the funeral of her father who was hanged by him via what is now termed as a judicial murder. However, when her Party returned to power in 1988 and she became the youngest and the first Muslim woman head of an Islamic State (after Zia’s death in plane crash) she shunned the politics of hate, vengeance, and vendetta. She adopted the course of reconciliation instead. It is now a part of record and history that all the Zia cronies, protégées and the henchmen continued to live peacefully and take active parts in politics during her regime. All of them even ganged up against her once again by forming IJI (Islamic Democratic Alliance) – a front of the right-wing and the pro-establishment political parties. They all continued to make her life both difficult and miserable. However Bhutto never ever turned to vengeance against them all. Vengeance and hate was not in her blood.

The gory tale of the witch-hunting, malicious campaign, false politically motivated court cases, and all sorts of organized injustices meted out to her and her husband Asif Zardari (now President of Pakistan) by the joint conspiracy of her political adversaries and the so-called establishment is no secret. All of these had caused great pains and mental torture to her and her family. And, because of which her husband had to spend most part of his best life in jails and she and her small kids were forced to live in self-exile – she without her husband and her kids without their father.

It’s now a part of history and record that in December 1971 General Yahya Khan had sent a plane to New York to bring back the senior Bhutto (Benazir’s father) to pick up the pieces of a broken and devastated Pakistan then. Fast forward to the last years of General Musharraf. – Yet another military dictator and power usurper. When found in abyss, Musharraf now kneeled down before another Bhutto – this time Benazir Bhutto to bail him out. Being the largest political Party, PPP and Benazir had all the political power and support to dislodge Musharraf’s government. But for Benazir Bhutto, the larger interest of the country and the region was in her mind. She very well knew that paralyzing the Musharraf government by means of mobilizing supporters on the street was a very risky thing to do. It would have done immense damage to the peace and stability of the country and at the end the poor people of Pakistan would have suffered the most. More over, General Musharraf would have easily exited, and go in exile, by handing over the reign of the country to another General; a la Ayub-Yahya model in 1969. So, despite all opposition from many (including some from within her Party), she once again opted for reconciliation with her arch foe – General Musharraf. Thus a broad reconciliation was reached with Musharraf in the larger interest of the country to get the political affairs of the country going. This explained why the now-defunct National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO) was passed and promulgated by Musharraf’s the then government

But alas, the enemies of Benazir Bhutto and the enemies of Pakistan and its people had some other game plan in their mind. When she reached Karachi-Pakistan on 18 October 2007, after ending her long self-exile, she was greeted with over 3 million of her supporters and a huge bomb blast planned and executed by those who hated her guts. She was not cowed down then so they finally eliminated her on that fateful day of 27 December 2007 after her impressive political rally in Rawalpindi. Benazir Bhutto is no more with us today. However, on her 57th birthday (falling on 21 June) it is relieving to note that her message of reconciliation now lives on. President Asif Zardari has strived and endeavored long enough to pursue the policy of reconciliation with all and sundries. Due to this, it has brought political stability in the country and the nation has risen up from the ashes, in the aftermath of the assassination of his wife and our leader – Benazir Bhutto. No wonder her killers silenced her – the messenger of peace and reconciliation – but could not silence her message of peace and reconciliation. BB’s legacy of reconciliation thus lives on!!!

Faiz Al-Najdi is a Riyadh-based Engineer and a Writer