True religion & true science are mutually supporting
Col ® M Zaman Malik

“And hasten not (O Muhammad) with the Qur’an, its revelation has been perfected unto thee, and say: My Lord! Increase me in knowledge.” Moral science means systematic knowledge as applied to morals and it provides with moral sense. Scientology is a religious system based on self-improvement and promotion through self- knowledge. Any religious belief which is not comfortable with scientific proof and investigation is superstition, for true science is reason and reality, and religion is essentially a reality and pure reason; therefore, the two must correspond. Religious teaching which is at variance with science and reason is human invention and imagination unworthy of acceptance, for the antithesis and opposite of knowledge is superstition born of the ignorance of man. If we say, religion is opposed to science, we either lack knowledge of true science or religion, for both are founded upon the premises and conclusions of reason and both must bear its test.
It should be recognized that scientific knowledge is constantly expanding and what is thought to be the truth today, may be modified or reversed tomorrow. Sometimes, a religious teaching will be ahead of what can be proved or disproved by the science at a given point in time. There are however, many superstitions connected with religion which obviously contradict known physical laws of the Universe and it is these which should be recognized for what they are.
The prophets were chosen by God and God would grant prophethood that He willed. God has His own way of revealing the prophetic message and we have no knowledge or access to know about the means and characteristics of revelation. Of course, according to the Holy Qur’ran which is the miracle for the guidance of humanity for all times (Muhammad PBUH, being the last prophet sent by God to this world), the humanity should have kept this point in mind to adhere to morality which would have kept it concretely anchored to the moral ground while going about for business to have needed material benefits, essential for physical existence in this world.
The Holy Qur’an in Surah Al-Fatir- Chapter 35: 44-45 says: “Have they not journeyed through the land and seen the fate of those who went before them, nations far mightier than they? All Knowing is He and Mighty. “If it was Allah’s will to punish men for their misdeeds, not one creature would be left alive on earth’s face. But He respites them till an appointed time. And when their hour comes, they shall know that Allah has been watching over all His servants.”
Thus, in a way, the Holy Qur’an challenges the mankind by showing them on ground in front of them and in the Heaven that they can see clearly with all and every thing in it, as a scientific proof for them. In Surah Yasin-Chapter 36: 36-40, and Surah Al-Rehaman- Chapter 55, one can see and grasp easily the reality revealed by God to His prophet Muhammad (PBUH) more than nine Hundred years before Newton was victimized by the custodians of the Church. The revelation unless fiddled with will never tell a lie; it will rather always continue to open new vistas of knowledge and discovery to the mankind. However, it must be read in the very context it was revealed for. Ptolemaic system was done away with by the Holy Qur’an only; why was it not done so by other religious Scriptures? Obviously, those Holy Scriptures were altered or misinterpreted. Islam is a religion of Science. It is another matter, though ‘most piercing into heart’ that with renaissance the benefits were pushed to the West. Napoleon was the first to benefit himself, though his approach totally ignored the humane side of it. He began to think in terms of the Survival of the Fittest. Same was true, more or less, concerning other Nordics, too. Just as Abu-Sufyan said, ‘My honour lies in the back of my camels; the West claimed that its honour lay in the gift of Muslims who set the West on the path of renaissance. But then what happened to Muslim’s glory which had enabled them rule Spain from 712 AD to 1492 AD?
Ar-Rum, “The Romans,” takes its name from a word in the first verse of the Surah Romans- Chapter 31. The armies of the Eastern Roman Empire had been defeated by the Persians in all the territories near Arabia. In the year 613 AD, Jerusalem and Damascus fell, and in the following year Egypt. A Persian army invaded Anatolia and was threatening Constantinople itself in the year AD 615 or 616, (the sixth or seventh year before the Hijrah) when, according to the best authorities, this Surah (Ar-Rum) was revealed at Mecca. The Pagan Arabs triumphed in the news of Persian victories over the Prophet and his little band of followers, because the Christian Romans were believers in the One God, whereas, the Persians were not. They argued that the power of Allah could not be supreme and absolute, as the prophet kept proclaiming it to be, since the forces of a Pagan empire had been able to defeat His worshippers. The Prophet (PBUH) was told by Allah: that the Romans would be victorious over the Persians, and also, the persecuted company of Muslims in Arabia would have the reason to rejoice, “Within ten years.” Infect, in 624 AD the Roman armies entered purely Persian territory, and in the same year, a little army of the Muslims, led by Prophet (PBUH) overthrew the flower of Arab Chivalry upon the field of Badr. But the prophecies are only prelude to God’s proclamation of universal kingdom, which is shown to be an actual Sovereignty. The laws of nature are pounded as the Laws of Allah. So, this Prophecy took barely ‘Ten years’ or so to mature! This is the first instance to remember.
The Second one is to follow now in the light of Surah Bani Israel (The Children of Israel), Chapter 17: 104, which reads as follows: “And We said unto the children of Israel after him: Dwell in the land; but when the promise of the hereafter cometh to pass We shall bring you back as a crowed gathered out of various nations.” The verse implies that like Jews, the Muslims would suffer national disaster twice. The first of these two disasters befell Muslims when Baghdad fell to the arms of the Tartars under Halaku Khan. They are here told that they would be visited with Divine punishment for the second time in the days ‘of hereafter’ in the times of promised Messiah – Jesus. The verse signifies that as the Jews were punished for the second time, which means the fulfilment of the Promise of the hereafter days, the Jews would be brought back to the Holy Land from all parts of the world. The Prophecy has been remarkably fulfilled by the return of the Jews to Palestine under the ‘Balfour Declaration’ and by the setting up of the State of Israel. “The Promise of the days of the hereafter applies to the time of the Promised Messiah (Bayan). The first prophecy took something like Ten years to be fulfilled. How long will this take place, after the establishment of Jewish government in Palestine since 14th May, 1948? This time, mind you, the whole world is involved, because we will all be consumed by the ‘Here After’.


A drop goes a long way
LAN XINZHEN

Tongren in China’s southwestern Guizhou Province is an 18,000 square-km area largely shaped by the dissolving action of water on carbonate bedrock, and is home to 3.9 million people. Located in the humid subtropical climate zone, this region has an annual rainfall of 1,300 mm. The landscape of rolling mountains cannot hold or store any rainwater, which makes the region one of the most water-scarce areas of China.
The acute water scarcity makes for very harsh living for the local people. The farmers’ houses, located on the hills or at the foot of hills, are built of rock and usually roofed by grass and tiles. The inside is humid and dark. Sometimes, one finds two-story wooden buildings supported by columns, a traditional architectural style. The only electric appliance in most homes is often an old TV set.
The more modern two-story concrete buildings all belong to families whose members work as migrant laborers in the country’s eastern regions.
“The lives of the people here lag at least 10 to 20 years behind that of the eastern regions,” said a local civil servant Liu Jian.
At a small village in Tongren, a barefooted middle-aged woman carries on her shoulder freshly threshed rice from the farm next to her house. She said many villagers worked in the field barefoot to save on buying shoes.
Unlike many poverty-stricken areas in China whose backwardness can be attributed to poor transport infrastructure, Tongren has express highways and a small airport with daily flights to big, cosmopolitan cities such as Guangzhou and Shenzhen. However, this has not brought wealth to the local people. A senior government official, Chen Yiqin, said Tongren’s poverty was mainly caused by low efficiency of water usage.
The farmlands, scattered over the hills, lack basic facilities to hold or store ground water. During rains, water runs down the hills, leaving less than 10 percent for irrigation.
The Ministry of Water Resources defines such shortage as a “technical water shortage,” to differentiate it from a natural shortage of water. In Tongren, 1.3 million people and 540,000 cattle heads have no access to adequate supplies of drinking water owing to this “technical water shortage.” Many locals have to climb mountains and walk several miles for drinking water. In some places, firefighting vehicles have to be mobilized to transport water. In this mainly agrarian region, agricultural output has been hit by water shortage every nine out of 10 years. A local ballad captures the situation well when it says, “Please drink my wine but not my water; please borrow my oil but not my water.”
“Technical” but real
Tongren’s “technical water shortage” has emerged as a big problem for the local government. In the winter of 2005, it embarked on a campaign of mobilizing farmers to build simple water storage facilities, including ponds close to farmlands, pools at the bottom of the valleys and water cellars in courtyards to collect and store rainwater.
“My small pond has helped me so much this year,” said farmer Yang Shengguang. He built the 50-cubic-meter pond next to his field in about one month last December. It was filled full by two spring rains this year. When the seasonal summer drought struck this region, Yang irrigated his lands with the water in the pond and managed to save his vegetables, tobacco and his 0.1-hectare rice crop. “In my 67 years, this was the first time I did not have to worry about watering my farmlands,” said Yang with a smile, after reaping a good harvest this year.
Yang said the idea of building ponds to conserve water was nothing new to this region. But the cost of constructing a pond with no seepage or evaporation, or a water cellar, could run anywhere between 3,000 yuan and 5,000 yuan, while the per-capita income of local farmers is less than 1,000 yuan. Even the local government finds this too expensive as it sometimes has to put off paying its own employees. Meanwhile, the region was hit by the most serious summer drought in 20 years last year. The drought, which lasted more than 40 days, affected 70 percent of the population and 61 percent of farmlands, whose output was reduced to almost nothing. The disaster prompted the local authorities to organize farmers to build simple water storage facilities. The expenses were borne by borrowing from richer neighboring regions and squeezing the local budget.
Through last winter and this spring, 67 pools and 5,230 ponds and water cellars were built, involving an investment of more than 35 million yuan.
Local farmer Ran Guanghong said he planted vegetables in a 0.3-hectare plot with its water needs met by ponds, bringing him a revenue of more than 20,000 yuan. Ran said this would have been unthinkable before.
Yang Yuxue, the Party head of Tongren, said output was higher in areas serviced by these simple irrigation facilities.
However, not all farmers have access to pools, ponds or water cellars as farmers still have to pay for half the expenses. This summer’s drought cost farms without man-made ponds a dramatic drop in output.
Yang Yuxue said, “Farmers without their own water facilities are now eager to build them during the off-season in winter.”
Since only less than one quarter of the locals’ water shortage problems has been solved by the campaign so far, the local government is committed to expanding the program with support from the Ministry of Water Resources. Besides offering financial support to farmers, it has also embarked on enlarging ponds into reservoirs.
September 26 witnessed the official inauguration of the reconstruction of irrigation facilities in eastern part of Tongren, with a total investment of 255 million yuan. These facilities will be able to cover 22,000 hectares of farmland and provide water for more than 600,000 people.
Yang said the plan is to enable all farmers to have their own simple irrigation facilities in the next few years.
Less poverty
China has been trying to alleviate poverty in water-scarce areas by building simple irrigation facilities since the 1980s. Such facilities in the driest middle and western provinces of Gansu, Shaanxi and Shanxi, have yielded satisfactory effects. The population suffering from drinking water shortage in water-scarce regions nationwide has dropped from more than 80 million to 24 million.
Jiao Yong, Vice Minister of Water Resources, said the Central Government plans to eradicate rural poverty caused by water shortage by 2010. He said the top priorities in this respect are adequate water for people and cattle, reconstruction of irrigation facilities to raise efficiency and ecological projects aimed at preserving water.
Guizhou Province, Xinjiang Uygur Autono-mous Region and Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region should be the key target areas for future programs. Of the population living in poverty in these regions, more than half do not have access to clean drinking water.
The Ministry of Water Resources mapped out a five-year plan of poverty relief in 2001, which identifies the village and family as basic units of focus. One goal set in the plan was to guarantee that per-capita ownership of basic farmland that has stable yields despite droughts or excessive rain reaches 0.07 hectare in poverty-stricken regions. Another was to ensure that irrigated areas that have adopted water-saving technologies account for 20 percent of total effective irrigation areas. These goals are yet to be realized.
According to the Ministry of Water Resources, the reasons for this include low investment in the irrigation infrastructure-despite substantial growth since 1993-and the ageing and poor condition of those facilities that are there.
The ministry estimates that hundreds of billion yuan are required to rid these regions of water shortage. “No matter how difficult it may be, eliminating poverty caused by lack of water is our responsibility,” said Jiao Yong.

(The Daily Mail-Beijing Review Articles Exchange Item)



Materializing energy needs
Mamoona Ismail

The release of new estimates showing that Afghanistan may possess substantial reserves of oil and gas may alter the region’s geopolitical balance. In March 2006, the US Geological Survey and the Afghan Ministry of Mines and Industry reported that Afghanistan’s resource base was much greater than previously believed. According to their findings, undiscovered petroleum resources in northern Afghanistan range from 3.6 to 36.5 trillion cubic feet (TCF) of natural gas, with a mean of 15.7 TCF. Estimates of oil range from 0.4 to 3.6 billion barrels (BBO), with a mean of 1.6 (BB0). Estimates for natural gas liquids range from 126 to 1,325 million barrels (MMB) with a mean of 562 (MMB). These estimates represent an 18-fold increase in the country’s potential oil resources, and more than triple the natural gas resources.
If accurate, the discovery of oil and gas resources could mark the turning point in Afghanistan’s reconstruction efforts. Energy exports could generate the revenue that Afghan officials need to modernize the country’s infrastructure and expand economic opportunities for the beleaguered and fractious population. “ Today, there are two pipeline projects that would connect Central Asian exporters and South Asian markets. One is a Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline (IPI) and the other is a Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan pipeline (TAP). Naturally, these contrasting plans have helped spur geopolitical maneuvering in the region. Given the US policy goal of trying to stymie Iran’s energy exports wherever possible, Washington opposes the IPI pipeline and supports TAP. The latter also could enhance Washington’s new strategy of reorienting Central Asian energy to South Asian markets in order to steer Central Asian states away from Russia. Russia, for its part, supports the IPI pipeline and Gazprom, the Kremlin-controlled company, has even offered to help build it. Meanwhile, Chinese leaders have expressed interest in building a link to the IPI pipeline that would enable Beijing to import gas overland, instead of via tankers plying the Indian Ocean.
In addition to the pipeline competition, Russia has tried to gain the upper hand in the energy game by seeking control over Turkmenistan’s natural gas reserves. The ability to dictate where Ashgabat ships its energy is seen as a central element of a Russian plan to create a Eurasian gas cartel that resembles OPEC. Turkmenistan, however, has proven to be a fickle partner for Russia, underscored by Ashgabat’s recent demand for a sharp increase in the price paid by Moscow for Turkmen gas.
Russia could gain a foothold in South Asia through the IPI pipeline, but there are several factors beyond the prospect of Afghanistan’s potential energy wealth that are clouding the project. For one, India highly values its relationship with the United States and New Delhi may be reluctant to anger Washington by opting for the IPI route. The same factor also appears to be discouraging Pakistan’s participation in IPI. A decision by India and Pakistan to select the TAP route over IPI would constitute a major geopolitical setback for both Russia and ran.
A prerequisite to any pipeline construction in Afghanistan is the stable law and order situation in the country. Over the past year, Taliban have become increasingly active, but the new energy estimate could bolster international resolve to address the insurgency. Pakistan desires internal stability and accelerated reconstruction of Afghanistan. It has time and again urged upon the international community to provide all-round assistance to establish a stable government in Afghanistan. Under any scenario, the end of Afghanistan’s stabilization process, along with the start of pipeline construction, is a long way off. But the vistas opened up by this new energy discovery not only raise the stakes of the pipeline battle; they have implications that go well beyond Afghanistan into Central Asia.