The Halwa Chronicles - II

So much for "conspiracies against Islam" and "Pakistan's religious leadership." The maulanas simply had halwa beyond its sell-by date.

From Dawn:

Outdated halwa laid clerics down

By Munawer Azeem

Wednesday, 23 Dec, 2009

        

ISLAMABAD, Dec 22: An unofficial report about the Halwa which sickened a number of religious figures here last week suggested that the sweet was ‘expired’, sources in the police told Dawn on Tuesday.

The sources said the sample of the Halwa was sent to the biological laboratory of the Punjab University by Senator Azam Khan Swati and the report was submitted to the Secretariat police on Monday night.

The report said though poison was not found in the sweet it contained bacteria due to expiry, the sources said.

However, the investigators are waiting for the report of the chemical examiner Lahore to decide the fate of the case, the police added.

The police said even if expiry of the Halwa was confirmed, the investigation would continue to trace the person who had delivered it at the suite of Senator Abdul Gahfoor Haideri to ascertain whether it was a mistake or a deliberate act.

The sources said several requests made by the investigators to interrogate the senator’s cooks in isolation and independently were still being denied.

On December 17, the Secretariat police registered an attempted murder case against the unidentified person on the complaint of Senator Haideri.

Mufti Muneebur Rehman, Liaquat Balcoh, JUI’s Rashidul Haq, deputy chief Abdul Khaliq, press secretary Abdul Haleem and Abdul Rauf; Jamaat-i-Islami’s Zubair Farooq along with the Maulana’s two cooks - Zakir Hussain and Qurban Ali - and Mehar Dil Baloch suffered food poisoning after eating the sweet.

My bet: The report will be rejected by the maulvis who will never accept anything less than deliberate poisoning.

The Halwa Chronicles

There's something utterly surreal about a country where a whole class of people stereotypically derided as "halwa lovers" (idiomatically meaning 'partial to the good life') is spectacularly laid low by, of all things, halwa.

I refer of course to the now infamous episode two days ago where a bunch of maulvis - including the 'Real Drone Attacker' Mufti Muneebur Rehman (he of the Ruet) and the Jamaat's 'Face-of-the-Youth' Secretary General, 57-year-old Liaquat Baloch - were rushed to the hospital with severe food poisoning after consuming the aforsesaid dish at the Islamabad residence of the deputy head of the Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Islam.

The Drone Attacker laid low by halwa (Source: Dawn / Online)

Reports of the details are conflicting about what kind of halwa was the culprit (habshi or sohan) and what all these clerics were up to (some say they were meeting for a Mashaikh Conference called by the government to declare suicide bombings unIslamic, other more credible reports - especially since the government would not be calling a conference in the flat of the JUI senator - claim the conference was only incidental to the whole thing). But everyone seems to agree that the sweet was delivered to the residence by some unknown man the night before the meeting and that the host Senator Abdul Ghafoor Haideri only survived the poisoning because, having diabetes, he refrained from trying the sweets. Obviously taking food items from total strangers and serving them to your guests without verification - despite there being "a strange, foul smell" emanating from them (in the words of DIG Bani Amin in the Dawn report) - is not, however, a problem for Mr. Haideri.

But this report in today's The News, wherein Mr. Baloch claims it to be a conspiracy to eliminate the "religious leadership" of the country and vows that "such incidents cannot weaken our principled stand of exposing conspiracies against Islam and Pakistan", also sheds some light on the mindset of the same leaders.

"“There is no doubt that it was an attempt on the lives of Ulema who have been raising their voice against the anti-Pakistan international conspiracies,” he maintained. He said the sweet dish was of black colour and carried a very bad taste and everybody, therefore, could eat a very small quantity."

Call me fussy but if someone offered ME something black, foul-smelling and awful tasting, I would politely refuse. I mean, how desperate for halwa IS our "religious leadership"?