A couple of days back, I found from a website that the full moon in Karachi had occurred on August 3 at 20.58 hrs. From this it was evident that the Ruet-e-Hilal committee (comprising of aging mullahs) had made a mistake in declaring Eid-al-Azha on August 1 (it should have been on 31 July 2020). I sent Whattsapp and Twitter messages to everyone I knew, and immediately I was bombarded by fanatics, one of whom even called me an atheist.
One of them (a born-again Muslim and a Memon to boot) said that Muslims must look in the skies to determine if there is a new moon. So I asked him why Muslims rely on their watches when they pray five times a day, although until a hundred years back they used to look at the sky to do so. He had no answer. Naturally, he couldn't admit that today's Muslims can't determine when to start and end fasting without using watches (something invented by infidels in the West). But he persisted in calling me westernized, saying I was more interested in science than in Islam. That is of course the usual response of fundamentalists when they don't have an answer.
Today a female writer in the Tribune claimed that the theory of evolution has been rejected by most Western scientists, without naming any. Back in the 1950s, Pakistani Islamic scholars used to claim that Islam had been the first to tell mankind about evolution . I have studied the Holy Book and the Hadith in detail, but I couldn't find anything about evolution in them (nor about atom bombs, as some mullahs used to claim in those days).
I had a relative who couldn't hold a sensible conversation about anything without bringing religion into it. One day I told him that despite what we had been told by mullahs, it is now possible to find out whether it's a male or a female inside a woman's womb. He immediately said "Can you predict whether the boy or girl would live up to adulthood, or whether he or she will be a criminal or not? That is what is meant by knowing what is in a woman's womb". This again is how fundamentalists twist an argument whenever they don't have an answer. I next told him, "We were also told that no one could predict whether it would rain the next day or not, now we can even make rain fall wherever we want". He was stumped.
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