DAWN.COM | Columnists | Smokers� Corner: Boxing the faith

Once upon a time, charity boxes of so-called Islamic welfare organisations were a ubiquitous sight at shops in our cities. These boxes were claimed to have been put there by the shopkeepers and Islamic welfare groups to raise money for the building of mosques and madressahs.

They started appearing in shops during Pakistan's involvement in the so-called anti-Soviet Afghan Jihad in the 1980s — a decade that saw a proliferation of mosques and madressahs across the country, mostly funded by aid from the Gulf countries, and patronised by the Ziaul Haq dictatorship. By the 1990s, however, it became quite apparent that the funds collected through these boxes weren't necessarily being used to build mosques and madressahs that were already thriving and in abundance.

The money in this case was largely ending up in the laps of various Kashmiri and Afghan Jihadi organisations, and from 1989 onwards, sectarian organisations too started to place their respective charity boxes at shops. Most of the charity boxes belonged to the Jamaatud Dawah Pakistan, a so-called charity organisation formed in Lahore in 1985 by a former university professor of Islamic Studies.