“O mankind, indeed We have created you from male and female and made you peoples and tribes that you may know one another. Indeed, the most noble of you in the sight of Allah is the most righteous of you.”
(Al-Qur’an, Surah Al-Hujurat 49:13)
Beneath this sky stitched with the same stars, our flags flutter like different-coloured sails on one vast river. The verse does not command us to erase the colours—it asks us only to look across the water and recognise the same longing in every sail. When the river of sport turns bitter and turbulent, we forget that single, quiet truth: we were made to know one another.
The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ said:
“The believers in their mutual kindness, compassion and sympathy are just like one body. When one of the limbs suffers, the whole body responds to it with wakefulness and fever.”
(Sahih al-Bukhari & Sahih Muslim)
Today that body lies feverish under floodlights. A limb called Bangladesh has been severed from the tournament field; another called Pakistan refuses to lift its bat while its brother bleeds. The fever spreads through every mohalla, every chai stall, every child’s cupped hands dreaming of a six that will arc like a comet across borders. We cannot pretend the wound is far away. The pulse is one.
And always, in the quiet chamber of my heart, these lines return like a moth to lantern-glass:
(In the mirror of the heart the beloved’s face appears
When that image arrives, even the heart grows restless)
That restlessness once lived inside every cricket ground from Karachi to Chittagong. A white ball left a bowler’s hand and the entire subcontinent held its breath together. Today the mirror is clouded with smoke; the image flickers, half-lost.
Yet memory still glows.
February 1987. The sky above Rajasthan heavy with the iron scent of war. Operation Brasstacks had drawn sabres so close that mothers on both sides of the border began whispering prayers into their children’s hair at night. Into that charged silence stepped Shaheed General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq.
He did not arrive in a convoy of black cars or behind bullet-proof glass. He came like a breeze that slips under a closed door—unannounced, gentle, impossible to ignore. He met Rajiv Gandhi in Delhi, then travelled to Jaipur and sat among ordinary men and women in the stands, watching India play New Zealand. No protocol separated him from the crowd. He shook calloused hands, laughed with children waving paper flags, let the winter sun touch his face the way it touched theirs.
And then he spoke four words that still shimmer like dew on morning grass:
“Cricket for peace is my mission.”
They were not rehearsed slogans. They were a flame held up in a storm. That small flame warmed the border winds. Troops stepped back. Fingers moved away from triggers. Dialogue, fragile as new leaves, began again. Shaheed Zia carried no ambition for marble statues or golden medals. He carried only the faith that a leather ball, when struck cleanly, can speak a language deeper than any communiqué.
That language is now in peril.
The T20 World Cup 2026 has become a garden where roses have been replaced by thorns. Bangladesh, after a season of blossoming—fifteen victories in thirty matches, bowlers breathing fire, batters painting the sky—finds itself cast out. Not for lack of skill, but because it would not send its sons into a storm whose lightning it could already see on the horizon.
Bangladesh stands firm and justified on this issue.
The refusal was not born of pride or politics; it was born of a father’s instinct to shield his children from gathering clouds. When a fast bowler like Mustafizur Rahman can be erased from the IPL under shadows that smelled of revenge, when diplomatic rivers have turned to acid, when the memory of sheltering a deposed leader still burns like an open wound—then to ask for safety is not rebellion. It is the quiet dignity of a people who know the worth of every beating heart they send to the crease.
Pakistan heard that heartbeat across the border and answered with its own. To forfeit the glittering India match on 15 February is not grandstanding. It is a brother placing his arm around another brother’s shoulder in the hour of exile and saying: “If you cannot stand on that field, neither will I.” That gesture carries the fragrance of the same courage General Zia once scattered on Jaipur soil.
The canvas before us is still untouched—white as the moment before dawn.
Pakistan’s path forward is luminous because it seeks to heal rather than to conquer:
Let the Lahore conversations continue like a slow, patient river finding its course
Press—gently yet unyieldingly—for hybrid or fully neutral venues that allow every flag to fly without bowing
Arrange future exhibitions where Bangladeshi and Pakistani players can once again share the same dressing-room laughter, the same pre-match dua
Raise a steady voice inside the ICC for rules that no longer force nations to choose between dignity and participation
These are not the steps of the weak. They are the steps of those who remember that true strength lies in holding the door open even when the wind howls.
Cricket in our part of the world has never been only runs and wickets. It has been the sigh of grandmothers who still light lamps for sons separated by 1947. It has been the shout of boys who found language beyond language in a cover drive. It has been the silence after a last-ball six when even enemies stood and applauded.
When politicians are permitted to stride across that sacred turf in muddy boots, the silence turns to ash.
Yet the mirror of the heart refuses to stay dark forever.
I still see the boy in a Dhaka lane tossing a taped ball against a cracked wall until the street lamps come on.
I see the child in Lahore defending an imaginary wicket with a splintered bat and fierce love.
I see the old man in Colombo who still keeps newspaper cuttings of Aravinda de Silva and Wasim Akram in the same drawer.
I see every player who ever walked to the middle under floodlights carrying not only his country’s hopes, but the hopes of strangers who became family for twenty-two yards.
That boy, that child, that old man, those players—they do not hunger for Nobel citations or economic thunderbolts dressed as peace. They hunger only for the clean sound of willow meeting leather, for the moment when rivalry dissolves into shared joy, for the embrace at the end of a fierce contest.
Shaheed Zia understood this. He did not preach peace from a pulpit. He lived it in a winter stand in Jaipur, among strangers who, for the length of an afternoon, became brothers beneath the same sun.
Today the question burns quietly inside every lover of the game:
Will we let the gentleman’s game become another graveyard of grievances?
Or will we—players, boards, leaders, watchers—choose once more to let the bat speak with more truth than any headline?
The Lahore talks are no longer merely about rearranging fixtures. They are about whether we still believe in the verse that calls us to know one another, in the hadith that makes one man’s pain the fever of all, in the restless heart that once made a white ball fly like a messenger between divided houses.
Let us not fail the children watching from the boundary edge.
Let us not fail the mirror.
Cricket for peace must not remain a faded photograph from 1987.
It must become the living flame of 2026—and every summer that follows.
Allahumma ij’alna min al-mutasaadiqeen, min al-mutahabbina fi-ka.
(O Allah, make us among those who are truthful with one another, among those who love each other for Your sake.)
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