Karachi, A Poem

Karachi, A Poem

walking past the chips wala

masala chips after maghrib prayers

oily hands, walking

a Pepsi, maybe? from seven to thirteen rupees

past abdullah bhai's bakery

maybe a burned cake rusk for free

not today, Fridays only

passed the gosht walas

under the infested trees

swooping around the congregation

of cats and crows, goat intestines fall

from trees

passing the sign, "matric boks and suplies"

towards the printing press and garage

mechanics that fix cars and bicycles

Into the thin street

dividing the arcade

where children watch their backs playing streetfighter

"Beware of Babar Bhai, he is not the right kind of man!”

and the dabbu table for men

around which young boys learn to smoke

at Abdul’s pan shop where you can buy

Marlboro lights from America

“made by Jews to make Muslims impotent

It is a war of demographics; Abdul is a spy!”

A tin paper box wala announces his presence

"four annas for a kilo"

Samosas, Jalebis, and Cake rusk

at the Master Bakery, but here the oil is a month old

Khurram buys Pakoras from here, but never samosas

He has epilepsy, it might be the oil

Condensed milk is good with ice candy

but it costs one rupee extra

"gole gande wala, you are a thief!"

"Wheat has gone up four rupees this week," he says

A rupee is not worth much these days

The streets are quiet

It is time for evening prayers

Shias have called for prayers already

At the al-Aqsa mosque, Maulana Fazal has a sore throat

A Siren is used in his place.

There is resentment: “Tonight they will have the last word"

Towards the Al-Farook ground which once had a coat of thinning grass

Now it is covered in gravel.

rabid mongrels occupy it at night

There was an encounter here

police shot a militant and killed a boy of almost-eleven

“A batsmen, like MIANDAD!,” they said.

But I suspect the dead are always remembered like that

Maybe I will be lucky enough to die

in my Graham Gooch uniform

But I fear that boys who die in English uniforms do not go to heaven

Across the street is Agha's Juice House

Clean shaven young men wait there for girls

From Sir Syed Girls College

Sohail from down the street sits there

He once sported a jamaati beard

Now he is clean shaven and in love

On the main road

a green and white bus is broken down

Emblazoned on it, a fighter jet streaming above a mosque

Under it the words "Allah will protect"

The air is thick with smoke

The horns blaze against the summer heat

A gentle breeze brushes against me

Maybe one day I will move to the ocean.

The Poetic Life of Afzal Ahmed Syed

My stepfather, poet Afzal Ahmed Syed, loved Dhaka. But his beloved city now only appears to him in nightmares.

---

Arsalan Khan December 16, 2011 

My stepfather, Afzal Ahmed Syed, is a generally quiet and inward man who occasionally breaks from his reticence with humorous insights about the world. He does this not through fanciful and elaborate explanations, but in pithy quotes or by reciting a shaer.

As many thoughtful commentators on his life and poetry have suggested, much of my father’s poetic vision has been shaped by his experience as a witness to immense political tragedies like East Pakistan’s violent rebirth as Bangladesh in 1971, the Lebanese Civil War, and the ethnic and sectarian violence that overwhelmed Karachi in the 1990s.

Musharraf Farooqi, my father’s friend and translator, has suggested that his poetry reflects a long “inner migration” commonly found amongst writers and thinkers who have witnessed the enormity of war and suffering. This is undeniable. But, there is a little more to the story than that. It is important to remember that experiencing great trauma does not necessarily generate the kind of humanitarian ethos that I believe is central to my father’s life and work. In fact, if our modern day experience demonstrates anything, it is that political tragedies are just as likely, if not more likely, to deepen the ethos of brutality and violence as they are to create an ethic of self-reflection and compassion.

Perpetrators of violence often believe themselves to be victims of some kind. They always imagine that they are merely defending themselves against the machinations of others. It is no surprise then that the arc of history takes the shape of a recurring tragedy as one generation of victims becomes the next generation of perpetrators. Not surprisingly, violence and suffering are recurring themes in his poetry:

We need a whole lot of flowers

for one half of them will succumb to their wounds

We need a forest of nocturnal flowers

for those who could not sleep for the report of gunfire

we need a whole lot of flowers

for a whole lot of rueful people

we need anonymous flowers

to cloak the stripped girl

(from "We Need a Whole Lot of Flowers")

My father’s humanistic ethic is built around a realisation that the lines between victims and perpetrators of violence are often quite blurry. This too comes from experience, especially his experience in Dhaka, Bangladesh during the Bangladesh war of Independence. My father frequently says, and with no small measure of pride, that the first and only vote that he has ever cast in his life was for the Awami League Party in the 1971 elections.

For those of you who are not familiar with Pakistani-Bangladeshi history, this election was won convincingly by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the Bangladeshi leader and champion of Bengali political autonomy and civil rights, but was later abrogated by the West-Pakistani establishment backed by the powerful Pakistani military. This event thrust the country into a cataclysmic Civil War that led to the deaths of millions and culminated in the emergence of Bangladesh as an independent nation-state. Although himself an Urdu-speaking West Pakistani, he was a firm supporter of the Bengali movement. This commitment was informed by his unbounded love for Dhaka, a city that he had made his own. He says that every night, around dusk, he would renew his love for the city by taking a stroll through its narrow streets and newly erected parks.

He was a staunch supporter the Bengali movement because he understood that a people, especially a people with such monumental intellectual and literary achievements, could only be subjugated so long before they revolted. Yet, despite his support of the Bengali movement, my father became a victim of the war. On December 14, 1971, Bengali soldiers forcefully removed him from his home in Purbali, a suburb on the outskirts of Dhaka, and interned him in Mirpur, a quarter of Dhaka where other Urdu-speaking minorities lived. He could no longer walk through his city and as a result his love, naturally, dissipated. In 1972, he was arrested as a Pakistani sympathizer and a collaborator with the Pakistani military. This was during a time when many such “internal enemies” were being executed. He was later deemed a “peaceful citizen” and released, possibly at the request of an influential member in the Bangladeshi militia forces. A year later, he along with his mother and six younger siblings managed to escape Dhaka, never to return, making their way through India and Nepal to Karachi where he now lives.

If my voice is not reaching you,

add to it the echo —

echo of ancient epics

And to that —

a princess

And to the princess—your beauty

And to your beauty —

a lover’s heart

And in the lover’s heart

a dagger

(from "If My Voice is Not Reaching You")

My father rarely speaks of Dhaka, but when he does it is with a tremendous sense of betrayal and sadness. His beloved city, he says, now only appears to him in nightmares. It was in Dhaka that he first began to think about the destructive potential of language, its capacity to strip people of their humanity and open them up to violent retribution. The War my father experienced was very much fought in language well before it was fought on the streets of Dhaka. West Pakistanis had long dehumanised their fellow citizens in East Pakistan, attacking them for being backwards and unsophisticated.

This was also very much a war about language because West Pakistanis had imagined their Bengali counterparts to have a degraded and inferior tongue. Later, when everyone had abandoned speech for war, the Bengalis turned on their Urdu speaking minority with the same vitriol to which they had themselves been subjected. Now, it was Urdu-speakers who were imagined to be conspiring, by virtue of their language, against Bangladeshi liberation. Much of my father’s interest in poetry emerged in a context where everyday language had become deeply compromised on all sides. His poetic vision springs from the knowledge that our modern day political tragedies are rooted in everyday speech and language. Maybe this is why he remains to this day a conspicuously “quiet” and “inward” man and maybe this is why when he does speak, he prefers to speak in the language of poetry.

Maybe poetry in his world carries a unique potential to transcend the violence of our modern world, a violence woven deeply into the tapestry of our everyday lives.

Poetry translations have been done by Musharraf Ali Farooqi.

This post was originally published here.

Why the Insaafian Dream is not the Solution

Why the Insaafian Dream is not the Solution

Published in The News, September 25, 2014. 

Let me begin by admitting that I agree with Imran Khan. Our political establishment, by which I mean our major political parties, is full of people who have no respect for the rule of law, who treat government office as their own private business and use the police like their own personal armies. These are mostly people who, absent media cameras, would scoff at the suggestion that they are “servants” of the people. This must change. But, none of this justifies the politics of that urban, middle to upper class segment of PTI’s base that we have come to call Insaafians.

The politics of Insaafians is based on a very simple premise: Pakistan’s problems can all be traced to the fact that corrupt, morally bankrupt politicians are in control of government. Their lack of moral character is mostly attributed to their “feudal” and “uneducated” backgrounds. By contrast, Imran Khan is an incorruptible leader with a morally unassailable character. If such a person were to lead Pakistan, they argue, Pakistan would be transformed, politics would be purified of corruption, rule of law would rein supreme, and Pakistan would be on its way to becoming a leader in the world of nations, as it rightly should be.

Let’s suspend disbelief for a minute and accept that Imran Khan is in fact as unimpeachable as Insaafians say.  The question still remains, how will one man’s moral character lead to the kind of “revolution” that they envision? Obviously, a functioning government requires more than one moral person or even a few. It requires a whole cadre of ministers and a diverse array of bureaucrats and functionaries. How will PTI get these individuals to act so morally? Insaafians largely respond in two ways. First, they say that Khan would dismiss people who do not meet his high moral standards. Second, they say that the great leader will become an example for all other politicians and will inspire them to act in accordance with the highest of moral standards. This combination of top down party discipline and trickle-down morality will purify politics of corruption and vice.

PTI’s rhetoric of “revolution” belies the profoundly conservative nature of this perspective. What we have here is the vision of a top-heavy and centrally controlled administrative apparatus tasked with moral uplift and reform. This vision of a paternal state ushering the country into modernity is hardly new. It has been the primary justification for army rule in Pakistan since our founding. Whatever the ideological differences between the regimes of Ayub Khan , Zia-ul-Haq, and Parvez Musharraf, they all converged on the idea that civilian politicians could not be trusted to govern Pakistan because they lacked the appropriate moral character, especially discipline and honor, and that Pakistan’s progress depended on standing above the corruption of civilian politics. Similarly, Insaafians insist that our politicians are incorrigible and politics itself must be transcended.

When PTI leaders claim that they have inspired a whole generation of youth to participate in the political process, people who otherwise see politics as a filthy vocation, they mask the fact that what they have actually inspired is a kind of anti-politics that treats all political negotiation, dealing and bargaining as a sign of corruption and immorality.  When one begins with such an absolutist and purist vision of what politics ought to be, the solution can only be a centralized and authoritarian state. Insaafians dream of a state governed by “educated” urban professionals—a technocracy—who, unlike “feudals,” are not only more efficient but also morally upright. The argument goes that these technocrats, untainted by politics, will faithfully serve the people and usher in a “naya” Pakistan.

This discourse about the moral vice of our politicians elides the real problem of governance in Pakistan, which is not that our politicians lack moral character (why should they be less moral than politicians elsewhere?) but that the majority of Pakistanis lack the capacity to hold them accountable. This lack of accountability springs from the vast inequalities of wealth and power that structure the relationship between Pakistan’s elites (business, landed, and military) and the rest of the population, including the middle class.  Insofar as PTI’s leadership draws from the same pool of privileged and powerful people (and it does!), there is no reason to believe PTI will be any more accountable than any other party.

The passion that drives Insaafians is certainly real. The problems that Insaafians identify in the political establishment are real enough, too. But the Insaafian vision of a moral state, purified of politics and politicians, is not the solution. Certainly, one can argue that PTI will govern better than PML-N or PPP, but this is a far more humble claim than “revolution.” It need not come with the sanctimony we have come to expect from Insaafians.

But, there is still promise here. If the Insaafians can channel their passion into the difficult work of organizing people and building up local institutions and, more specifically, organizing cross-class alliances (lower to middle class) that can stand as a challenge to elite power and privilege, then we might still find ourselves on the road to accountability and a more substantive democracy. For this to happen, however, Insaafians must abandon the framework in which the problem of politics in Pakistan is reducible to the corrupt moral character of our politicians and instead focus on the structures of power and inequality that allow elites, all elites, to evade accountability. This requires first that we awaken from the dream of the great savior, but maybe this is like asking for a naya PTI.

The 'Harlem Shake' and the Western Illusion of Freedom

with Jason Hickel

When five teenagers in Queensland, Australia uploaded a video of themselves dancing to a short excerpt of Baauer’s song “Harlem Shake” it immediately went viral, garnering some 400 million views and spawning well over 100,000 copycat versions.
Critiques of the fad thus far have pointed out that it looks nothing at all like the real Harlem Shake, and that – as Harlem residents have been quick to assert – it appropriates black working-class style without due acknowledgment, leaving no room for the original.  These are important points, but there’s yet more to explore about the Harlem Shake craze. As by far the most popular meme of the year so far, it begs for analysis: Why is it so infectious? What does it tap into in our collective consciousness that makes it work so well?

Of course, one might reasonably ask why anyone should care about the meaning of such a flimsy, fleeting fad like the Harlem Shake, which in a matter of weeks will be eclipsed by yet another viral meme. What is there really to say about such a bizarre collective ritual?  It’s just a bunch of young people having fun, one might say – leave it alone and enjoy its entertainment value.
But there’s more to it than that.  We suggest that the Harlem Shake videos have become so popular because they dramatize aspirations for freedom that lie at the very center of Western culture.  But the particular notion of freedom at play here is one that has been thoroughly co-opted by consumer capitalism in a manner that undermines the possibility for emancipatory politics.
To get at this, let’s begin by considering the general formula of the meme itself.  Each video offers 30 seconds of footage divided evenly into two parts.  First we’re presented with a mundane setting, generally formal or regimented, with a single non-conformist doing a random dance to which no one pays any attention.  By far the most popular is the one with the Norwegian soldiers, which has well over 50 million views. It presents us with CCTV-like footage of uniformed cadets in rigid lines, their bodies stiffened to attention.  Other popular versions include office workers – again, sometimes in uniform – sitting behind rows of desks and staring like zombies into their computer screens.
Then the bass drops, the music shifts, and the scene cuts to total mayhem: everyone wears unique costumes, generally with masks, often scantily clad, and each person engages in their own completely idiosyncratic dance.  The costumes and dances are usually absurd: one might wear a sleeping bag while squirming on the ground, bash against a wall while wearing a Viking costume, or stand in the corner with a dinosaur mask doing pelvis thrusts.  It all seems totally random; indeed, the more random the better.


A theory of freedom
These videos are so compelling because they stage a simple and elegant contrast between the rigidity and monotony of everyday life and work, and an indomitable spirit that aims to escape, to transcend, to overcome stifling social norms. In doing so, the meme taps into a long tradition of classical liberal thought, resonances of which can be found in thinkers as diverse as Voltaire, Emerson, and Nietzsche. This tradition holds that liberation – the emancipation of the individual – requires separating the self from social norms, resisting mass conformity, and questioning the rules imposed by arbitrary authorities.

This Western conception of freedom assumes a fundamental tension between the individual and society: the former is considered to be authentic (and prior) while the latter is considered to be artifice (and imposed).  There is nothing natural or universal about this idea.  Ethnographers have pointed out that people in other cultures assume no such tension between the individual and society.  Furthermore, on an analytical level it makes no sense, for individuals cannot exist outside of social norms. As Clifford Geertz has so famously put it, “there is no such thing as human nature independent of culture”; people without culture would be “unworkable monstrosities with very few useful instincts, fewer recognizable sentiments, and no intellect: mental basket cases.”
In an increasing number of the Harlem Shake videos, this individual-versus-society motif gets played out as a story of repressed libidinal energy. Polite, formal decorum in the first half turns suddenly into nakedness and overt sexual expression, suggesting that wild, chaotic desire always lies just below the surface of stable everyday life.  This plays up the Freudian version of individual freedom that is so popular in Western thought: the id, the source of authentic desire, always strives to rupture the artificial boundaries set for it by the ego (the rational, realistic self) and the super-ego (the moralizing force of church and parents).

The meme also has hints of a kind of anti-capitalist, or at least anti-bureaucratic, logic.  It recalls Max Weber’s famous assertion that capitalism is like an “iron cage,” typified by that distinctly modern institution: bureaucracy. Weber writes, “The bureaucratic organization, with its specialization of trained skills, its delineation of competencies, its rules and hierarchical relations of obedience… [is] in the process of erecting a cage of bondage which persons—lacking all powers of resistance—will perhaps one day be forced to inhabit.”

This sentiment is expressed most poignantly in the videos that show nameless workers performing mundane tasks in a drab, boring environment.  The image here is one of pure alienation and the dehumanizing force of modern labor, which is then transcended through the indomitable spirit of the individual.  This explains why the video of Norwegian soldiers has become so popular: it sets up arbitrary authority, rigid rules, and mass conformity for attack, and explodes against them with a veritable orgy of craziness.

Resistance without politics
Now, what’s interesting about the Harlem Shake videos is that the program of resistance and freedom that they espouse has no substantive political referent.  The meme taps into a deep and pervasive urge for a more egalitarian and equitable political-economic system but then offers absurdist fantasy as the best solution.  Resistance is focused solely on non-conformist individual self-expression, to the point where pelvis-thrusting octopuses and light sabre-wielding Yoshis become icons of liberation.  Wild desire and absurdist behaviour come to substitute for political activism, suggesting a rather grim outlook on the possibility of emancipatory politics in our age.

The concept of resistance that these videos perform is not really resistance at all.  In fact, it participates in wider discourses about libidinal desire and individualism that are central to our contemporary capitalist moment (as we argue here). A quick survey of billboards, television commercials, and magazine ads would be enough to reveal that libidinal desire and individualism have become stock-in-trade for corporate marketers.  Companies make a great deal of money by setting up the idea of conformist alienation and then selling products that promise to help consumers express their real, authentic selves.

Rebellion, in this sense, is no longer a threat to the establishment; rather, since at least the 1970s onward, it has become a commodity that is openly bought and sold on the market.  The cultural critic Thomas Frank has aptly referred to this process of co-optation as “the conquest of cool.”
Along these lines, we can see the form of resistance that the Harlem Shake meme dramatizes as deeply complicit with the logic of consumer capitalism. It is a form of resistance that operates as capitalism’s own recuperative frame: its logic (namely, the imperative to desire against all constraints and to give full rein to individual self-expression) offers an avenue for rebellion that loops back to support the goals of capital accumulation.

This meme has such global appeal because it embodies the great promise of capitalism. It juxtaposes two extremes: the extreme of mindless, monotonous work with the extreme of libidinal freedom. This is the great promise that capitalism extends to youth around the world: if you spend your days and nights doing the menial, repetitive tasks that corporations depend upon, then your reward will be an orgy of unlimited freedom in the form of consumptive power.

Absurdism and class privilege
But there’s yet another element of the Harlem Shake that is worth drawing out, namely, the absurdism that it promotes.  Absurdism has gained widespread social currency over the past decade, particularly among upper middle class youth and college students.  In addition to the Harlem Shake videos, consider the recent “planking” craze, where individuals place their bodies in a rigidly horizontal pose in random public spaces, take pictures, and then post them on Facebook.  Facebook is increasingly littered with absurdist photographs along these lines.

One might read this fascination with absurdism as an expression of political nihilism or even escapism: young people who have worked hard in pursuit of success realize that the old certainties that their parents enjoyed are no longer guaranteed.  Given the realities of climate change, financial crisis, economic decline, and the capture of the political system by corporate elites, students graduating from college may not be able to find stable careers, command secure salaries, save money, buy houses, start families, and participate meaningfully in the democratic process.  Absurdist behaviour reflects these anxieties.  It says: “the world is riddled with chaotic uncertainties; there’s not much hope, so we might as well have some fun.”

There is some value to this perspective.  After all, anxieties about one’s place in a rapidly changing economic landscape run deep.  But the people who deploy absurdist symbols –primarily middle and upper middle class youth – are not the ones who are really being screwed by the system.  In light of this, a more accurate reading might be that absurdism becomes a means with which to signal privilege, a way of saying: “I am so certain of success that I don’t need to take myself too seriously.”  Working or lower-class youth aspiring to middle class status are much less likely to violate norms of decorum in the face of authority; they know what’s at stake, and they have too much to lose.  They literally cannot afford to be absurd.

Absurdism communicates a certain willingness to play with symbols that suggests a familiar ease with the world, with meaning, and with authority. This is the domain of elite class privilege, and particularly of white male privilege. We can go further still: absurdism not only reflects acquired status, it also enables access to that status.  Mastering absurdism signals one’s ability to speak a certain class language; it flags participation in a distinctly white-collar world of college educated youth.

If this is true, then we can circle back to add another element to the common critique that we raised in the beginning.  In the process of appropriating black working-class symbols, the Harlem Shake meme transforms them through absurdism to be totally inaccessible to working-class people and then – in a twist of cruel irony – uses them as markers of privilege.  This further underscores our point that the meme not only peddles an apolitical concept of resistance, it does so in a manner that bolsters the very system that it seeks to overthrow.

This should not be surprising to us, for, as Marx argued so eloquently in the Grundrisse, capital cannot abide limits to profitability; it always converts them to its favor.  This is particularly true when it comes to political resistance, which can so easily be neutralized or appropriated.  The take-home point here is that we have to guard against this tendency with vigilance, to ensure that our deepest urges for social change – our cries against alienation and domination – don’t get plundered of their true potential. 

Originally published in New Left Project: http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/the_harlem_shake_and_the_western_illusion_of_freedom

Islamist Posturing and the Battle for Minority Rights

“We’re all gathered here, and we are here to show our love for the Prophet (PBUH),” declared the vice president of a local Islamist organization, Owais Noorani, to media crews. In the background, one could hear the crowd of nearly 50,000 men chanting “Allah ho Akbar.” Cameras zoomed in on flushed faces. Reporters scribbled furious descriptions of fiery speeches by well-known Islamist leaders. It seemed like a spontaneous gathering of zealous Muslims, a heated, groundswell rejection of the government’s timid nods towards amending Pakistan’s notorious “blasphemy law.” But the rally, for all its appearance of spontaneity, was actually a meticulously organised event, carefully staged for mass viewing. That’s the fundamental point: Pakistan’s Islamist political parties have been somewhat successful at masquerading as defenders of Islam when they are, in fact, simply conventional political agents, as manipulative and politically-minded as any other party.

Following Governor Salman Taseer’s assassination, the Islamist organisation Jama’at ud Dawa, well known as a front for the banned militant outfit Lashkar-e-Taiba, sponsored this rally near the Quaid-e-Azam’s mazaar in Karachi to exploit the recent controversy around the blasphemy law. The area was cordoned off, traffic was blocked, and the police was deployed in full force for the security of attendees. Journalists were hailed in through the blockade. Islamist leaders like Qazi Hussain Ahmed and Maulana Fazl-ur-Rahman delivered impassioned speeches from atop a footbridge, while the rank and file sat on the street below draped in green and white flags embellished with political slogans and ayats. It was a carefully planned mass media event, like any other.

Similar to any other political party, Islamists organise “rallies” and “dharnas”. They raise funds, ask for votes, have meetings, make media appearances, deliver speeches, create alliances and so on. But what is vexing about their politics is that in order to position themselves as defenders of Islam, they are willing to prey on some of the weakest groups within Pakistani society, its religious minorities.

The rise of Islamist politics has been tragic for Pakistan’s religious minorities. According to a recent report by the Jinnah Institute, nearly a thousand cases of blasphemy have been registered since 1986. Of these cases, 476 have been registered against Muslims (various denominations), 479 against Ahmadis (who by law are classified as non-Muslim), and 180 against Christians. The report notes that in 2010 alone, 64 people were charged under the so-called “blasphemy law,” and 32 people were killed extra-judicially either by mobs or individuals. In August 2009, a mob of at least 150 attacked a Christian community in Gojra, setting 40 houses and a church on fire, burning 8 people alive including 4 women and a child, and injuring at least 18 others. Earlier the same year, trained militants opened fire on Ahmadis as they prayed, massacring 93 people. These are only some of the most dramatic incidents of violence and persecution in recent years. Everyday discrimination against religious minorities in schools, universities, and the workplace goes almost unnoticed.

It would be a grave mistake to see Islamist politics as essential or inevitable to the Islamic tradition, as many Western intellectuals and journalists, as well as some in our own “liberal” class, would have us believe. This position actually supports Islamists understanding of themselves as representatives of Islam.

In fact, the most prominent urban groups like the Jam’at-i-Islami and Jama’at ud Dawa often express hostility towards “traditionalists” for focusing too much on theological matters and ignoring politics. Islamism draws most of its strength from the urban lower middle and middle classes who are educated, not in madrassas, but in schools, colleges and universities. This does not mean that the madrassa system in Pakistan does not contribute to the making of religious extremism, just that the exclusive focus on “education” as a solution does not really account for the fact that many Islamists are already quite educated, and often in the same institutions that produce their secular-liberal counterparts. In short, Islamism has little to do with Islam. It has to do with national politics. And that means you will find Islamists in the same spaces that produce more secular-minded and liberal Pakistanis.

But, how exactly did we get here? After all, didn’t Jinnah envision a Pakistan in which religion “has nothing to do with the business of state”? While it is true that Jinnah professed avowedly secular ideals in his oft-quoted speech, the appeal of Pakistan did in fact have much to do with the promise of Islam. As the historian David Gilmartin has argued, the Muslim League defeated the Unionist Party in the elections of 1946 by marketing itself as a party that represented both a unified Muslim community and Islam. Muslims were deeply worried about living under the domination of Hindus in a post-independence India, but they were just as concerned about divisiveness and conflict within the ranks of Muslims, and they saw Islam as the only means available for averting chaos. The Muslim League capitalised on this sentiment by contrasting a united India with, as a number election flyers put it, an “azaad Islami riyasat.” The positing of Islam as a solution to domination by outsiders as well as force that helps overcome internal divisiveness has continued to be a consistent theme throughout Pakistan’s history.

Not surprisingly, Islam’s symbolic importance grew throughout the next few decades and peaked in the 1970s after the violent and traumatic loss of Bangladesh when Pakistani nationhood was in a crisis of radical doubt. The Jama’at-i-Islami, the dominant Islamist force in urban Pakistan, began its political ascent precisely during this period, and Islam was trumpeted as the only means to resist foreign domination and ensure internal harmony against the rising tide of ethnic nationalist movements first in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and then in Sindh, Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. In 1974, Islamists pressured Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to declare Ahmadis “non-Muslim.” They were successful. Bhutto, later, made further concessions to the opposition by banning alcohol and gambling, and changing the day of rest to Friday. He even began calling his quasi-socialist platform the “equality of Muhammad.” Four years after seizing power from Bhutto in a bloodless coup, General Zia explained his Islamisation program as a defence of Pakistan. “Pakistan is like Israel, an ideological state,” the general declared. “Take out Judaism from Israel and it will collapse like a house of cards. Take Islam out of Pakistan and make [it] a secular state; it will collapse.”

That belief still has strong backing today. The Pakistani state and particularly the Army continue to use Islamism as a centralising ideology and a bulwark against demands for ethnic autonomy, redistribution, and decentralisation. If Islamists have now turned on the Army, it is because many of them see the Army as having capitulated to American aggression and therefore as having abandoned its role as the defender of Islam and Pakistan.

What does this all mean for the minority question? Only this: we do not have the luxury of dismissing Islamist politics as simply the blind religious devotion of uneducated masses, as many “liberals” tend to do. It means that we cannot excise the issues faced by religious minorities from the larger political context that catapulted Islamism into the political mainstream. Ethnic divisiveness and foreign domination remain the central political concerns of Islamist ideology. If we want to undo this ideology, we cannot do so without remedying the political circumstances that give Islamism its appeal.

On the issue of ethnic divisiveness, Pakistan needs serious devolution of power and redistribution of wealth to the provinces so that ethnic tensions are managed and contained. The 18^th Amendment has moved us along considerably in this regard, and we should support further efforts to democratise and decentralise power. This means rejecting all military intervention in governance even if it is cast as the more “liberal” alternative, as was Musharraf’s dictatorship.

Regarding foreign domination, Pakistan’s liberal class has failed to take a principled stand against American imperialism in Pakistan, which has meant ceding that space to Islamists. Examples like the drone attacks or the Raymond Davis issue abound. Unless Pakistan’s liberal class provides an alternative platform to heal ethnic divisiveness and to reject American incursions, Islamism will continue to thrive.

And, Pakistan’s religious minorities will continue to suffer.

Originally published in Paper Magazine.

Knee-jerk Secularism Won't Solve Our Problems.

When I encountered Humaira Iqtidar’s Secularizing Islamists, I was pleased that someone had attempted to write a book that takes seriously how Islamists understand themselves and their own project. One does not have to agree with Iqtidar’s broader theoretical argument about the relationship between secularization and secularism to see that this is commendable. It challenges the tendency among Western “terrorism experts” to paint all social and political forces that appeal to Islam with the same black brush, despite their obvious ideological differences, distinct goals, and divergent strategies. Iqtidar demonstrates that rather than being driven by blind and irrational devotion to religious edicts and texts, Islamists are actually motivated by a more complicated set of values and interests.

This is also why I found Ayesha Siddiqa’s review of Iqtidar’s book in the Express Tribune so disconcerting. In Siddiqa, we have a prominent Pakistani intellectual who thinks that the mere effort to understand what motivates people in Islamist movements “may contribute to further radicalisation by presenting the militant narrative as a rationalised discourse.” Siddiqa insists that all ideological differences between these movements are superficial and argues that their “non-militant acts are mere tools to attract people or hide the real objective, which is to expand globally.” So, not only is it wrong to attribute any kind of rationality to Islamist movements, it is also naïve to think that non-militant tactics, say democratic participation, are anything more than a strategy to recruit people into their project for world domination.

So, what exactly bothers Siddiqa about Iqtidar’s book? Siddiqa’s primary complaint is that Iqtidar fails to address the role of the state and its agents—the middle class—in constituting and advancing Islamist ideology. This is an odd complaint given that Iqtidar actually explicitly points out how the Jama’at-i-Islami leadership is largely educated in government schools and universities, devotes an entire chapter to showing how the colonial state created the conditions for the rise of Islamism as a modern ideology, and explicitly highlights state patronage of the JI and IJT during Zia’s rule. At no point does Iqtidar suggest that Islamist ideology has flourished independent of a relationship with state power.

What bothers Siddiqa is actually Iqtidar’s willingness to go beyond the state and explore the values, ideals, and motives that underwrite the Islamist project and to suggest that these might constitute a coherent way of thinking. It is Iqtidar’s suggestion that Islamists might be something more than just mindless drones and may even have a semblance of agency that troubles Siddiqa. And, possibly the most troubling of all, I imagine, is Iqtidar’s suggestion that there may be deeper parallels between Islamism and Secularism, both being products of a common socio-historical process. For Siddiqa, this amounts to the unthinkable idea that “the behaviour of these people” might be “expressions of freethinking and hence rationality,” though at no point does Iqtidar make any such claim or address such a question. For Siddiqa, the mere willingness to examine their worldview on its own terms implies that Iqtidar has been “entrapped emotionally.” In other words, Iqtidar’s emotional connection to her irrational subjects, marked by her unwillingness to make sweeping generalizations and whole scale condemnations, means that she has forfeited her own rationality.

Islamist militancy is a very serious concern in Pakistan, and it is necessary to explore the socially and historically produced motives and values that underwrite it. Secularizing Islamists reflects one academic’s effort. Whether Iqtidar’s work is convincing is worth debating. But, to accuse her of “rationalising” the violent manifestations of Islamist ideology goes well beyond legitimate academic critique into the realm of knee-jerk condemnation. This knee-jerk condemnation is indicative of a broader approach to Islam and Islamism among some segments of Pakistan’s secular-liberal class who will condemn anyone that tries to complicate their us vs. them, good vs. evil, rational vs. irrational narrative. Such knee-jerk condemnation will not get us very far in understanding why so many of our fellow Pakistanis remain committed to this ideology, and why, despite its violent excesses, they continue to believe that it carries the promise for a better future.

Published in The Express Tribune August 24, 2011.

The Poetic Life of Afzal Ahmed Syed (Speech at Poet's House, NYC).

I am not in any meaningful sense a literary scholar and certainly not a scholar of Urdu poetry. I have been asked here to speak about my step-father, Afzal Ahmed Syed, and his life and work, and I been asked to speak in my capacity as a son, not as a critic or an expert. This is not an easy task because, as we all know, it is hard to talk about our loved ones in that detached and critical manner that is expected in intellectual and literary spaces. It is hard not because we do not have a sense of their achievements and talents, but because these are simply not as significant to us as other more mundane aspects of their being like the way they eat their food, how they manage a game of cards, their passion for cricket, or their penchant for watching political talk shows that only seem to arouse their anger. But, for my father, poetry and literature are never far removed from any of these activities. He reads and writes while eating or watching t.v., he draws on his knowledge of literature to make sense of everyday events, and his daily interactions and relationships are often cut through with a sense of the poetic. So it is not fair to say that literature and poetry are separate from his mundane existence. But it is also true that my father speaks very little about his own literary accomplishments. Maybe this is why his poetry remains as much a mystery to me as it is to other readers, and is definitely why I cannot claim to be an expert on it anymore than any one else. Nevertheless, given his absence here today, I will try to communicate what I feel are some of the salient features of his character and life experience and how they relate more generally to his poetic vision.

Let me begin with some broader aspects of his character that I think are most significant to him as a person. My father is generally a quiet and introverted man, although he frequently breaks from his reticent demeanor with humorous, INDEED poetic, insights about the world. He has a unique ability to draw our attention to the ways that absurdity masquerades as wisdom, and wisdom becomes silent in the face of its’ onslaught. But he usually does this in pithy quotes or by reciting a shaer (couplet), not through fanciful and elaborate explanations. My father would also strike many people as a cynical man, aware that the world is being hurled deeper and deeper into a crisis. But his cynicism is of a measured or soft variety in that it acts as a warning but never denies the potential of human beings to change their destiny. So, cynical but not misanthropic, and genuinely eager to find humanity in a world that more often than not seems bent on destroying it. Anyone that knows him will attest to the fact that above all my father is a humble man who generally downplays the breadth of his knowledge, which he has cultivated not only from a lifetime of careful reading and writing but also from listening to the concerns of other people. He has always been more invested in other people’s thoughts and ideas than in his own, more willing to listen than to speak, and more eager to understand other people’s ideals and motivations than to impose his own. Indeed, much of his life seems to be guided by the understanding that knowledge is a moral project that takes shape through engaging with the experience of others. This is a self-reflective and humanistic ethic that I believe defines his life and his poetry.

As many thoughtful commentators on his life and work have suggested, much of my father’s poetic vision has been shaped by his experience as a witness to immense political tragedies like East Pakistan’s violent rebirth as Bangladesh in 1971, the Lebanese Civil War, and the ethnic and sectarian violence that overwhelmed Karachi in the 1990s. Musharraf Farooqi, my father’s friend and translator, has suggested that his poetry evidences a long “inner migration” commonly found among writers and thinkers who have witnessed the enormity of war and suffering. Indeed, my father’s approach to his day to day life seems to confirm the existence of such“inwardness.” But, there is more to the story than just that. It is important to remember that experiencing great trauma does not necessarily generate the kind of humanitarian ethos that I believe is central to my father’s life and work. In fact, if our modern day experience demonstrates anything, it is that political tragedies are just as likely if not more likely to deepen the ethos of brutality and violence as they are to create an ethic of self-reflection and compassion. The great many political tragedies around the world highlight the fact that violence and brutality against others is often predicated on claims of one’s own past and present victimhood. Perpetrators of violence often believe themselves to be victims of some kind and always imagine that they are merely defending themselves against the machinations of others. It is no surprise then that the arc of history takes the shape of a recurring tragedy as one generation of victims becomes the next generation of perpetrators.

My father’s humanistic ethic is certainly born out of tragedy, but it is also built around a realization that the lines between victims and perpetrators of violence are often quite blurry. This too comes from experience, especially his experience in Dhaka, Bangladesh during the Bangladesh war of Independence. My father frequently says, and with no small measure of pride, that the first and only vote that he has ever cast in his life was for the Awami League Party in the 1971 elections. For those of you who are not familiar with Pakistani-Bangladeshi history, this election was won convincingly by Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rahman, the Bangladeshi leader and champion of Bengali political autonomy and civil rights, but was later abrogated by the West-Pakistani establishment backed by the powerful Pakistani military. This event thrust the country into a cataclysmic Civil War that led to the deaths of millions and culminated in the emergence of Bangladesh as an independent nation-state. My father was from a minority Urdu-speaking community in East Pakistan called “Biharis,” but he was a firm supporter of the Bengali movement (Note: he was not actually from Bihar, so technically not a "Bihari," but Urdu speakers were often lumped in this way). This commitment was informed by his unbounded love for Dhaka, a city that he had made his own. He says that every night, around dusk, he would renew his love for the city by taking a stroll through its narrow streets and newly erected parks. But my father also supported the Bengali movement because he understood that a people, especially a people with such monumental intellectual and literary achievements, could only be subjugated so long before they revolted. Despite his support of the Bengalis movement, my father became a victim of the war. On the 16th of December, 1971, Bengali soldiers forcefully removed him from his home in Purbali, a suburb on the outskirts of Dhaka, and interned him in Mirpur, a quarter of Dhaka where other Urdu-speaking Bihari minorities lived. He could no longer walk through his city and as a result his love, naturally, dissipated. In 1972, he was arrested as a Pakistani sympathizer and a collaborator with the Pakistani military. This was during a time when many such “internal enemies” were being executed. He was later deemed a “peaceful citizen” and released, possibly at the request of an influential member in the Bangladeshi militia forces. A year later, he along with his mother and six younger siblings managed to escape Dhaka, never to return, making their way through India and Nepal to Karachi where he now lives.

My father rarely speaks of Dhaka, but when he does it is with a tremendous sense of betrayal and sadness. His beloved city, he says, now only appears to him in nightmares. It was in Dhaka that he first began to think about the destructive potential of language, its capacity to strip people of their humanity and open them up to violent retribution. The War my father experienced was very much fought in language well before it was fought on the streets of Dhaka. West Pakistanis had long dehumanized their fellow citizens in East Pakistan, attacking them for being backwards and unsophisticated. This was also very much a war ABOUT language because West Pakistanis had imagined their Bengali counterparts to have a degraded and inferior tongue. Later, when everyone had abandoned speech for war, the Bengalis turned on their Urdu speaking Bihari minority with the same vitriol to which they had themselves been subjected. Now, it was Biharis who were imagined to be conspiring, by virtue of their language, against Bangladeshi liberation. Much of my father’s interest in poetry emerged in a context where everyday language had become deeply compromised on all sides. His poetic vision springs from the knowledge that our modern day political tragedies are rooted in everyday speech and language. Maybe this is why he remains to this day a conspicuously “quiet” and “inward” man and maybe this is why when he does speak, he prefers to speak in the language of poetry. Maybe poetry in his world carries a unique potential to transcend the violence of our modern world, a violence woven deeply into the tapestry of our everyday lives.

Thank you for your time.