Pakistan cricket: Two books, one history

It’s quite a pleasure to see two good reads on Pakistan’s cricket history appearing within a span of one year.

Us Pakistanis have not been very good in recording and preserving history, so much so, that in this day and age when a whole new generation is growing up with little or no knowledge of what life was like in Pakistan before the mid-1990s, one struggles to gather visual and scholarly material to compile something that would help the younger lot understand their immediate existential roots and those of their country’s culture, politics and even sports.

That’s why Osman Samiuddin’s The Unquiet Ones and Peter Oborne’s Wounded Tiger are welcome additions. Both books make it a point not to relate Pakistan’s cricket history in a vacuum. Instead they attempt to understand it as something that was impacted (and vice versa) by the ebb and flow of Pakistan’s politics and societal vibes and tides.

Osman Samiuddin is a young but an already well-known cricket journalist. He writes like a passionate cricket fan well-versed in the technicalities and nuances of the game. But he is also humorous enough to wittily explain the many absurdities that Pakistan’s cricketing history is riddled with.

His book, The Unquiet Ones, is like a knowledgeable fan’s history of Pakistan cricket, focusing more on the cultural, social and political dynamics that have driven Pakistani cricket teams and players, rather than on just static facts and stats.

In one seamless whoosh, Osman gathers and runs across the various controversies and idiosyncrasies associated with some of Pakistan cricket’s leading men, one-hit-wonders and obscure figures, using some fascinating anecdotes related over the years by former captains, batsmen, bowlers and chiefs of the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB).

There is an utter lack of pretension to sound ‘analytical’ or punctuate the text with a mouthful of numbers. Instead, Osman seems to find a great deal of joy in unfolding the history of Pakistan cricket like a colourful monologue of a fan, revelling in the many interesting, funny, complicated and at times downright bizarre episodes that dot the countless rises and falls of Pakistan cricket. It is this that gives the book its charm.

The tone of the book is consistently upbeat, excited and armed with a strand of wit that makes The Unquiet Ones a youthful celebration of a wildly impulsive cricketing culture.

Osman does well to cover all aspects of this culture, right from the time of the emergence of Pakistan’s first Test captain, A.H. Kardar (in the early 1950s), all the way to the period that saw the blossoming of the team’s current skipper, Misbahul Haq.

The book is largely about interesting episodes involving captains, players, commentators, PCB chiefs and even those who were once stars of ‘street cricket’, especially in Karachi.

This is why The Unquiet Ones can be a rapid riot for fans curious about what takes place in dressing-rooms and on the cricket field that is not quite captured by stump microphones and TV cameras.

But then this is also exactly why when Osman’s book gallops towards the last decade or so of Pakistan cricket, one is left high and dry when he only nominally comments on one of the most controversial episodes in Pakistan cricket in the 2000s: The emergence of a highly exhibitionist strand of religiosity in the team during Inzimamul Haq’s captaincy (2003-2007).

One is not quite sure why Osman chose not to comment on this issue. But had he applied the anecdotal style that he has used in the book on this issue, he just might have been able to write perhaps the most interesting chapter on the subject, mainly carried by quotes and incidents related to the topic and to the men involved.

Osman’s history of Pakistan cricket is a people’s history. A fan’s version of the story of Pakistan cricket joyfully told with the help of the many amusing musings of former and current cricketers; and culled from old clippings from the now defunct cricket magazines and from the recordings of games and glimpses that best capture the sudden highs and the equally sudden lows of Pakistan cricket.

Unlike The Unquiet Ones however, Oborne’s Wounded Tiger is a more deliberate (and less spontaneous) effort. This is most probably due to the fact that it was written by a non-Pakistani — an outsider looking in.

Oborne, like so many non-Pakistani cricket fans, is quite clearly fascinated by the unpredictable and implosive nature of Pakistan’s cricketing culture. He is even more intrigued by how vividly this culture mirrors the dynamics of Pakistan’s politics and society.

His book is neatly and extensively researched and he carefully discloses the complexities of Pakistan’s political history and how these complexities have affected the many aspects and vagaries of the country’s cricketing scheme of things.

At least such is the deliberate and well-informed disposition of Oborne’s book until it begins to approach the 1992 Cricket World Cup that Pakistan won.

Where Osman’s book left one feeling stranded when he failed (or refused) to comment on the more thorny issues that plagued Pakistan cricket in the 2000s, Oborne’s book begins to lose steam once he begins to go past the mid-1980s period.

From being a detailed account it suddenly becomes a hasty wrap-up of Pakistan cricket’s last 20 years that are only thinly furnished by the already well-known summaries of matches played beyond the late 1980s.

It is as if Oborne lost interest, especially after describing in detail the 1982 player’s rebellion against Javed Miandad’s captaincy. After this the book becomes more of a compilation derived from newspaper précises about matches and issues such as match-fixing, captaincy tussles and the rise of religiosity between 2003 and 2007.

And that’s a shame, because had all of these issues been given the same scholarly treatment that Oborne gives to Pakistan cricket history between 1952 and 1985, this book might just have become one of the most comprehensive histories ever authored on Pakistan cricket.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, February 1st, 2015.
http://www.dawn.com/news/1160432/pak...ks-one-history

The sage, the populist and the dictator

The 1970s are remembered as the ‘Golden Age of Television’ in Pakistan, in which the state-owned PTV produced a series of quality drama serials and music programming.

Though many of the serials either insinuated the Z.A. Bhutto government’s ‘socialist’ and populist overtones, or were an apolitical celebration of various liberal notions of the era, there were also plays that indirectly addressed the perceived dichotomy that emerged when the government-sponsored populism clashed head-on with the new reactive historical narrative being built by the state after the violent separation of East Pakistan in 1971.

The frontline player in this respect was intellectual and playwright, Ashfaq Ahmed. A serial based on his teleplays called Aik Mohabbat, Sau Afsanay (One Love, Many Stories [1975-76]), celebrated the liberal signs of the times and the sense of freedom being exhibited by the middle-class youth; but the bottom-line of almost each and every play of the series was always a plea to balance modern notions of liberalism with the country’s traditional religious lineage.

But the problem was, nobody was quite sure exactly what this traditional religious lineage constituted.

Pakistan was (and still is), a diverse population of various ethnicities, Islamic sects and sub-sects and ‘minority religions’. So much so that (as proven by the Bengali nationalist movement in former East Pakistan), one’s ethnic roots started to matter more than the concoction of a singular version of faith shaped by the state.

Ashfaq’s balancing pleas emerged from his Sufi bent, and since for a while he was a supporter of Bhutto’s socialist initiatives, Ashfaq had to first rip into the supposed ‘hypocrisies of the modern bourgeoisie’ before advising a balance between modern materialism and traditional eastern spiritualism.

The above is clearly visible in one of his most popular TV plays, Dada Dildada (The Hearty Grandfather [1976]).

It’s a story of a loving and liberal grandfather and his favourite grandson (played by late Zafar Masood) who (with his long hair, flamboyant personality and liberal ideas), is the stereotypical 1970s middle-class youth.

The grandfather (Dada) also loves to drink and the family is happy radiating within the comfort of their bourgeoisie cocoon, until the grandson falls seriously ill.

The helplessness of the ‘liberal’ belief system is then (supposedly) ‘exposed’ when the doctors fail to cure the grandson and the family (especially the doting grandfather) starts to crumble.

Ashfaq alludes that the glue that was keeping the family together was of superficial nature because it had detached the family from its traditional spiritual moorings.

In a scene inspired by Mughal Emperor Babar’s sacrificial undertaking — in which to save his son Humayun’s life, Babar is said to have given up alcohol — the grandfather prays to God that his life be given to the grandson and for this he is willing to give up drinking.

The grandfather then enters the grandson’s bedroom where the young man lies dying. There the old man starts to walk in circles around the grandson’s bed until he stops and sits on the edge of the bed. The next thing we see is the young man opening his eyes. He is cured. But in a tragic twist, when he approaches the grandfather, the old man has quietly passed away.

Ashfaq Ahmed’s TV plays of the era were a lot more literary compared to the hyperbolic-ism of the time’s ‘social films;’ but the question is, was Ahmad also critiquing Bhutto’s populism, blaming it for encouraging the disengagement between Pakistani youth and religion?

The Bhutto regime seemed to have perceived Ashfaq as attacking bourgeois-capitalist values, whereas to Ashfaq he was simply instating ‘genuine Sufism’ in the ideologically vulnerable minds of modern young people (of the era).

But his creative critique now seems to have had a more pronounced scheme, because during the conservative set-up under the Zia-ul-Haq dictatorship in 1980s, Ashfaq Ahmed’s TV plays actually became the social and intellectual rationalisations of Zia’s convoluted ‘Islamisation’ agenda.

Ashfaq Ahmed who had been inspired by the 1940s and 1950s ‘Progressive Writers Movement’ had begun to abandon the Movement’s Marxist and Freudian themes in the 1960s. But his teleplays in the 1970s seemed to have largely supported the populist discourse of the Bhutto regime, even though they had increasingly become critical of the social outcome of the liberal aura that the Pakistani society was emitting (at least on the surface) during the 1970s.

Eventually, Ashfaq emerged as one of the first popular TV playwrights to become conscious of a dichotomy (during the Zia regime) that saw the middle classes become ‘pious’ and simultaneously cynical and materialistic.

Observers believe that after experiencing bitter disappointment with the Z.A. Bhutto regime’s performance, Ashfaq Ahmed himself wanted to tackle the social and cultural dichotomies emerging from Zia Islamisation-meets-capitalism outtakes.

By now he had started to dabble heavily into Sufism, his teleplays became longwinded and somewhat convoluted commentaries on the psychological tensions in the society between materialism (maa’dah pasandi) and spiritualism (roohaniat).

Fakirs danced in most of these teleplays, as urban middle-class families were shown stricken with various psychological and spiritual ills after letting their materialistic desires override their spiritual instincts.

These plays were a symptom of yet another important development. Even though the shrine culture that was glorified by these plays was, in the political context, more associated with the PPP and Bhutto’s populism, however, beginning some time in 1981, it had started to be co-opted by the Zia regime.

In the 1950s, Pakistan’s ‘social films’ had largely portrayed the cleric as an uncouth, illiterate and exploitative scoundrels (mostly in films by famous Expressionist film director, Luqman).

Teleplays in the 1970s continued the tradition, with 1974s Nijat (Riddance) that was penned by Ashfaq going as far as to explore the sexual tension a young village cleric goes through in everyday life, caught between his primal instincts and his puritanical indoctrination.

However, beginning in 1980, the Zia regime ‘advised’ PTV to discourage the practice of showing the cleric the way he’d been perceived by a bulk of Pakistanis.

From then onwards the cleric in PTV teleplays not only became a recurring character, but he suddenly became a wise old man with a white beard, praying beads in hand and blessed with a soft and empathic disposition.

As PTV was announcing the arrival of the good mullah on the mini-screen, the character of the Pirs (directly associated with Sufi shrines) became largely villainous; they were now shown as men who exploited the superstitious disposition of illiterate peasants.

To take the mantra of ‘Islamisation’ to the middle-classes, PTV, apart from using the symbol of the wise and polite cleric in its plays, began introducing conservative Islamic televangelists who could also punctuate their commentaries with English words and terms.

The impression being given was that a preacher who can use and understand English is ‘educated’ and ‘civilised,’ even though the content of these preachers remained to be highly conservative and, of course, in line with Zia’s Islamisation discourse.

Ashfaq’s job now was to present the cleric as someone who was as equipped to run a shrine as he was a mosque. The line between the Sufi and the cleric began to blur in his plays during the Zia regime.

Ashfaq lured the bourgeoisie away from the supposed ‘irreligiosity’ of the 1970s with Sufi-themed plots of spirituality and then once their interest was aroused, the same plots then put them on a path of middle-class piety that attempted to work as a bridge between religious ritualism, exhibitions of piety and modern material desires and aspirations.

To him this was a balancing act. To his critics it was nothing but a way to rationalise moral and material hypocrisy.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, March 1st, 2015
http://www.dawn.com/news/1166313/the...d-the-dictator

__________________
"But screw your courage to the sticking place,
And we'll not fail." _Shakespeare, 'Macbeth')

The first Pakistani?

Ever since the early 1970s, the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI), has been frequently organising ‘Yaum Babul Islam’ — an event in which the party celebrates the conquest of Sindh by Arab commander Mohammad Bin Qasim (in the 8th century CE), explaining it as the ‘advent of Islam in South Asia’.

Speakers at this event also describe Qasim as the ‘first Pakistani’ and then trace and place the creation of Pakistan to the arrival of the Arab commander 1,300 years ago.

Curiously, the JI was originally opposed to the man who actually created Pakistan (in 1947): Mohammad Ali Jinnah.

JI’s founder, Abul Ala Maududi, had found Jinnah to be steeped in the ‘Western notion’ of nationalism and too Westernised to deliver and head a Muslim state.

So one can suppose that the whole idea of an ancient Arab commander being posthumously raised to become the main architect of what hundreds of years later would become Pakistan, is more in tune with JI’s Arab-centric concept of Pakistani nationhood.

But it wasn’t really the JI that had first initiated the idea of dressing up an 8th century Arab as the true founder of Pakistan. This impression which, from the late 1970s onwards, has found ample space in the country’s school text books, was first alluded to in a 1953 book, Five Years of Pakistan.

The book was published by the government to commemorate the fifth anniversary of Pakistan. In a chapter authored by archaeologists associated with a state-funded archaeology project, the authors describe Sindh (after it was invaded by Qasim), ‘as the first Islamic province in South Asia’.

In a recent detailed essay on the subject, Manan Ahmed Asif (a professor of history at Columbia University), informs that although allusions to Qasim being the ‘first Pakistani’ can be found in various publications after 1953, he was first officially adopted as the ‘first citizen of Pakistan’ in Fifty Years of Pakistan published by the Federal Bureau of Pakistan in 1998.

The whole notion of Qasim’s invasion of Sindh being the genesis of a separate Muslim state in South Asia was first imagined by a handful of Pakistani archaeologists in 1953.

It then found its way into the narrative of religious parties such as the JI, before being weaved into school text books (by the populist Z.A. Bhutto regime) due to the severe existential crisis that the country faced after its Eastern wing (former East Pakistan) broke away in December 1971 to become Bangladesh.

The notion was then aggressively promoted by the reactionary Ziaul Haq dictatorship (1977-1988), as a way to explain Pakistan as a nation that had deeper roots in the ancient deserts of Arabia than in the congested expanses of South Asia.

What’s most interesting is the fact that as far as the region’s history is concerned, or even that of the Arabs, Qasim’s foray into Sindh was not quite the significant event it is made up to be.

Professor Manan speaks of a silence that usually greets historians when they go looking for ancient sources about the event; there are almost none. This gives rise to the question, if Qasim’s invasion of Sindh was such a grand undertaking, why is it only scarcely mentioned in the available textual sources from the period?

The earliest available source to mention the invasion is the 9th century book Kitab Futuh al-Buldan by Arab historian al-Baladhuri. It was written more than a hundred years after the invasion.

Then there is also the 13th century Persian text called Chachnama that was authored almost 400 years after Qasim’s forces arrived on the shores of Sindh.

When historians such a Prof Manan and Dr Mubarak Ali piece together whatever little early sources there are about the event, it transpires that the Arabs had first begun to exhibit interest in Sindh in 634 AD.

The Umayyads (the first major Muslim empire), sent troops to conquer Sindh on a number of occasions between 644 AD and 710 AD. Most of these raids were repulsed by local tribes, even though at times Arab armies did manage to hold on to Makran (south of Sindh), but not for long.

The reasons for the Umayyad to enter the region were many: it was a rapidly expanding empire and wanted to get a toehold in the region. It wanted to gain control of the region’s lucrative port trade. It also sent in troops to crush renegades and rebels that used to escape to Makran from the Umayyad mainland, sometimes to hide and sometimes to organise attacks against the empire from here. Such rebels included the radical Kharajites who had established a clandestine foothold in Makran.

The popular narrative found in most post-9th century Muslim history books about Qasim’s invasion sees him being sent here by Umayyad governor in Baghdad to avenge the plundering of Arab ships by Sindh’s pirates and the refusal of Sindh’s ruler, Raja Dahir, to do anything about it.

Historians such as Dr Mubarak Ali and Prof Manan who have tried to substantiate this narrative with the help of authentic sources have found only sketchy evidence to validate this account.

Manan concludes: ‘Qasim’s expedition was merely the latest in a 60-year long campaign by Arab regimes to gain a foothold over the port trades and to extract riches from these port communities (in Sindh and Makran) …’

Qasim’s supposedly genesis-like manoeuvres in Sindh are also largely a myth. In 731 when al-Hakim al-Kalbi was appointed governor of Sindh (some 20 years after Qasim’s death), he found a land where a majority of those who had converted to Islam (during Qasim’s stay here), had reverted back to being either Hindu or Buddhist. So much for Qasim’s Sindh being the genesis of Pakistan.

The question now is if Qasim’s invasion was comparatively a minor historical event, how did it become so inflated?

We have already seen how and why it gained such an existential significance in Pakistan. It was almost forgotten about for hundreds of years, even during much of the 500-year long Muslim rule in India.

Interest in Qasim was ironically reignited by British colonialists in the 19th century. British author, James Mill, in his book The History of British India (1817), mentions Qasim as an invader who created a rupture in the region.

Hill presents very little evidence but his lead was followed by other British authors of the era who all saw Qasim as the man who opened the gates for hoards of Muslim invaders to pour in and destroy the Indian civilisation.

This narrative of a bloodletting Qasim was then picked up by early Hindu nationalists, some of whom who had largely forgotten about this 8th century Arab!

A couple of 19th century Muslim historians, Syed Suleman Nadvi and Mohammad Hanif responded by offering a more studied look at Qasim’s invasion, describing it as nothing like the one that was being peddled by the British colonialists and early Hindu nationalists.

They portrayed Qasim as a just, tolerant and gallant man. Both these versions of the man emerged from the highly polemical debate on Qasim’s invasion that erupted in the 19th century between the British, Hindu and Muslim historians.

The truth is, to non-aligned history, Qasim remains to be an enigmatic figure of which sources say very little. But ever since the 19th century, he has become an overtly glorious myth to some, and an equally mythical force of destruction to others. Historical truth has nothing to do with either version.


The first Pakistani?

__________________
Left is Right

Once upon a Saudi king

A peek into what Saudi Arabia might have been if King Faisal was still alive.

A few years ago while attending a media conference in Dubai, I had an interesting conversation with a delegate from Egypt. He was a graduate of a university in Riyadh where he had enrolled in the late 1960s after escaping the rule of Gamal Abel Nasser in Egypt. In Riyadh he became an ardent supporter of Saudi monarch, Faisal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud (aka Shah Faisal). He told me: ‘Had Faisal not been killed (in 1975), Saudi Arabia would have been a very different country than what it became and what it is today …’

But the historical verdict on Faisal largely remains somewhat schizophrenic. Many who hail him as a dynamic force who attempted to tenaciously modernise a ‘backward tribal society,’ also accuse him (in the same breath) of being the original initiator of the controversial practice of dishing out ‘Petro-Dollars’ across the Muslim world to promote the highly intransigent strand of the Muslim faith that is prevalent in Saudi Arabia. This view is highlighted by leading documentary film-maker, Adam Curtis, in his recent documentary (on Afghanistan), Bitter Lake (BBC). Curtis suggests that Faisal’s legacy cuts both ways. On the one hand it set the pace that turned Saudi Arabia into becoming an extremely rich and highly influential monarchy and state, while on the other hand it saw the country promoting an ideology that eventually mutated and triggered various faith-oriented fissures in the Muslim world.

But did Faisal know what he was unleashing?

Farzana Moon in her book, No Islam But Islam, explains how Faisal’s ascension to the Saudi throne (in March 1964) was not a smooth, seamless event. He was Prime Minister during the regime of King Saud bin Abdulaziz (who had been on the throne since 1953). Though both men belonged to the same family (the Ibn Saud), Faisal was often at loggerheads with the King. The entry on Faisal in Encyclopaedia of the Orient suggests that he was often critical of Saud’s regime, accusing it of squandering the wealth that had begun to pour in from Saudi Arabia’s vast oil reserves. According to American professor of political science and author, R. Hrair Deckmejien (in his 1994 book Islam in Revolution), the Ibn Saud family had risen to power in the 1920s with the help of armed militias made up of highly conservative Bedouins called the Ikhwan.

After establishing itself as the ruling dynasty in the region, the Ibn Saud (on the insistence of the Ikhwan) agreed to implement hidebound religious dictates. However, according to Robert Lacey’s account of Saudi history (Inside the Kingdom), Ibn Saud (in 1930) began to eliminate and disband the militias (because they had turned against the King). Faisal was made Crown Prince when his brother King Saud came to the throne in 1953. James Wynbrant in A Brief History of Saudi Arabia maintains that when (in 1958) Faisal was also made prime minister, he quietly cultivated relations with the powerful official clergy of the country. This helped him gain their trust, enough to get them to back him when he finally demanded that he be made regent.

Michael G. Roskin and James J. Coyle in their detailed study, ‘Politics of the Middle East: Culture & Conflicts’ describe how King Saud refused to budge, but as the Royal Guards loyal to Saud surrounded Faisal’s residence, Faisal (as Prime Minister) ordered the Saudi National Guard to surround the King’s palace. Consequently the ulema issued a fatwa in Faisal’s favour, and he became the King. Saud was sent into exile to Greece. Faisal became the king during a period when populist left-leaning ideologies like Ba’ath Socialism, Arab Nationalism and Islamic Socialism had begun to sweep across numerous Muslim countries.

Middle-East expert, James P. Jankowski, in his book Nasser’s Egypt (2002) suggests that the Saudi monarchy’s main opponents at the time were Egyptian ruler, Gamal Abel Nasser, and the Ba’ath Socialists in Iraq and Syria. Nasser was a passionate and progressive Arab Nationalist and a popular leader in the Muslim world. Across the 1960s, so-called ‘Nasserism’ would go on to inspire youthful uprisings in Yemen, Sudan, and Libya and even in Pakistan; whereas progressive regimes had emerged in Algeria and Tunisia. The Muslim world was awash with leftist ideas that fused socialism with Islamic ideals of egalitarianism. These ideas were also vehemently critical of Arab monarchies, Israel and the United States.

In her book on the Saudi monarchy, Professor Sherifa Zuhur explains how Faisal actually tried to imitate this sense of populism by asking the Saudis to treat him as their servant instead of King. He began to organise and streamline the country’s oil wealth to set up a state welfare system that is still in place in Saudi Arabia today. He strengthened his country’s relationship with the United States and offered to help it fight its Cold War against the Soviet Union.

To Faisal, the ‘dangerous’ populist ideas and movements that were erupting in the Muslim world at the time were being instigated and bolstered by the Soviets. To counter the spread and influence of Nasserism in Saudi youth, Faisal tried to rapidly modernise Saudi Arabia. He introduced television, encouraged modern education and allowed Saudi women to work alongside men in offices. Mordechai Abir, in his 1987 essay, ‘The Consolidation of the Ruling Class and the New Elites in Saudi Arabia’ explains that (consequently), many of the powerful ulema who had supported Faisal in his bid to gain power, eventually turned against him. According to Abir, they accused Faisal of introducing ‘alien ideas’ and ‘corrupting Saudi culture and society.’ As a result, Faisal kept them at an arm’s length and blocked their entry into the higher echelons of his regime.

In 1966 a group of men attacked Saudi Arabia’s first TV station, and one of the attackers was killed by security guards. The dead man was actually a distant cousin of the King. A decade later, the cousin’s younger brother would return to haunt Faisal. Nasser died in 1970 and Faisal stepped up his efforts to replace Nasser as the Arab world’s main leader. To do this, Faisal also began to overtly oppose Israel. He supported Egypt and Syria in their 1973 war against Israel and then shocked the world by dramatically increasing the price of Saudi oil to weaken the economies of the United States and those Western countries that had backed Israel.

Faisal’s move finally saw him becoming one of the most powerful Arab monarchs and a popular leader in the Muslim world. No other Saudi monarch before or after him has been able to match the kind of populist appeal and fame that Faisal finally cultivated for himself. To retain this appeal, Faisal began to fund various movements both on the left and the right. For example, he bankrolled various left-wing Palestinian outfits fighting against Israel, and on the right, bolstered radical right-wing groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood who were opposed to Nasserism and Ba’ath Socialism. He also began to pump in money into the coffers of the poorer Muslim countries as long as they espoused ideals dear to Faisal’s Saudi Arabia. But, alas, in 1975 Faisal was assassinated by the brother of the man that the security forces had killed during the 1966 Saudi TV station attack. It was a case of revenge, but some theories suggested that the Israelis had him killed, while others pointed the finger at the many powerful Saudi conservatives who had been sidelined by Faisal.

Faisal was succeeded by his brother Khalid who at once slowed down Faisal’s modernisation project and toned down his foreign and internal policies. But Faisal’s demise also gave the ultra-conservatives the space to rebound. In 1979, dozens of armed Saudi fanatics stormed the Holy Mosque in Makkah. According to author Yaroslav Trofimov (in Siege of Mecca), the uprising was an expression of repressed anger among Saudi conservatives against Faisal’s modernisation policies. The uprising was crushed by Khalid, but it made future Saudi monarchs give a lot more space to the conservatives, slow down modernisation and channel the radicals by exporting their energy and ideas out of the Kingdom and into Muslim lands that were recipients of large Saudi economic hand-outs. But by then Nasserism was dead, Ba’ath Socialism was receding and the Soviet Union was on the brink of collapse.

So the exported ideas and energies were now being disseminated into a tumultuous vacuum. That is why they violently transfigured and became almost entirely nihilistic, further tarnishing the legacy of perhaps the most unique Saudi monarch ever.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, May 10th, 2015
http://www.dawn.com/news/1180748/smo...n-a-saudi-king

__________________
"But screw your courage to the sticking place,
And we'll not fail." _Shakespeare, 'Macbeth')

Smokers’ Corner: Economics of spirituality

‘Folk Islam?’ Yes, Folk Islam — the strand of faith that still drives the everyday lives of millions of Pakistanis, especially in the country’s vast rural and semi-rural areas. And yet, till about 35 years ago, its social and cultural dynamics were intertwined with large segments of the country’s urban milieus as well.

Folk Islam, or the version that is present among Muslim populations in Pakistan and India, is that strand of the faith that emerged when — from the 12th century onwards — Muslim generals and monarchs from Central Asia, Iraq, Turkey and Afghanistan began to invade India.

While setting up their respective kingdoms in the region, they brought with them not only soldiers, ministers (wazirs) and clerics. With them and during their rule, also came a steady stream of Sufis.

The majority of their subjects in India were Hindus. But instead of trying to do the impossible by converting such a large population into accepting Islam, most of the Muslim rulers began to heed the advice of the Sufis who wanted to interact with the Hindu majority.

How economic well-being can affect centuries of faith and belief in just a few decades
This was an exhibition of political pragmatism on the part of the rulers who managed to ‘Indianise’ their presence through the cultural and theological interaction and intellectual exchange between the Sufis and the Hindus of India.

This interaction and exchange eventually began to evolve a rather unique brand of Islamic faith among the Muslims of India. Various non-Muslim traditions and ideas (that, to the Sufis, did not contradict the main beliefs of Islam) were adopted and as they evolved they weaved themselves into the social and economic fabric of everyday life of the Muslims of the region.

To put it briefly, on most occasions than not, following a more orthodox strand of Islam (by the Muslims) actually began to invite social isolation, and consequently, economic problems.

This was most apparent during the long reigns of three Mughal kings, Akbar, Jahangir and Shahjahan (16th-17th centuries), who were ardent followers of Sufi saints and adopted the strand of Islam that had been developing in the region.

This strand was never put down on paper and defined as a concrete philosophy as such. It was too tied to the daily ethos of the common Muslim folk of the land — a religious ethos that repulsed the more orthodox Muslims.

This indigenous strand of Islam that developed in the region between the 12th and 16th centuries helped the Muslim rulers of India to maintain a social contract of sorts between them and the region’s Hindu majority.

But more importantly it was the economic aspect in this regard that was also one of the main factors that helped this Folk Islam of the period to thrive and grow. It was supplementing the politics of the ruling elite; it worked well with the resultant social, economic and cultural dynamics of the period’s agrarian society and economy.

But all this began to change with the slow and painful decline of the Muslim empire in India from the 18th century onwards. As British colonialists began to strengthen their grip in the region and introduce political ideas derived from mercantilism, Muslim thinkers of the period became despondent because they had no idea how to face such a challenge, especially on political and economic levels.

As a consequence, after some 500 years of ruling India, these Muslim thinkers for the first time became conscious of the fact that they were a minority in India. In the 19th century a string of Muslim scholars and ideologues emerged. The moderate ones first tried to rekindle the pride and the past of their bygone empire and at the same time asked the Muslims to adjust their intellectual and economic dispositions according to the new ideas being introduced by the British colonialists.

Though such pleas attracted the small numbers of urban Muslims, the battle for the hearts and minds of the majority of Muslims in India was initially fought between two distinct groups of religionists. These would eventually evolve into becoming two new indigenous Sunni Muslim sub-sects in the region.

One group emerged from the Islamic seminaries of the Indian town of Deoband (and became known as Deobandis). Their analysis concluded that the Muslim empire in India collapsed because the rulers continued to distance themselves from the tenants of ‘true Islam’ and (thus) fell victim to the decadent and deviant spiritual concoctions.

Instead they advocated the undoing of what passed for Islam among the Indian Muslims and the infusion of more orthodox strands of the faith.

But the system of belief ingrained for 500 years in the ways of the Muslims of the region was just too deep to exorcise the way the Deobandis wanted to. As a reaction, some Islamic scholars appeared from the Indian town of Bareilly (hence called the ‘Barelvis’), who mounted a hefty polemical and doctrinal defense of the beliefs of the common Muslims of India.

Though the Muslims who had been urbanised and impacted by the colonial mercantile capitalism of the ‘British Raj’ became either ‘Muslim modernists’ or began to drift towards what the Deobandis were advocating, the majority of Muslims who were still tied to agriculture remained attached to Folk Islam because it now became attached to powerful landed Islamic spiritual leaders (the pirs).These pirs became essential elements behind the agrarian Muslims’ economic well being.

After the creation of Pakistan, so-called Barelvi Islam was allowed to prosper in Pakistan and some of its traits, like its spiritual music-forms (such as the Qawaali), colourful rituals (adopted and augmented from certain indigenous regional rituals) and traditions also became popular among the urban working-classes and segments of the middle-classes.

During the government of Z.A. Bhutto in the 1970s these became politicised when the government began to express its populist tenor by using the traditions of visiting Sufi shrines (to mingle with the masses) and adopting popular Sufi anthems as party songs at rallies.

Nevertheless, this strand of the faith gradually began to erode when the same government also opened up brand new avenues of employment for Pakistanis in the oil-rich Arab countries.

Here the Pakistanis came across a dryer and more puritanical strand of Islam and by the early 1980s, much of the country’s urban middle and lower-middle-classes had begun to shun their folk pasts.

This past, it was believed, was not suitable to sustain the kind of economic tendencies that more and more Pakistanis were now embroiled in, especially after earning in Riyals and Dirhams.

The nature of the new money that began to pour into Pakistan from the pockets of those who had worked in or were still working in oil-rich Arab countries was such that it came with an undeclared condition: This money will only benefit you if you mend your distorted religious beliefs.

Since society was becoming polarised into groups that would prefer to only interact with their own kind, pragmatism demanded that one (even superficially) adopt the faith of those with money to spend and invest.

When most Pakistanis came into contact with their Arab employers, they were initially disoriented by what they saw and felt was a somewhat dry strand of the faith.

Never before had the Pakistani working and middle-class folk (who managed to travel to countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE in the 1970s), made the kind of money that they began to make in those spiritually dry but materially rich lands of the limousine-driving Arabs.

However, more than these Pakistanis being persuaded to give up their old version of the faith and take up what their Arab paymasters insisted was ‘true Islam,’ it was the money that they made and the sudden rise in their social status back home, is what convinced them to shed their old beliefs.

After all, the old beliefs now reminded these Pakistanis of days that may have been more fun and open-ended, but these were also days when they had struggled to own their own TV set, freezer, air-conditioning unit and refrigerator.

In other words, the shedding of folk traditions and the adoption of a new strain of the faith also became a kind of a badge exhibiting a person’s enhanced economic status and social standing.

Nevertheless, in the last three decades, this is changing. But to what? For this one will have to find out what spiritual exhibition and disposition is now guaranteeing economic well-being.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, June 7th, 2015

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The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion !

I was in Istanbul, Turkey, during that country’s 2011 election. I closely followed the campaigns of its two leading parties: the ‘moderate Islamic’ AKP (or AK PART being led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan); and the centre-left, CHP (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi).

Erdogan’s party had been in power since it first swept the elections in 2002. To present the party as a viable, robust and fresh alternative to the country’s traditional ruling party, the CHP — that was founded by the modernist founder of Turkish nationalism, Kemal Ataturk — Erdogan had largely softened AKP’s so-called ‘Islamist’ image.

Instead, he squarely focused on promising a government that was stable and entirely concerned about the uplift of the country’s then floundering economy.

In this ambitious pursuit he was more than successful, helping his party sweep the 2007 election as well. During the campaigning of the 2011 election, I heard three long speeches delivered by Erdogan — two on a Turkish TV channel in my hotel room (with English subtitles), and one at a square in Istanbul.

Not once did he mention religion. It was all about the economy, political stability and how Turkey was set to become an important part of the European Union.

Does Erdogan’s legacy have lessons for Nawaz Sharif or is it just a Turkish delight?
He was drawing the most diverse crowds as well: secular men and women in their liberal European attire; conservatives in their hijabs and beards; businessmen, shopkeepers, students, bus and taxi drivers and even artists!

I had asked a group of liberal college students at the rally to explain me why were many young people like themselves supporting a party that had supposedly emerged from an ‘Islamist’ movement?

“This is not the same party”, one of the students had replied. “This is a very functional party that is very good with economics (sic) ... “

Erdogan was saying (and more so) delivering what almost every Turk — left or right, secular or conservative — had been craving for after the political and economic chaos of the 1990s: i.e political and economic stability; an end to the long era of military-civilian power struggles; and a Turkey that would finally be accepted as a respected peer by other European nations.

Fast forward to June 2015. I was traveling between Amsterdam (Netherlands) and Copenhagen (Denmark). In Copenhagen, Danish parties were campaigning for a new election.

I was busy admiring the fact that how well the Scandinavian model of social democracy and the welfare state has done to survive the ‘neo-con’ economic onslaught of the 1990s and early 2000s; and of the resultant cultural upheavals muddling the mindset of Europe’s Muslim diasporas, when I came upon a very telling graffiti painted underneath a bridge in Copenhagen.

It was in Danish, and when I translated it (on Google translator), it read: ‘Noise gets you attention, not votes. It also leaves you deaf ... ’

Incidentally this was two days before the 2015 Turkish election. I had been scanning various websites of Turkish newspapers, mostly to see what Erdogan was saying five years after I had been so impressed by the contents of his speeches.

I was shocked. It was noise. Sheer noise. His statements were now deeply suspicious and almost incoherent rants about ‘traitors’, ‘bad Muslims’, conspiracies, et al.

He’s now the President so he wasn’t on the party ticket. But he was searching for another AKP majority in the parliament that would provide him new powers (as President).

But perhaps after realising that this was a rather tall order, he began to tear away at the image of the hard-working and highly efficient manger of Turkish economy and democracy that he had so impressively constructed ever since 2002.

Out came a man who in reckless desperation was now willing to malign his own brilliant legacy and replace it with the demagogic sound and fury of his more distant past — the one he had himself greatly softened, and had even dispensed with, 13 years ago.

The result was a drastic reduction in the seats and votes won by the AKP in 2015. It lost almost 58 seats to its rivals and is now struggling to even clobber a shaky coalition government.

Demagogic noises do get media attention and initially may also bag some votes. But the electorate anywhere in the world have continuously exhibited the fact that such noises may attract large audiences in the media (and now the social media), but they leave the voters jarred.

In my observations of elections in various developed and developing countries in the last decade or so (including, of course, Pakistan), I always notice how most voters, the moment they approach the voting booth, go into a rather practical state of mind. They are thinking, what can a candidate or a party do to address economic and social issues, both on a macro and micro levels. He or she (or at least most of them) are not concerned about any grand ideological scheme of things, as such.

Erdogan was the man who got things done. His trump card was the creation of a robust economy based on clever and pragmatic economic maneuvers instead of on any particular political ideology. In the end the same man somehow lost the plot and began with some loud holy book thumping and talk of neo-Ottomanism, whatever that is. Noise.

He should’ve known better. As one Erdogan and AKP voter proudly told me back in 2011: ‘we don’t need to be taught about our faith. That’s for us to learn from our parents and elders, and not from politicians. We need to be taught what good economics is and how it works ...’

Erdogan and AKP also became models to follow by Pakistan’s largest centre-right party, the PML(N). This party, quite like the AKP, has roots in what the West defines as ‘Political Islamism’.

But just as AKP had done in 2002, PMLN too began to evolve into becoming a moderate conservative entity that wanted to work towards building stable economic constructs that were compatible with global economic trends as well as with Pakistan’s evolving idea of nationalism.

The PML(N) has correctly gone on to eschew its demagogic past and tenor. It swept the 2013 election in Pakistan, the 2015 election in Gilgit-Baltistan, and continues to win the by-elections.

After a slow start, its government chose an astute and upfront soldier as the country’s new military chief who had an elaborate plan for tackling the issue of extremism and terrorism, giving the PML(N) regime enough space to set its economic schemes into motion.

Voters can see this, even though social media sites remain ripe with opposition sloganeering about revolution, change, outrage, flying teers, punctures, patwaris, jeeay this and jeeay that. Noise.

Beyond this noise, however, is a vague but clear feeling about certain unprecedented happenings: a regime that is slowly, but surely working; a military focused on correcting certain terrible follies of the past; and votes being won on examples and symbols of economic mobility, and not noise.

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif should indeed be impressed by PM Erdogan’s legacy, but must be wary of the one who is currently Turkey’s President. He should also remain assured by the fact that so far much opposition to his government is sheer noise. That’s why his party is still getting the most votes. Yes, it’s that simple, really.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, June 14th, 2015
http://www.dawn.com/news/1187560/smo...ner-noises-off

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The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion !

Eqbal Ahmed: the astute alarmist

When I dropped out of the Karachi University (due to ‘political reasons’) in 1990 and joined journalism, I found myself hanging in an ideological limbo.

Having styled myself as a ‘Marxist’ at college in the mid-1980s, by the decade’s end I wasn’t quite so sure where I stood during a time when the Cold War was winding up and the Soviet Union had begun to collapse.

This is when I stumbled upon the columns of Eqbal Ahmed. Almost immediately I found myself relating to his every word. Thanks to him, I believe, I finally discovered something that was always in me; something for which I didn’t have the academic discipline and intellectual tools to fully articulate and shape.

For me, Eqbal became an intellectual guru. A guru I actually met just once. I bumped into him in 1993 in a hallway of the offices of the Dawn newspaper. I was too much in awe of him to say much, but was quietly thrilled to learn that he had heard of me, despite the fact that I was still in my early 20s and had been in journalism for a mere three years.

So what did I find in Eqbal that I couldn’t in Marx, Mao, Faiz and Hamza Alvi (on the left) and in men like Abul Ala Maududi (on the right)?

My days as a reckless student activist had seen me fervently trying to complement this recklessness with the writings and thoughts of classical and modern leftist and rightest ideologues. In hindsight I now believe I was always searching for some sort of a progressive middle ground.

I was surprised that, even though Eqbal Ahmed had been a well-known intellectual and writer ever since the early 1960s, I somehow didn’t pay a lot of attention to him till 1990.

But I believe that he is still a relatively lesser known intellectual entity in Pakistan compared to the country’s other intellectual giants and political thinkers.

Nevertheless, he remains to be perhaps the most relevant because whereas the thoughts of his above-mentioned contemporaries are firmly rooted in the ebb and flows of Cold War politics and ideologies, Eqbal had the uncanny ability to transcendent the tyranny of being grounded (and thus stuck) in the myopia of contemporary political trends and events.

He did this by understanding the present with the help of historical dialecticism (that he was a master of), and then actually predict what certain current events were promising (or warning) about the future.

In a recent book on Eqbal by his friend Stuart Schaar, the author suggests that Eqbal was able to derive uncanny insights into political and social events and then make poignant predictions. Schaar suggests that this was mainly due to the fact that these insights were not only being shaped by Eqbal’s immaculate grasp of political histories and philosophies, but also by his first-hand experiences as an activist.

The latter clearly sets Eqbal apart. Born into an aristocratic Muslim family in Bihar, Eqbal migrated to Pakistan with his elder brother in 1947. His parents were supporters of the Congress party, but Eqbal became smitten by Jinnah who remained to hold a special place in Eqbal’s thoughts throughout his life.

Eqbal (who was just 14 when Pakistan emerged as a separate South Asian country), made most of his journey to his new homeland on foot along with millions of other Muslim migrants.

Eqbal often spoke about the violence that he witnessed during this mass migration. It reminded him of the brutal murder of his father by his opponents in Bihar. His father was stabbed to death in front of Eqbal when he was just nine.

In Pakistan Eqbal lived with his elder brother and joined college. In 1948, he volunteered to join a battalion of Muslim League youth who had come to his college to recruit men to fight in Pakistan’s first war in Kashmir. He was wounded in action.

In 1958, he won a scholarship to study at the prestigious Princeton University in the United States. Here he immersed himself in the study of Middle Eastern and African history and politics and also learned Arabic. He was already fluent in Urdu, English and Persian.

In 1961, he travelled to Paris where he learned French and came into contact with Algerian nationalists who were fighting a war of liberation against the French in Algeria.

For his PhD thesis he travelled to Tunis and then entered Algeria in 1962 where he fought side by side with Algerian nationalists till the French were driven out.

By now Eqbal had also begun to study and master Islamic history. He was invited to join the first independent government in Algeria but he declined and returned to the US.

He began to teach at a university in Massachusetts where he became an early opponent of America’s involvement in Vietnam. In 1971, he was arrested for his anti-war activism, tried and eventually released.

He had already begun to describe himself as a progressive Muslim and vehemently opposed ‘Soviet Communism’ and ‘American imperialism.’ He was also extremely critical of dictatorships in Third World countries and of Arab Sheikhdoms in the Middle East. He also became a passionate supporter of the Palestinian cause.

Eqbal took great pride in the cultural history of his faith and in his writings and lectures he often denounced Muslim rulers and the clergy who he believed were hell-bent on whitewashing this history to meet their myopic and avaricious ends.

Now well armed with immaculate academic and experiential knowledge of Islam, the Middle East and Africa, Eqbal travelled to Paris in 1978 to interview Iranian spiritual leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, who had been living there in exile.

Though Eqbal hailed the Iranian Revolution in 1979, he predicted that the Shah’s pro-West autocracy in Iran will be replaced by the religious despotism of the clerics. He was proven right.

In the early 1980s when the US openly began to arm Afghan insurgents against Soviet troops that had invaded Afghanistan, Eqbal predicted that ‘this will come back to haunt the US.’ And it did as it did other parties in the conflict, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

Eqbal once again warned the US against attacking Saddam in Iraq in 1990. He predicted that Saddam’s fall would usher in sectarian chaos in the region. Fourteen years later, he was once again proven right when the US finally toppled Saddam in 2004 and the region went up in flames.

Schaar suggests that Eqbal had also predicted tragic events like 9/11. Eqbal had interviewed Osama Bin Laden in Peshawar in 1986 and in the early 1990s suggested that the same ideology that had been drummed into men like Osama by the Americans and the Pakistanis in the 1980s, would spiral out of control and turn the indoctrinated into adversaries.

Eqbal spend the last decade of his life in Pakistan writing a weekly column for Dawn. He continued to advocate social democracy in Muslim countries as an antidote to extremism, poverty and injustice.

His greatest ambition was to establish a large social sciences university in Pakistan that could herald in a progressive and enlightened Muslim Renaissance. Unable to raise the $30 million that was required to build such a project, Eqbal succumbed to cancer in 1999. He was 65.

Eqbal Ahmed: the astute alarmist

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Left is Right

Smokers’ Corner: Who’s to say?

While on a recent trip to Germany, I had the chance to catch up with the mutual friend of an old buddy of mine.

The buddy’s name was Nasir and we were members of a progressive student outfit at a local college in Karachi in the mid-1980s. Nasir came from a lower-middle-income group and lived with his family in a tiny apartment in the city’s Burns Road area. I remember he used to have a large collection of Urdu translations of the works of Marx, Mao, Lenin and Trotsky.

In those days we were also great admirers of Benazir Bhutto who was in exile.

Just before Benazir Bhutto decided to return from exile in 1986, a group of activists from my college were planning to travel to Lahore, where she was to hold her first public rally after her return.

A case of what goes around, comes around …
Nasir and I journeyed to Lahore with this group and stayed at a rundown apartment of a friend’s cousin in a congested area where our group gathered to plan its bit in making Benazir’s rally a success.

Right behind the apartment building was a mosque with a booming loudspeaker. We were in Lahore for about three weeks, and every Friday, the cleric of the mosque would deliver a fiery sermon in which he would urge mothers to send their sons to take part in the armed struggle against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Most of us would be sleeping at the time of the sermon, thanks to the long nights we used to spend discussing politics. But some parts of the sermon almost always yanked everyone up, before we tried going back to sleep again.

One such Friday, Nasir got up grumbling like a cranky old man and then suddenly announced that he was going to the mosque.

Most of us in the apartment were surprised by this dramatic declaration because he was considered to be the most surkha (Urdu slang for communist) of us urban, wayward Cold War ‘Marxists’. He asked me to accompany him.

“What for?” I protested.

“Abay buss, inn molvi sahib sey milna hai (I just have to meet this cleric),” he said, washing his face in the tiny bathroom. “Just come,” he said.

So I did. When we reached the mosque, the cleric was done with his loud ‘let’s go to Afghanistan’ sermon and was in the process of leading the Friday prayers. We waited, even though I still had no idea what Nasir had in mind.

Once the prayers were over, we moved in. Nasir went straight for the cleric. Speaking in Punjabi, he asked him why it was important for us to go to Afghanistan.

The cleric gave him a smug smile.

Nasir continued: “The thing is, maulvi sahib, these sermons have really inspired me to go to Afghanistan and fight alongside our brothers against the communists!”

“Bless you!” Replied the cleric — a sturdy and stern looking man, maybe in his early 30s, and (as we later learned) a passionate sympathiser of one of the many puritanical groups that had begun to sprout during the Ziaul Haq dictatorship. “I have sent many brave boys like you to Afghanistan,” he proudly claimed.

“Bless you!” said Nasir, echoing the cleric. “So be it! My friend here and I shall leave tomorrow for the Afghan border.” But the cleric’s smug smile rapidly turned into a nervous droop, when Nasir added: “… and you are coming with us!”

Looking at the cleric’s expression, I got into the act as well: “That’s true, maulvi sahib. We have heeded the call of our great leader (Zia). You must accompany us as our mentor.”

The cleric’s smug smile had by now turned into a twitchy grin: “Sons, my health is weak, and I have a job here at the mosque. You go, I will join you later.”

“Maulvi sahib,” Nasir replied, “your body is like steel. Your strength is equal to the strength of both of us. Your booming sermons and voice have such power; they will instil fear in the hearts of the Soviets. All those young boys you have sent to Afghanistan would be so inspired and thankful when they see you fighting alongside them. So it is decided then. We leave tomorrow morning after Fajar prayers. We’ll pick you up.”

The cleric just tamely shook his head and hastily bid farewell.

The next day, just before the morning prayers, we went to a nearby office of the student organisation that we were members of and managed to borrow a jeep from the office in-charge whose brother was attending college in Karachi with us. We then drove towards the mosque. After much convincing and another emotional spiel from Nasir, we finally got the cleric to accompany us.

“Now what?” I whispered to Nasir. “Afghanistan?”

“Just see,” he whispered back.

We got into the jeep and started driving towards Islamabad. As Nasir and I sang praises of Ziaul Haq, the cleric remained conspicuously quiet. However, after about 20 minutes, he broke his numb silence and asked us to stop.

“Kyun, kya hua maulvi sahib?” (Why, what’s the matter?), Nasir asked.

“I need to go to the washroom,” said the cleric.

“We are fighters, maulvi sahib,” I said. “We can face torture with a smile, so what is facing going to the washroom to us? We can surely hold it far longer than the Soviets, can’t we?” I asked, with a serious, straight face.

“Bilkul, bilkul!” Nasir added.

“Son, I have a condition, that’s why I am asking you to stop,” said the cleric. “I’ll just take a minute.”

So we stopped the jeep near a few bushes. He got off and disappeared behind the bushes. Nasir followed him. “Abay, yeh kya kar raha hai?” (Hey, what are you doing?), I asked.

“Come, come,” said Nasir, hurrying after the cleric. “There’s a road behind these bushes.”

And lo and behold. There indeed was a road there, and on it was our passionate enthusiast sprinting away, chasing first a rickshaw, and then a bus. In a matter of minutes he had scrammed a good hundred yards away from us.

Nasir shouted: “Maulvi sahib! Par jang ka kya hoga?” (Moulvi Sahib, but what about the war?)

Then looking at me, he smiled: “At least we won’t be hearing his sermons for a while.”

Later in 1986 Nasir was arrested. He was released in January 1989 soon after Benazir was elected PM. But after being completely disillusioned by her first regime and then disgusted by the Benazir-Nawaz-Military tussles of the 1990s, Nasir managed to slip into a European country in 1997.

His last words to me were: ‘This country is going to implode, friend. It has created too many monsters.’

I never saw him again, till 18 years later in Bonn, Germany, where the mutual friend informed me that Nasir was in Rome for some years (where he had worked as a waiter), and was now in Brussels, Belgium.

‘So, what is he up to now?’ I asked, smiling.

Our mutual friend replied, ‘He’s the pesh imam (cleric) of a mosque in Brussels ...’

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, June 28th, 2015
Source: Who’s to say?

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The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion !

Smokers’ Corner: Satire in the time of cholera

Everybody knows about Fifty-Fifty —the satirical skit show that debuted in 1978 on the state-owned Pakistan Television (PTV) and ran till 1984.

The show’s legacy has been such that it is not only instantly recalled by those who saw it first-hand on their TV sets, but also by those who were either too young at the time or not even born!

The show was still attracting a large, loyal viewership when its producers decided to call it a day.

In 1988 Shalimar Recording Company (SRC) released the first official VHS release of the show that was a compilation of some of its most popular skits.

The release was converted to DVD in the 1990s and this took the show into the 2000s — a period when skits ripped from these DVDs began to be uploaded on various websites (especially on YouTube).

Fifty-fifty dished out satire during an oppressive regime, and that too, right under the dictator’s nose
Fifty-Fifty never really went away. Its uploaded episodes on websites still get a large number of clicks and its DVDs remain best-sellers.

Fifty-Fifty has a rather curious history. It debuted in 1978, hardly a year after a populist government was overthrown in a reactionary military coup.

The show ironically emerged when a new military regime had begun to embark on a banning spree, cancelling TV shows, films and songs it deemed ‘immoral’ or ‘detrimental to the well-being of the country’.

And yet, PTV somehow managed to launch a social satire show helmed by a maverick producer, Shoaib Mansoor, who was still in his early 20s and almost entirely inexperienced.

In an interview that he gave to an English daily in the 1990s, he suggested that despite the fact that an intransigent dictatorship had taken over in July 1977, the situation (in 1978) was fluid and one could still make his or her way on TV with ideas which, however, a few years later, would become almost taboo.

As a college student Mansoor had been a fan of Such Gup and Taal Matol, the two satire shows penned and produced by Shaoib Hashmi (for PTV) in the early 1970s.

One of the main cast members of Hashmi’s shows was actor, singer and composer, Arshad Mehmood. Mansoor befriended Arshad and both began to visit the house of Anwar Maqsood whose main claim to fame at the time was the fact that he used to write the script for PTV’s flamboyant variety programme, The Zia Mohyuddin Show (1970-73).

Mansoor and Arshad began to talk about producing their own satire show and call it Fifty-Fifty. Highly impressed by Hashmi’s satirical style, they began to look for a writer who could match his panache.

Mansoor was convinced that Maqsood was that writer. Maqsood agreed to do the script but by the time the show was given the go-ahead by PTV, General Ziaul Haq had overthrown the government of Z.A. Bhutto.

So Maqsood had to tailor the script according the new regime’s dictates and ‘advices’. The regime was not to be spoken of (in a satirical manner) and nor were the policies that it was introducing in the name of morality and faith.

Maqsood instead turned his guns squarely towards the bureaucracy, the film industry (that had begun its slow decline) and popular sports such as cricket and hockey.

A cast of relative newcomers was assembled and these included small-time stage comedians like Ismail Tara, Majid Jahangir and Zeba Shahnaz; and debutants, Ashraf Khan and Sakhi Kamal.

A tall hefty man who used to work for a travelling agency also became a regular and so did experienced actor, Latif Kapadia.

Soon, the then unknown (but future comedy stars) such as Umer Sharif and Bushra Ansari too would sporadically appear on Fifty-Fifty.

Maqsood became a regular too, often appearing in skits where he played a serious looking man interviewing a wide variety of idiosyncratic characters that he had written.

Some performers from Hashmi’s defunct shows too migrated to Fifty-Fifty, including Arshad Mehmood.

The show debuted in late 1978 to instant acclaim. Though it began by satirising the incompetence of the bureaucracy and the volatile nature of the country’s cricket and hockey cultures, Maqsood began to devise methods through which he could trick the censors.

He would use a subtle and dry style of wit to critique the regime that the members of the censor board would often fail to pick.

For example, during the show’s third season in 1979, Maqsood and Mansoor were able to slip in a skit that (on the surface) was about a crooked cloth merchant bemoaning a police raid on his shop.

However, the merchant (played by the versatile Majid Jahangir), also talks about a cream he’d been applying on his back that has ‘long painful marks’ (‘lumbey, lumbey nishan’).

With this skit, Maqsood slyly managed to satirise the regime’s habit of publicly flogging petty criminals to insert a sense of fear in society. Many years later, Mansoor told a newspaper that though the censors failed to pick this up, Ziaul Haq did!

On various occasions the show’s core team members have stated how Zia became a regular viewer of the show and would often call Mansoor to discuss his (Zia’s) observations.

The first time this happened was right after the episode that had the cloth merchant skit.

Fifty-Fifty also became one of the earliest in Pakistan to satirise the influence of ‘Arabisation’ in Pakistan — especially after hundreds of Pakistanis (from the late 1970s onwards) had begun to travel (for work) to oil-rich Middle-Eastern countries.

In a 1980 skit of the show, an Arab Sheikh is shown having tea at a café. One by one he is approached by Pakistani men of all classes and professions, asking him for a job in his country.

They also express how close they are (in habits) to the Arabs, until another man appears and tells the aspirants that the Sheikh was actually a PTV actor playing the role of an ancient Arab warrior in a TV series.

He also admonishes them, telling them, ‘what’s wrong with being a Pakistani, that you all are grovelling at the feet of a sheikh …!’

The show also often lamented (in a highly satirical manner), the decline of the local Urdu film industry and the rise of the loud and ‘crude’ Punjabi films.

To highlight the supposed absurdities of Punjabi cinema, the show produced what is perhaps its most popular skit in which it creates a trailer of a Punjabi film but with dialogues that are fused with English (Bashira in Trouble).

When calls from Zia became too frequent and the team had to quietly listen to his rambling critiques, Maqsood decided to quit. Some believe he also had a falling out with Mansoor.

Mansoor, Ismail Tara, Majid Jahangir, Zeba Shehnaz and Ashraf Khan now began to script the show, but when spontaneous lobbies began to bemoan the way it was mocking Punjabi and Pushtu speakers, the members decided to call it a day (1982).

An intense letter-writing and call-in campaign from fans forced PTV to revive the show in mid-1983. But soon the show’s two top performers, Majid Jahangir and Ismail Tara, had an altercation and Jahangir stormed out.

Calls from Zia resumed, making Mansoor and co. wonder why the head of the state was always stuck in a room watching TV! Then a lobby demanded that the show stop making fun of Urdu-speakers.

Exhausted and frustrated, the team decided to wrap up the show once again in 1984, this time for good.

Most of the members of the Fifty-Fifty who began as unknowns went on to become stars.

Many continue to insist that the reason the quality of writing, direction and acting on the show was so polished and high was mainly due to the fact that the actors, writers and director of the show had to continuously be on their feet and devise intelligent ways to dodge an extremely suspicious censor board and a dictator who thought he was an insightful critic.

A joke is still popular among the show’s team. It goes something like this: decades after the show ended, a man who (in 1979) was on the censor board suddenly began to smirk. When someone asked him why he was smirking, he replied: ‘I just understood an (anti-Zia) joke that Anwar Maqsood had written in 1978 and which I had let go thinking it was about a goat. Hehe.’

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, July 5th, 2015
Source:Satire in the time of cholera

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The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion !

Eid messages…

From Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif


Dear patriots and patwaris,

Assalamualaikum. Full stop. New para.

I take this asparagus … err … aus … aus… auspicious occasion to greet you all a very hefty … err … happy Eid. Mubarak.

New Para. Dear patriots and patwaris, this year, my government completed its second year in power and as you can see, mashallah, cucumbers … err … nothing en .. en … encumbers the economic progress of the country because all imported mints … err … imp … imp … impediments are being successfully removed, inshallah, mahshallah, alhamdulillah, excreta. New para.

Dear compatriots ... this Eid is a special Eid. Why? Because, my government has finally bought economic prostate artistry … err.. pros … Prosperity … and peace through many effective mangroves … errm … mangos … err … manoeuvres. Full stop.

No new para. So end of massage … err … message … excreta.

From Asif Ali Zardari


Dear Jiyalas and Jiyalees, both genuine and jaalis,

Eid Mubarak to you all from the bastion of our party’s struggle against economic exploitation, injustice and intolerance: Dubai.

Seven years ago, our party lost a great leader and I took over the reins of the party to make sure that it survives and continues to thrive as Pakistan’s largest democratic party.

I led it to victory across Pakistan in 2008, then across Sindh in 2013, and rest assured, I will now lead it to victory across Larkana and Dadu in the 2018 elections.

Dear Jiaylas and Jiyalees, our party is going through some tough times just because it stands for serving the interests of the peasants and the working-classes for whom our selfless ministers in Sindh have been amassing millions of rupees through some ingenious ways and deals. But, alas, the establishment is casting a suspicious eye on us, calling us incompetent and corrupt.

The tragic thing is that now even my own son, Bilawal, has begun to point fingers at us, but what does he know about the poor peasants and working class folks that we serve! Folks like Pir Saheb of Naudero, Sain Maulabakhsh Wadero, Seth Chachar Chandio and so many otherso. Agreeo? Goodo.

Dear friends and members of the party, I urge you all to celebrate this Eid with the peasants and the working-class folk. And for those coming to visit me at my humble mud abode in Dubai, just wanted to inform you that the Dubai Mall is having a great Eid sale. So come on over, and we’ll both shop for the happiness of the toiling masses. Eid khapay!

From Imran Khan


Oyyye my inquilaabian insaafians,

Eid Mubarak! As I dictate this message to Arif Alvi, some fans are photographing me saying my Eid prayers so they can spread these photos across the internet on Eid day just as they do photographs of me saying all my other prayers! I am very pious, oooyyye!

My message is that on Chaand Raat, look closely at the moon. Look at all the craters on it. Count these craters. Last year, I counted 35. Now I can see 71! Jahangir saheb told me these craters were created by Najam Sethi in collaboration with the famous CIA astronaut and PML-N patwari, Neil Armstrong. It is these craters that stole our mandate in Punjab!

So oyyye Armstrong! When I come to power, I will hang you at the Imran Khan Enclosure at the Gaddafi Stadium to the funky music of DJ Butt!

So rejoice, my inquilaabian insafians, Eid aa nahi rahi. Eid aa gai hai!

♪♫ Jab aye ga Imran, barhay gi shaan, baney ga naya Pakistan, baney ga naya Pakistan … ♪♫

Okay. Now back to praying pose.

From Altaf Hussain


‘Brothers … (15-minute gap) … and sisters… (18-minute gap) … a very … (17-minute gap) … happy Eid …. (18-minute gap) … But …. (21-minute gap) … what was I saying?’

(Reminded by party leaders: ‘Bhai, you were giving us your Eid message …’)

‘Haan … yes … Eid … sweet Eid … like gulab jaman … (14-minute gap) … Eid … Gulab Jaman … Nirala Sweets … Lahore … Punjab …. Eid and … … (line breaks) … toot, toot, toot …’

(Connection restored): So … Rangers …. Disconnecting my line … but … (19 minute gap) … but, brothers and sisters …. But …. (20 minute gap) … but what?

(Reminded by party leaders: ‘Bhai, but we will stay strong…’)

Yes … this Eid … strong Eid … sweet Eid … Sweet pumpkin … Pumpkin meaning kaddu … pumpkin meaning?

(‘Kaddu, bhai, kaddu’)

Haan … kaddu. This Eid, I will resign.

(‘No, bhai no, you can’t, who will lead us?’)

Kaddu! I have made up my mind … I will resign!

(‘No, bhai, no, you can’t’)

Okay … I won’t. I take my resignation back. My Eid message to my supporters is … (17 minutes gap) … that … (14 minutes gap) … where … (50 minutes gap) … where …

(‘What is the message, bhai?’)

Where is my Eidi?

From Junaid Jamshed


How wonderful it is to look at the Eid moon. But dear brethren and sisteren and sisteren who became brethren, have you ever wondered what lies between your eyes and the Eid moon? There are millions of miles of sinful dust, clouds and space between you and the moon.

So, my fellow brethren and sisteren and sisteren who became brethren, I offer you special 100 per cent Shariah-compliant lenses! You can place them on your eyeballs and then look at the Eid moon without being contaminated and corrupted by all that sinful dust.

Place your order now! Call 111-KON-BANAY-GA-JJ. Remember, brethren and sisteren and sisteren who became brethren: You pay, I pray!

Also, brethren, please don’t allow the sisteren to drive. It’s a sin. Send them to my driving school in London where we teach the sisteren to unlearn their driving skills. This Eid I am offering up to 50 per cent discount! Eid Mubarak.

From Hamza Ali Abbasi (on Facebook)


Dear fraands,

First of all a very happy Eid and second of all screw those who don’t like my ideas and thoughts and third of all Imran Khan Zindabad and fourth of all we need to stand up to the cruel and corrupt leaders and fifth of all do watch my special Eid play on HumTV and seventh of all report to PTI’s moral steering committee anyone you think is gay.

Fraands, this Eid, to show how aware I am to the plight of the poor in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Myanmar and Bhutan, I have decided not to get my Eid haircut from Nabila or Tariq Amin and instead get one from their assistants.

Secondly, I will be donating over 1,000 empty plastic Pepsi bottles to old women who have never seen a light bulb in their lives. Yes, fraands, both Pepsi and I believe there are still such people in our beloved country, so I appeal to you, this Eid, donate empty bottles to those who have never ever in their lives seen a light bulb. This way more and more people will buy Pepsi and defeat the malicious designs of Coca-Cola that is owned by Zionists and anti-Pakistan elements, and, of course, gays.

I know I will again be criticised for speaking my mind, but I damn care because I only care for beloved country, faith, future, light camera action!

Fraands, Romans, countrymen and petite models, lastly but not leastly, thank you for your support, prayers and kisses – even though I have reported the men who sent the kisses.

Source: EID Messages

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The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion !