In the past couple of weeks, many people I know have been furious about the treatment of Malala Yousufzai in Pakistan. Why, they ask in plaintive and frankly nasal tones, do so many people at home insist on dragging the purest possible form of hero through the mud, when she is universally lauded everywhere else?
Foolishness. I have duly chided them for their lack of awareness. They sit among the people who deride Malala and do not understand their reality. They have slipped into Conspiristan, our less than benevolent version of Narnia (entered not through a wardrobe but a closet of skeletons), and yet expect the world to make sense.
When you are in Rome, you do as the Romans do, for good or ill. It is a shocking breach of etiquette to sit in Conspiristan and demand logic.
Always a servant to the public good, I have decided to devote my time to take you on a tour, that you might not embarrass yourselves further with your ignorance of your surroundings.
Let us journey together to a new place, a place I have never lived in but have always been compelled, out of excruciating curiosity, to visit. Let’s go to Conspiristan.
At first glance, it looks an awful lot like home. The sky is blue, traffic is terrible, and we are in an abusive but exciting relationship with our cricket team. But after a moment, you realise you have entered a world like an M C Escher painting, made of up recognisable objects but impossibly twisted around until the whole is a distorted view through a broken prism.
It soon becomes clear that Malala is in direct conflict with three customs of this land: a painstakingly cultivated culture of victimhood from ‘foreign hands’, a suspicion of local heroes and a disdain for women who are too loud for their own good.
Conspiristan is in many ways a comfortable place, where you can tell everything about someone from a glance at their passport or name or skin. Pakistani Muslims are prima facie incapable of wrongdoing. Righteousness is woven into their DNA, which is why the idea of the Pakistani Taliban actually being Pakistani is absurd, when they are clearly a Ukrainian Uzbek American Jew hybrid. You can tell, you see, because they do terrible things. Every terrible action of a Pakistani can easily be attributed in every case to an outside power jealous and frightened of our awe-inspiring potential.
In Conspiristan everything is about you. Everything. Every policy, every war, every amendment to every constitution is aimed at the oppression and destruction of Muslims and particularly Pakistanis. You have to watch your back, because there are spies around every corner, foreign hands in Pakistani gloves, conspiracies hatching like eggs on a battery farm, all to hold back the development of Pakistan since we are the chosen people and if we were able to come into our own, why, we would rule the world within a year.
How can we blame people for their fervent belief that Malala is part of a conspiracy, when they live and breathe conspiracies every day? Now, in the real world, we may think of entities like the CIA as war criminals with all the subtlety of a bull in a china shop who couldn’t kill Fidel Castro after half a hundred tries and hunted a man on dialysis for 11 years before finding him, who’s lies are so outrageous they are caught out at every turn. (Remember the Weapons of Mass Disappearance in Iraq?) In Conspiristan, however, the CIA is an omniscient, omnipotent entity that works in complete stealth and silence and maliciousness, like a cross between a ninja and the devil.
But they will fail because for all their power and low cunning, they did not reckon with the average Conspiristani armchair detective. You see, in Conspiristan, we are all Snowdens and Sherlocks. No matter how mediocre our performance in the rest of our day to day lives, we have complete confidence in our ability to sniff out plots like a bloodhound in a slaughterhouse.
It’s not that the locals of this land do not have journalists and analysts who have made it their life’s work to try and seek the truth. But they cannot hold a candle to that far more respectable and reliable source, My Aunt's Cousin Twice Removed or of course the ever sagacious Some Chap I Met At Dinner.
Nor, in fairness, can Malala’s gender be trusted. Conspiristan is chock full of women who apparently suffer through the unimaginable nightmare of sexual assault and then talk about it ‘to get a foreign passport’. In fact, ‘talking about it’ is clearly a greater crime here than “it” ever is and herein, again, lies Malala’s obvious treason.
In this strange land, perpetrators of violent crime-gang rape, terrorism etc are condemned but never with such full throated conviction and vitriol as are the (usually female) victims and survivors of those crimes that speak out against it. The locals are convinced this is a sound strategy for both moral and practical reasons: a) violent criminals may do terrible things but at least they don’t talk to westerners about it, possibly (horrors!) bringing shame to the country and b) violent criminals are usually far scarier opponents than victimized girls and women. An easy choice.
This was most infamous in the case of the insensitive Mukhtaran Mai who shocked a nation by talking about her gang-rape, without taking into account that she may possibly be hurting the feelings of a country that had never done anything to her aside from allow a culture where her horror was commonplace (and subsequently released five of her six rapists, confiscated her passport and raided her organisation for women’s welfare).
Why should Malala be above suspicion? This is a land where it is sane, patriotic and not at all a sign of mass mental illness that the greatest scientist of the nation and its only Nobel Prize winner was driven away from his beloved homeland and subsequently had his grave defaced for the provocative crime of being an Ahmadi in the first degree.
In Conspiristan, there is no possible way that a Pakistani girl who had championed education throughout her short life and was shot for it – almost fatally – is not a CIA plant. The clues were all around us: for example, all the white people being nice to her and inviting her to the UN which is one of the many major hubs for discussing anti-Pakistani plots (Conspiristan geography: the world is 70 percent ocean, 30 percent land and 120 percent anti-Pakistani hubs).
In this world, the brave criticisms of the public, who showed their courageous unwillingness to back down to or be cowed by a nearly mortally wounded 16-year-old girl, may well have saved the nation from Superspy Malala, who would no doubt have been torturing detainees in Baghram Airbase by the time she was old enough to vote (ie rig elections for her American overlords).
But let us return now, my friends, from this topsy-turvy land. It may amuse us to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there, and too many of us already do. And if you have a friend or a family member who went once too often and has gone native (trust me, you do) coax them back to Pakistan if you can. Conspiristan’s inhabitants could swell until all of Pakistan is absorbed into it but it will never, ever be Pakistan. It is not real, and never will be.
And sometimes, as we delightedly sniff out conspiracies because they are exciting and make us feel clever, we need to be reminded of that.

The writer is a freelance contributor.
Email: zaairhussain@gmail.com

http://e.thenews.com.pk/8-4-2013/page6.asp#;