Two competing waves over Pakistan

Khaled Ahmed
Because of the death of Pakistani culture, normalisation with India has become more crucial than most of us realise

After 60 years Pakistan is helplessly witnessing the destruction of its culture by elements arising from within its society. The mission of purifying society to make it a fit vehicle for Islam has passed from the state. This process has been incremental, but after Talibanisation, the culture-destroying process has accelerated. The state seems to be getting cold feet over something it did earnestly since 1947 in the name of its ‘purifying’ ideology. Now worried about its global image, it is face to face with religious anarchy and wants society to become ‘tolerant’ and ‘moderate’, which is the function of culture.

It is entertainment, stupid! It is always difficult to define culture. People insist on its aesthetic aspects, but much of what people do in the name of culture is simple entertainment. The sophisticated man wants to separate aesthetic pleasure from vulgar entertainment, and that is where the people get a raw deal. People do a lot of things to lessen the burden of living in a difficult environment, and much of this defensive routine of pleasure-seeking becomes creative and assumes the title of culture.

Is pleasure-seeking acceptable to religion? There was a time when Christianity would have nothing short of self-mortification as a way if life. In Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose, the Church allowed Aristotle’s treatise on Tragedy but locked up his other book on Comedy, covering its pages with a fine film of poison. Comedy was vulgar entertainment and could not be allowed!

Writing in Jang (26 March 2006) Ataul Haq Qasimi referred to a statement made by vulgar Punjabi pop-singer, Abrarul Haq, on the question of music as a source of peace of mind. A lady had asked if namaz was not the only source of this tranquillity. The columnist stated that the ulema were not united on the concept of entertainment in Pakistani culture. Were music, photography, singing, painting, poetry and cinema allowed as entertainment or not? That was the unanswered question. But today Talibanisation has removed all ambiguity and introduced us to the certitudes of amr and nahi.

It all boils down to entertainment in the case of Pakistan. If you don’t have consensus on the items listed by Qasimi, then you have only calligraphy to fall back on. The folk tradition has to be rejected because it is intertwined with entertainment. It appears that the masses express their culture only when they want to be entertained.

Culture as fahashi: Under General Zia-ul Haq, the state began to judge entertainment as fahashi (obscenity). The mela (fair) began to change. The great Mela Chiraghan of Lahore, with its fertility-rite tota and bhang -sodden dancing fakirs, was cleansed of all un-Islamic accretions. All dancing (dhamaal) at the tombs of the Sufi saints was also reformed. Accounts of saints began to emphasise their adherence to Sharia. Sufism was viewed increasingly as heresy.

With the rise of jihad and the empowerment of Deobandi Islam, the Barelvis, who had actually celebrated the Sufi saints, in addition to supporting the Pakistan Movement, went into decline. Culture was threatened by the hard Islam General Zia was borrowing from the Arabs. His first Zakat and Ushr Ordinance was framed by an Arab scholar.

When the state becomes harshly anti-entertainment, the people rely on what is termed as liminalism, a kind of reaching out to neighbouring cultures. This is what happened when the state under General Zia began to judge entertainment as fahashi. The people, closed off from entertainment, reached out to India. Zia’s Islamisation drove the urban populations to watching videocassettes of Indian films and buying satellite TV dishes.

Interestingly, the dishes were bought only after Indian programmes became available on them. Understandably, the state of Pakistan was more upset about the cultural invasion from India than with the American one that came in through globalisation.

Two competing waves over Pakistan: After the rise of the Taliban with the support of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, Pakistani culture came under threat. Mullah Umar began getting rid of whatever little culture remained in Afghanistan. He fell upon the pleasure-seeking cities away from the austere Pushtun hinterland and tried to kill their culture. In Kabul, he found that India was filling the cultural gap left by faith with its song-and-dance movies.

The Taliban banned the films and banned the TV and the videocassettes too. They went into Mazar Sharif in the north and tried to set right the city steeped in sinful entertainment. The city revolted and massacred the Taliban army. Thwarted in the north, the Taliban turned to the Durand Line and found the best carriers of their virus of hatred in Pakistan’s Tribal Areas. Today Pakistan is under siege from Talibanisation. It is a wave that punishes people’s pursuit of entertainment. And it has hit the entire country, including Islamabad. Culture is now pursued with a feeling of guilt and as a crime.

If Talibanisation is the wave that destroys culture in the name of Islam, another wave borrowed by the people as a countervailing force is coming from India. This second wave is less and less the furtive cultural function of the Zia period. It is carried on the groundswell of the process of normalisation with India set on foot by President Pervez Musharraf, the one policy over which the people of Pakistan support him. They will not say that all they want from India is what an ideological Pakistan and the Taliban are not willing to allow.

The music shops attacked by the Pakistani vigilante madrassa groups are mostly filled with videocassettes of Indian films and songs. Islamabad has no intellectual understanding of the fact that it is providing the people of Pakistan a chance to survive through normalisation with India. But who cares as long as we can survive Talibanisation? Because of the death of Pakistani culture, normalisation with India has become more crucial than most of us realise.

Before 1947, Muslims offended with the fahashi of Saadat Hasan Manto took him repeatedly to court, only to hear the Muslim judges under British Raj say that what Manto wrote was high culture, not obscenity. After 1947, every time he was dragged before the court for obscenity, he was convicted! The judge in Karachi gave him tea in the evening and told him he was the country’s greatest short story writer, but convicted him for obscenity in the morning. Now the state wants to stop killing culture, but it is too late.