Last month, while other pyalas scuttled off to the Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf's (PTI’s) Karachi jalsa with visions of free potty training seats in their heads, I stayed at home with a copy of Imran Khan’s Pakistan, A Personal History. I read it with the intention of reviewing it here immediately but, like certain Bufo toads that can, at will, secrete a noxious hallucinogenic substance that acts as a deterrent to predators, the book did not encourage further handling.
I revisited it today because I chanced upon Amir Zia’s review for Newsline last month. He succinctly articulated some of my biggest problems with the content of the memoir, saying:
Amir Zia did make an effort to balance his take on ‘the Khan’s’ personal history with references to the many good things in it, calling his recollections of cricketing life and building the Shaukat Khanum Memorial hospital ‘moving’ and ‘inspiring’. Mr. Zia is probably a better person than I am because I feel no such compunction. Whatever bright spark once lurked in the heart of this self professed Chosen One – his version of what happened to make an English jury return a verdict of 10-2 in his favour in the Botham libel case can be summarized with “As I was waiting, I got a message from a friend that Mian Bashir wanted to speak to me. I phoned him and found him in a cheerful mood. ‘Allah is changing the jury’s mind!’ he said – has long been obscured by a cloud of magic dust. Like in Pullman’s His Dark Materials, only without its fierce interrogation of dogma and ritual.
If you don’t like my words for it, take a few from the horse’s…er…mouth:
The Khan on what needs to be done to deal with the ‘10%’ of truly militant militants in the tribal areas (the rest apparently prefer crochet, only times are hard and the war blocks access to the market for doilies):
The Khan on the need for enshrining the difference between a public face and a private face or, as some people might call it, hypocrisy:
Passages like this worried me because they indicate a rigid, conservative mind that thinks along the lines of 'my way or the highway'. It is the disproportionate power given to those who would be custodians of 'public morality', for political purposes, that has landed Pakistan in the soup it is in today. Passages like this also amused me because, for someone whose main vote bank so far seems to be young people, he really is pretty clueless about what young people really want and, more importantly, need. The life of the body, the life of the mind, these are fundamental human rights. And too many of the physical and creative freedoms required to have either would potentially face the chop if somebody decided to place the protection of 'impressionable young minds' above both.
The Khan, for example, only took about two decades of experiential learning to understand "there was a world of difference between happiness and pleasure-seeking".
The Khan on people who might disagree with him:
The Khan on about half of the people who attended his Party In The Park:
Rants about this 'elite' function as periods throughout the memoir, punctuating his opinions on everything from environmental degradation to the need to overhaul the education system to his observations about the injustice of our judicial system. This is a real pity because they undermine the few things he says that actually make sense. Pakistan is indeed, as he hammers home again and again, saddled with a parasitic elite that has insisted on usurping, keeping and abusing power to the detriment of the many hovering around the poverty line; but his reductionist identification of them as people who have strayed from the one faith and become 'westernized' is sadly flawed. The powerful elite of which he speaks include the shallu-wearing landlords and industrialists that are now part of his movement for justice. They can also wear beards, uniforms and burqas as well as jeans and ape Saudi Arabia as well as Western pop culture, but apparently that isn't quite as bad. His position seems to be that if you are not part of the solution (in this case, his notion of Islam) you are part of the problem.
This debauched, rudderless, still mentally colonized elite has done Pakistan a world of harm, he says. For example, post 9/11:
I could go on, and quote verbatim other choice bits of text, such as his one sentence lament about how mean presswalas kept calling up his good friend Sita White for ‘lurid interviews’, or the paragraph where he mentions one Shah Mehmood Qureshi as an example of what is wrong with Pakistani politics, or how he lambasts the jamaati thugs he is now in bed with, or how it only took him five meetings and nearly as many years to understand Musharraf wasn't a good boy, or how my mother’s brother’s third cousin’s dog inferred a Madonna-whore complex from all the things Khan Saab’s book didn’t say about women in Pakistan when he accidentally sank his teeth into it but, really, what’s the point. Let’s not be liberally fanatical in our negativity and look at the plus points of it.
1) We have been asking for a PTI manifesto and lo and behold there has been one amongst us for a couple of months already, complete with Islamic Fabioesque cover and – just like his first book where the ghost writer really was a ghost - no mention of who actually wrote it.
2) In this book, we learn a lot about poetry. Well, Iqbal’s poetry. Well, those of Iqbal’s poems which fit into Imran Khan’s view of the world. In particular, the one about the shaheen. No not Khayaban-e-Shaheen, the other shaheen, the eagle, which as Khan Saab tells us is “an emblem of royalty which denoted a kind of heroic idealism based on daring, pride and honour.” (No mention of course of that of Iqbal's verse that calls, e.g., for burning down crop fields that do not feed the peasant, but I digress again.)
I was thinking of Khan Saab's fondness for the metaphor of the regal predator driven to hunt rather than scavenge when I read the inimitable Aakar Patel’s column in the Express Tribune today. In the column, the second in his examination of the army’s dominance in Pakistan today, Mr. Patel puts it down to a caste-driven obsession with the notion of ‘warrior’. His hypothesis…
Mr. Patel’s insight into the veneration awarded to ‘leading from the front’- which in my book can also be considered a Pashtun trait- is driven home when, later in the column while mentioning Kayani’s recent statement that our nation’s “honour will not be traded for posterity”, he goes on to say that…
You see the same kind of verbal posturing in Imran Khan's utterances (tsunami = destruction), and the same kind of frenzied, emotional response in his followers (tsunami? a massive tidal wave that kills indiscriminately? hell yeah!) that a popular general would get from his ranks. It is almost as if hundreds of thousands of usually pacifist people have suddenly decided to get in touch with their inner Spartan.
In Imran Khan's Pakistan though, there would be no loincloths.
My basic problem with the worldview that Aakar Patel is skewering and Imran Khan and other balding eagles seem most comfortable inhabiting is that Pakistan can no longer afford to be a nation of warriors. We need a narrative of inclusiveness, tolerance and unity based on achievable things like economic goals, not one that suggests identity is who you're not rather than who you are. Those who want to buy into the PTI’s ‘war' on corruption, the west (and mineral water) might want to stop and ask themselves what impulse, whose hand, they are really strengthening.
My other basic problem with men who think they are berserkers is their propensity for camp followers or, in less offensive terms, their demonstrated opinion of where women would be post-victory. Consider this clip follow up of an excellent Express Tribune report about what happened after Prime Minister Gilani was successfully driven off stage by the soldiers of the Lawyers' Movement at a Lahore Bar Association meeting a couple of days ago...
Incidentally, Imran Khan's last reference to the the Brotherhood of the Black Coats he mentions glowingly several times in his memoir is:
I revisited it today because I chanced upon Amir Zia’s review for Newsline last month. He succinctly articulated some of my biggest problems with the content of the memoir, saying:
And…“Khan’s personal analysis of the origin and spirit of the Pakistan Movement underlines his simplistic and superficial understanding of those times. In fact, it appears more akin to former military ruler General Zia-ul Haq’s distorted and twisted propagandist history, which still remains a part of our curriculum. For instance, Khan, in his zeal to promote the Islamic basis of Pakistan, equates Quaid-e-Azam Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s religious views with those of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi by saying that both stood on the same page vis-à-vis the role of religion in politics.”
“The tribal system, its code of honour and values are a constant refrain in the book. Khan maintains that the tribal areas were “crime free” before the upheavals of the recent years, ignoring the fact that before the start of the war on terror, the entire belt remained the epicenter of smuggling and gunrunning in the region. The known criminals and absconders used to take refuge in these areas and vehicles snatched from various parts of the country landed in the tribal belt. But Khan, in his zeal to glorify tribalism and the jirga system, shuts his eyes to all these facts. He makes a passing reference to the tribal practice of ‘honour’ killings which are being endorsed by jirgas in the rural areas. In fact, he views these jirgas as an “ancient democratic system.” The oppression, the backwardness, the myopic worldview and total alienation from the modern world, all of which stem from tribalism, fail to bother the Khan.”
Amir Zia did make an effort to balance his take on ‘the Khan’s’ personal history with references to the many good things in it, calling his recollections of cricketing life and building the Shaukat Khanum Memorial hospital ‘moving’ and ‘inspiring’. Mr. Zia is probably a better person than I am because I feel no such compunction. Whatever bright spark once lurked in the heart of this self professed Chosen One – his version of what happened to make an English jury return a verdict of 10-2 in his favour in the Botham libel case can be summarized with “As I was waiting, I got a message from a friend that Mian Bashir wanted to speak to me. I phoned him and found him in a cheerful mood. ‘Allah is changing the jury’s mind!’ he said – has long been obscured by a cloud of magic dust. Like in Pullman’s His Dark Materials, only without its fierce interrogation of dogma and ritual.
If you don’t like my words for it, take a few from the horse’s…er…mouth:
The Khan on what needs to be done to deal with the ‘10%’ of truly militant militants in the tribal areas (the rest apparently prefer crochet, only times are hard and the war blocks access to the market for doilies):
“I have spoken to General Pasha, head of the ISI about this, and he too believes that if we disengage from the US war, start a dialogue with the tribes, and withdraw troops from the tribal areas, we could eliminate this 10 percent in ninety days”.
The Khan on the need for enshrining the difference between a public face and a private face or, as some people might call it, hypocrisy:
‘The main difference Islamic sharia has from Western secular society is in the realm of public morality. This protects the family system, one of Pakistan’s greatest strengths…An Islamic society tries to protect the sanctity of marriage by creating an environment that affords the least temptation for people to commit infidelity. Secondly, it tries to protect impressionable young people from public immorality, the same concept behind the ‘adults only’ film classification…So apart from these vital provisions aimed at protecting the family, a true Islamic society would be no different from the democratic welfare states of Europe.”
Passages like this worried me because they indicate a rigid, conservative mind that thinks along the lines of 'my way or the highway'. It is the disproportionate power given to those who would be custodians of 'public morality', for political purposes, that has landed Pakistan in the soup it is in today. Passages like this also amused me because, for someone whose main vote bank so far seems to be young people, he really is pretty clueless about what young people really want and, more importantly, need. The life of the body, the life of the mind, these are fundamental human rights. And too many of the physical and creative freedoms required to have either would potentially face the chop if somebody decided to place the protection of 'impressionable young minds' above both.
The Khan, for example, only took about two decades of experiential learning to understand "there was a world of difference between happiness and pleasure-seeking".
The Khan on people who might disagree with him:
Yep. Damn redistribution of wealth (don't look now, Ali Shariati). And women voting in parts of Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa. And supermarkets. And mineral water. Especially mineral water.“…those at the other end of the extreme are called the ‘liberal fanatics’. To liberal fanatics modernization means westernization and Islam can only impede Pakistan’s progress…For them every solution to Pakistan’s problems is imported. Hence liberal fanatics have variously advocated Marxism, a radical version of women’s liberation, market economics and other Western beliefs.”
The Khan on about half of the people who attended his Party In The Park:
... Which would, errrr, make the Oxford-educated Khan singularly incapable of providing intellectual leadership, would it not:? But I digress...“ The elite that consumes most of the country’s educational resources is incapable of providing the intellectual leadership needed to move forward either the religion or the culture. Western education simply does not allow them to do so.”
Rants about this 'elite' function as periods throughout the memoir, punctuating his opinions on everything from environmental degradation to the need to overhaul the education system to his observations about the injustice of our judicial system. This is a real pity because they undermine the few things he says that actually make sense. Pakistan is indeed, as he hammers home again and again, saddled with a parasitic elite that has insisted on usurping, keeping and abusing power to the detriment of the many hovering around the poverty line; but his reductionist identification of them as people who have strayed from the one faith and become 'westernized' is sadly flawed. The powerful elite of which he speaks include the shallu-wearing landlords and industrialists that are now part of his movement for justice. They can also wear beards, uniforms and burqas as well as jeans and ape Saudi Arabia as well as Western pop culture, but apparently that isn't quite as bad. His position seems to be that if you are not part of the solution (in this case, his notion of Islam) you are part of the problem.
This debauched, rudderless, still mentally colonized elite has done Pakistan a world of harm, he says. For example, post 9/11:
That previous nugget comes much before the point towards the end of the book where he says:"I have never seen Pakistanis so terrified of US anger as during this period. This is a typical example of how fear can be used as a weapon by the ruling elite to make the people fall in line; at the same time, it shows that policies based on fear always end up in disaster."
"...my biggest worry remains that if things continue as they are we could face a rebellion within the army's ranks, the ultimate nightmare situation for Pakistan."
I could go on, and quote verbatim other choice bits of text, such as his one sentence lament about how mean presswalas kept calling up his good friend Sita White for ‘lurid interviews’, or the paragraph where he mentions one Shah Mehmood Qureshi as an example of what is wrong with Pakistani politics, or how he lambasts the jamaati thugs he is now in bed with, or how it only took him five meetings and nearly as many years to understand Musharraf wasn't a good boy, or how my mother’s brother’s third cousin’s dog inferred a Madonna-whore complex from all the things Khan Saab’s book didn’t say about women in Pakistan when he accidentally sank his teeth into it but, really, what’s the point. Let’s not be liberally fanatical in our negativity and look at the plus points of it.
1) We have been asking for a PTI manifesto and lo and behold there has been one amongst us for a couple of months already, complete with Islamic Fabioesque cover and – just like his first book where the ghost writer really was a ghost - no mention of who actually wrote it.
2) In this book, we learn a lot about poetry. Well, Iqbal’s poetry. Well, those of Iqbal’s poems which fit into Imran Khan’s view of the world. In particular, the one about the shaheen. No not Khayaban-e-Shaheen, the other shaheen, the eagle, which as Khan Saab tells us is “an emblem of royalty which denoted a kind of heroic idealism based on daring, pride and honour.” (No mention of course of that of Iqbal's verse that calls, e.g., for burning down crop fields that do not feed the peasant, but I digress again.)
I was thinking of Khan Saab's fondness for the metaphor of the regal predator driven to hunt rather than scavenge when I read the inimitable Aakar Patel’s column in the Express Tribune today. In the column, the second in his examination of the army’s dominance in Pakistan today, Mr. Patel puts it down to a caste-driven obsession with the notion of ‘warrior’. His hypothesis…
“is that the division of the Punjabi nation in 1947 produced a Pakistani Punjab that was heavily weighted in favour of the martial castes. The trading castes, which tend to be more pragmatic and balance society’s extremism mostly left to come to India. This has produced the imbalance which explains Pakistan’s fondness for a state dominated by soldiers. Gen Pervez Kayani runs the state’s foreign policy, security policy and most of its economic policy because the majority of Punjabis are comfortable with the idea of a warrior being in charge.”
Mr. Patel’s insight into the veneration awarded to ‘leading from the front’- which in my book can also be considered a Pashtun trait- is driven home when, later in the column while mentioning Kayani’s recent statement that our nation’s “honour will not be traded for posterity”, he goes on to say that…
"Only a warrior would make that statement and only a nation of warriors would accept it."
You see the same kind of verbal posturing in Imran Khan's utterances (tsunami = destruction), and the same kind of frenzied, emotional response in his followers (tsunami? a massive tidal wave that kills indiscriminately? hell yeah!) that a popular general would get from his ranks. It is almost as if hundreds of thousands of usually pacifist people have suddenly decided to get in touch with their inner Spartan.
In Imran Khan's Pakistan though, there would be no loincloths.
My basic problem with the worldview that Aakar Patel is skewering and Imran Khan and other balding eagles seem most comfortable inhabiting is that Pakistan can no longer afford to be a nation of warriors. We need a narrative of inclusiveness, tolerance and unity based on achievable things like economic goals, not one that suggests identity is who you're not rather than who you are. Those who want to buy into the PTI’s ‘war' on corruption, the west (and mineral water) might want to stop and ask themselves what impulse, whose hand, they are really strengthening.
My other basic problem with men who think they are berserkers is their propensity for camp followers or, in less offensive terms, their demonstrated opinion of where women would be post-victory. Consider this clip follow up of an excellent Express Tribune report about what happened after Prime Minister Gilani was successfully driven off stage by the soldiers of the Lawyers' Movement at a Lahore Bar Association meeting a couple of days ago...
Incidentally, Imran Khan's last reference to the the Brotherhood of the Black Coats he mentions glowingly several times in his memoir is:
"Though the anti-status quo wave known as the lawyers' movement for genuine democracy was hijacked, it remains simmering beneath the surface; I am convinced the moment the next elections are announced, a 'soft revolution' will explode on our political horizon and sweep away the corrupt status quo from Pakistan once and for all."
Ladies, keep those Rose Petals handy.
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