No Man-Istan

I suppose it should be rather obvious that the Pakistan Christmas experience is different from the US. Part of that has to due with the fact that the weather is comparable to New England’s spring temperatures, and the palm trees and yellow soil hardly resembles a “winter-wonderland”

(though this association with Christmas has more to do with northern European pre-Christian celebrations). The environment makes me think of the actual place Jesus was said to be born, and in a way is entirely appropriate. And the fact that this place looks different from New England is not itself the major difference from Christmas in the US, considering that the southwest during December is pretty much the same.

The difference is that this is my first Christmas in a predominately Muslim country. I attended midnight mass on Christmas Eve at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and it was not what I expected. There was a children’s choir singing to an electronic keyboard beat that was kind of cute, but it also made me think of karoake. Some of the music had a definite Indian feel. Moreover, the mass, due to the large attendance, was outside on lawn chairs under a tent adjacent to the church. The ceremony was mostly the same as I remember, except half of it was in English and half was in Urdu. Lastly, and most striking, there was armed security outside the church, no doubt because of attacks on Christians in recent years.

It was heartening to see that Prime Minister Aziz came to the cathedral on Christmas evening, I believe the first Pakistani head of state to do so since Jinnah. He stressed tolerance towards Christians, and acknowledged their contribution to Pakistan, because the sad reality is that Christians are widely discriminated against and mistreated.

So how did I spend my Christmas day? I spent most of it at a mall. I thought of Socrates, who liked to stroll along the market-place looking at all the things he was happy not owning. For me, going to the mall is a fun experience, when I have nothing better to do. It’s interesting to check out the latest gadgets or people-watch. I admired the craftsmanship of the fancy watches, the vast array of quality clothes, and the cars on display. There was a big fake Christmas tree and a machine spewing bubbles all around. It was quaint. After spending time at the book store and the food court, I perused a store of house decorations. Striking up a conversation with the owner, he showed me some impressive genuine Indian antiquities he has hidden away, some quite old and valuable.   

So it was a good Christmas, overall. If the celebration was a bit lacking, it’s no big deal because another Eid is coming up very soon.

This will be the first time I have not celebrated Christmas in the US. Supposedly, smell is directly tied to memory more than any other sense, and lately when I encounter certain types of incense, or certain plants, I’m whirled back to my childhood, with the big tree in my living room and frankensense burning on the mantle. Sometimes sights, yes, even in a country so different, bring me back. Decorative lights adorning houses and street lamps are an unmistakable reminder. And on rare occasions, the feeling of cool air on my skin is a better indicator of December than the calendar. Childhood is always in the past, wherever you are, and tradition is a ritual in the present to keep the flame of the past lit. What I have here that I wouldn’t have in the states is the time to enjoy Christmas for what it is.

I read an excellent article in Time commenting on once how fun holidays strangely morphed into stressful events. Until recently, societies spent a much greater chunk of time devoted to communal celebrations. It made me think of how much life here is devoted to celebrations, especially weddings.

Pakistani weddings are a longer and complex process. First there are dholkis, dinners that include singing, dancing, or practicing dances for the wedding. The mayun marks the beginning of seclusion for bride and groom, traditionally each one is treated to pampering and massage. There is the mehndi, in which women get together, sing, dance, put on mehndi, and do other rituals. This includes a friendly dance competition between the families of the bride and groom.  The shadi, the wedding itself, includes the nikah, a marriage contract. This is a more formal dinner inaugurated by a speaker who sings devotional songs and performs dua (prayer) or verses from the Qur’an. The shadi is followed by the rukshati, in which the bride goes to the house of the groom for the first time. Lastly there is a waleema, where the guys get together to celebrate this commencement, usually in suits. The choice of clothing reflects three aspects of Pakistan: the pre-shadi and shadi rituals are Hindu in origin, the nikah comes from Islam, and the waleema has a western feel.

Suffice to say this can be an expensive and exhausting process. I believe this summer they tried to pass a law to curb the limits of wedding spending. I don’t think it had any effect. There is a moral argument that the money spent on weddings could be put to better use feeding the poor, although I think the government’s real objection is how much work gets missed.

Even those of modest incomes will spend as much as they can on these events, so obviously people here consider them important. Further, weddings generate a lot of money for the economy. Imagine if the US decided to pass a law on how much people spend on Christmas gifts. I do agree with the cliché that Christmas is too commercialized, but the choice of priorities is ultimately up to the people. It’s not the cash or commerce that makes holidays soulless, but the lack of intent or positive emotions.

I finally read Muktaran Mai’s riveting autobiography In the Name of Honour. One thing that stood out was not just the obvious portrayal of how shariah law is abused, but how this injustice is mostly based on the structural inequalities within tribal society.  

The infamous caste system is India’s curse, and Pakistan feels its effects as well. This classification system seems to have been present in Indian society for over 2,000 years. Buddhists, Christians, Sikhs, and Muslims have not been able to stop it, despite objections, and in fact some just continued it (so obviously it’s not all the fault of Hindus). The post-Buddhist Hindu sage Shankaracarya was also against the caste system. The Indian constitution outlawed caste, and even introduced a quota system. Economic developments in India have brought changes to the structure of Indian society, yet despite all this, caste has not disappeared.

As some in first world wonder why countries like Pakistan are so backward, they need to acknowledge that social patterns are stubborn. Remember too that feudalism in the West did not die easily or quickly, and some might say it has even continued in some ways. We also need to acknowledge that there are indigenous human rights activists in Pakistan who are trying to fight cruel customs. Maybe the victories are small, but they give heart to a country often written off as a failed state.

My visit to Moenjodharo was definitely a high point of my Pakistan experience. My stay in the village was only three and half days, with little time to spare. I knew that, if nothing else, this was not something I could not forgo. I came too far and waited too long to come within 30 miles of Moenjodharo and not see it.

Moenjodharo is a Sindhi word that means “mound of the dead,” so named because tombs were the first thing to appear after the rubble covering the ancient civilization was removed. I don’t know what the original name was or what the inhabitants called it 5,000 years ago.

My first impression was how normal it was. I didn’t feel magically transported to a distant land as soon as I entered it, probably because, in a sense, I already had that vague feeling as soon as I ventured into the interior of Sindh. The first impression I did get was a sense of space, the vastness and quietness of a land that cradled one of the most advanced civilizations of its time. The area is flat, but not without character.

The guide told me a lot about the intricate system of drainage, irrigation, farming, and the purpose of the different buildings. Most of it was stuff that I had already read, but I did learn a few new facts. White stones (I don’t recall what substance they consist of) were placed under the sewage water because of their anti-septic properties. Amazingly, its drainage system is considered superior to some cities in India and Pakistan today! Although little is known about the original religion, they speculate that there was a school for the priests. By 2 ACE Buddhist Aryans ruled over the area and built a great Stupa, but they left the rest of the site intact, and the temple looks as though it’s part of the same organic whole.

Moenjodharo instils pride in Pakistanis, Sindhis in particular. Only ten percent of the whole site has been excavated and there is a lot more to explore. I spoke with a local leader who unsuccessfully tried to wrest control from Islamabad. The federal government controls all historic sites, and refuses to let outsiders help or share control. He said the government is spending more time on Harappa, which not surprisingly is part of Punjab.

Despite the pride that these ancient sites give to Pakistan, and the obvious challenge to biblical literalism due to its age, it does not seem to challenge Qur’anic literalism. On the one hand, Pakistanis can dismiss the notion that Arabs brought with them, during their invasion of Sindh, a more sophisticated culture. On the other hand, there is still a consensus that Islam is the supreme religion.

Some cite verses in the Qur’an that refer to earlier and more advanced civilizations crumbling. As far as I know it indicts the empires surrounding the Arabs to make an example of the dangers of corruption or licentiousness, and says nothing of the subcontinent. There is a narrative that Islam was the original religion and everything that came after was an impure deviation or a blasphemous innovation. Secular history generally takes the opposite track. Hunter-gatherer societies were generally animistic and shamanistic, which in some agrarian societies evolved into a polytheistic religion, which in some cultures evolved into henotheism, and fewer still into true monotheism. In other words, monotheism was not the first religion. But such a perspective knocks monotheism off of its pedestal and situates it in a larger historical context, and it’s understandably rejected by some true believers.

So it’s not that the Indus Valley civilization fell because of earthquakes, invasions, or floods, natural disasters that could happen to anyone. Those occurrences were God’s punishment for the ultimate sin of not worshipping Him alone.

And why did the earthquake kill thousands of Pakistanis last year? Obviously because God is against Pakistan cooperating with the US. Why people who had nothing to do with the decision had to suffer, I don’t know. If I wanted to play that game I could say that perhaps Pakistan was actually being punished for its past support of the Taliban, but I’m really not high enough to know God’s will.

Last week I travelled far into the interior of Sindh. Although I have yet to see the cities of Lahore, Islamabad, or any of the other provinces, I did see a lot more of rural life.

Karachi is about 180 miles south of Larkana, but the circuitous route and traffic jams stretch the trip into an 8 hour journey, at minimum. Donkeys, camels, horses, and cows all vie for space on the roads with the motorized forms of transportation. Looking at the scenery during the car ride, I was impressed by how they manage to get greenery and farmland out of the sandy soil. When I came to the small city of Larkana the streets quickly became crowded due to a political rally. People carried all kinds of flags – purple, blue, black and white stripes, etc. Some flags had writing I couldn’t decipher. Some flags had a star symbol which I knew represented the major party of the area, the socialist Pakistan Peoples Party. This is where Zulfkar Ali Bhutto is from, a hero due to his Sindhi roots, and a martyr due to his execution. Later I learned that the rally was a protest against the damming of the Indus River, which will have a disastrous effect on the locals.  

For the first time since I’ve been here I felt genuinely afraid, if only for a few minutes. Protests can turn into riots, and riots can turn violent. If they saw me as a foreigner, I could’ve been in trouble. Strangely, while my mind told me to be afraid, I knew I would be safe, somehow. As soon as I got out of the city I felt at ease.

Village life is slower. The air is cleaner, punctuated with farm smells and smoke from stoves and makeshift fires; scents that remind me of camping. What I can’t wrap my mind around is the fact that in this seemingly tranquil area it’s normal to have weapons (the place I was at had none, as far as I know, but I did see a pistol and bullets at my neighbor’s house). Feuds and honor killings do not happen every day, but they are not rare either.  

Yet I didn’t feel any less safe here than where I was in the US. I lived in a poor city for over a year before I came to Pakistan. When I first moved into that neighborhood I wasn’t exactly thrilled, but I adjusted. The sad thing is that underneath the grime I could see how it was once a beautiful area. 

The village outside of Larkana reminded me of some rural areas in the US. Not the way it looked, obviously, but the overall feel of it. A lot of the locals confused me with a Pathan (a lighter-skinned ethnicity from Afghanistan and the Northwest Frontier Province). I didn’t worry about being perceived as an American because whiteness here has a positive aura, and in addition I have important connections, so there is a great deal of respect. Being an outsider is not held against you as villagers will feed a guest before themselves. It makes me think that perhaps the categorical differences that separate the majority of people in the world, most of whom do not live in cities or suburbs, are superficial. And maybe East Coast liberals like myself are sometimes unfair in our judgments towards Red State America. 

One of the reasons I started this blog is to try to give those not living here of sense of what life is like, from the perspective of an American. My style is more prosaic than literary, more focused on ideas than on painting a picture. It’s difficult for me convey all the sensual experiences – the sound of the birds, the screeching high-pitched bus horns, the vast array of pungent smells, the call of the scrap metal collector intonating in cartoonish, nasal Sindhi “Teendeewa Yahlaye.”

While I suspect that it’s ubiquitous in my subconscious, I don’t focus on the bogeymen associated with Pakistan in my daily life. Normally I’m concerned with banalities such as whether there is a cricket match going on and how that will affect traffic, or what store has the cheapest prices and if they’re trying to rip me off because I’m a foreigner. But there are moments when the dark stuff breaks through to my consciousness.

The other night I was lying awake in bed thinking about the awful reality that I may be living in the same country as Osama bin Laden. If bin Laden is here, and is indeed still alive, he is probably recording his next directive in a remote cave over 400 miles away from me. That didn’t stop me from entertaining strange ideas. Maybe evil really is a supernatural force. Can this charismatic terrorist leader transmit negative vibes from afar? Can I sense it from here?

It doesn’t matter what he does anymore, or even if he’s alive. In the terminology of Malcolm Gladwell, he and his ilk have spread an epidemic of suicide bombing, which hit a crucial tipping point after 9/11, and found fertile ground when the US invaded Iraq (although it was the Ayatollah Khomeini who created the virus of asymmetric warfare and spread it first to the Palestinians). The radicalism meme has successfully reproduced; it has become “sticky.” (Note: a “meme” is an idea that propagates itself across cultures in a way similar to a virus). The McJihad franchise is a success. If only we can find a way to make a tolerance meme stick.  

The Friday Times is a liberal newspaper out of Lahore, billed as Pakistan’s first independent weekly. Its last editorial said that President Mushfarraf has pretty much done everything right given his difficult situation. It seems like an excuse to justify certain excesses, but whether you like him or not, we have to realize that Musharraf is not the whole of Pakistan, and he is not the source of all its problems either. Like any institution, the military establishment does whatever it takes to survive. I’m sure many officers sincerely believe that Pakistan needs to maintain its military strength in order to be secure, but you can’t deny that many career officials are in the upper echelon of society.

The article locates the source of Pakistan’s problems in its current ideology. After its creation, Pakistan changed its definition from being a refuge for Muslims to an Islamic state. Islam is still part of Indian society, incidentally, despite the poor living conditions of some Indian Muslims. The Indian constitution even allows Muslims separate courts for shariah law. It’s clear that Jinnah’s concern was not the purity of Islam the religion.

The problem with conceptualizing Pakistan as a religious state is the growing faction promoting the narrow construct of Islam envisioned by Maududi. At first these voices were marginal, but have gained concessions from the government in the last 30 years, mostly to please the fundamentalist parties. For Maududi, Islam was not just a rallying call to end British control, it was also set up as anti-modernist and anti-Hindu (by extension, Ahmedis and Christians have been treated as second-class citizens and often face discrimination). Hindus are labelled ‘infidels’ who worship false gods and idols (Hinduism is an accommodating system that includes polytheism, monotheism, pantheism, and transcendental monism). India’s historical religious tolerance is reframed as a dangerous syncretism that blurs the distinction between Truth and falsehood (sin).

Though most Indians are Hindus, the government itself is secular. India’s founders realized that this was the only way to keep its diversity from splitting the country apart (and even that has not stopped all rifts). Pakistan is also a diverse country – ethnically and linguistically – but making Pakistan exclusively Islamic has created a unity by turning against Jinnah’s vision of a state that treats other religions and minorities as equals.

So no, I don’t blame Musharraf for all this, and I don’t envy his position at all.

As I read an interesting autobiography of Kudsi Erguner, a Sufi musician who plays the ney, or Turkish flute, I thought about the documentary film by Salman Ahmed of Junoon fame “The Rock Star and the Mullahs.” He argued with clerics, to no avail, about the role of music in Islam. Five times a day the muezzin makes a call to prayer that by any reasonable definition is a type of singing, and public recitation of the Qur’an is also a musical act.

Muslim fundamentalists think music is a sin. There may be some support for this in tradition because certain forms of music in Islam are not allowed, but that doesn’t mean all music needs to be banned. When Cat Stevens (Yusuf Islam) gave up his musical career other Muslims told him he was going too far. Now he makes music, but only with singing and drums.

Despite conservative social forces, there is a small rock scene in Pakistan. Most pop songs are either dance music or ballads. Typically, most people here like to dance, and the favored forms of music are primarily rhythmic. There is some hip-hop here, though it is quite rare. As my conductor in college used to say, all music is either a song or a dance.

I like the Pakistan rock sound. A guitarist myself, I appreciate that players are not shy about their displaying their ability. In general, I think the American rock has gone in a boring direction. There is a barrier between academic music and pop music, as both sides snottily want to keep each other out (although it’s inevitable that academia will eventually find a way to intellectualize any given form of music, which can be good and bad).

Traditionally in Asia, artistic talent is not synonymous with individuality as it has been in the West in the last few hundred years. Classical European composers such as Mozart, Beethoven, and Tchaikovsky stand out as geniuses with bold personalities. That doesn’t mean people here don’t recognize big names; film composer A.R. Rahman is very well known, for example. The point is that the name is subservient to the genre. Ravi Shankar captivated hippies with his Sitar virtuosity when George Harrison helped popularize him, but he was more interested in preserving Indian musical and religious heritage than in showing off. Similarly, Peter Gabriel and Michael Brooks brought Nusrat Ali Khan to larger audiences. A singer of amazing capabilities, he humbly attributed his talent to Allah, and in keeping with Qawwali he dedicated his performances to Allah.  

While the music borrows from outside elements and modern trends, it hasn’t lost its purpose as a raaga. Similarly, film scores (filmi) can incorporate any genre, but still retain classical Indian elements. It’s like the food. You can find any national dish, but they always contain the spices of desi food. Indeed, the subcontinent is a true melting pot!

Blackouts, which are called brownouts here (I’m not sure why) are a common occurrence. They are more frequent when it’s hot, but you have to be prepared for them at any time. The first week I was here there were on average probably 2-3 a day, and it still happens every now and again. When the candles come out it can be kind of charming. Some wealthy households have backup generators, but no one else can afford them.

The main reason there are blackouts is because people dip into the grid without paying. Since electricity is owned and operated by state bureaucrats who get money regardless of whether people pay for utilities or not, they have no incentive to put a stop to this. A privatized system would be better, although in the short-term the switch would probably leave poor people high and dry. There is the opposite issue of de-regulation, where price-gouging would go unchecked, which has been a problem in California.

Pakistanis jokingly remark that blackouts are part of the lifestyle. It’s a sign of their strength that they can adjust to this and not complain, unlike me, but this fatalistic attitude can make people lose sight of the fact that it is possible to have a system where you can get reliable services efficiently and affordably. 

A few days ago an all-day rainstorm flooded the streets. The underpass was completely filled with water and was not drivable. 17 people died because of the floods, and naturally the economy suffers when people can’t get to work.

A proper drainage system would alleviate the problem, but transportation doesn’t seem like a government priority. A few weeks ago there was a weapons expo, and every newspaper in the country had front page pictures of Aziz and Musharraf holding guns with big grins on their faces. In order for the boys to get a chance to play with their toys all the roads in Karachi were shut down, even ambulances could not go out. As a letter to the editor of Dawn newspaper sardonically asked – What right does a dying person have to go to the hospital when there’s a gun show going on?