Entries Tagged 'islamabad' ↓

یہ اسلام آباد کو کیا ہو گیا ہے؟ گولڑا موڑ اور جی ـ ۹ کے درمیان سڑکوں پر قیامت آئی ہوئی ہے! سی ڈی اے نے لگتا ہے کہ باجماعت کوئی پکا نشا کِیا ہوا ہےـ اُس قسم کا نشا جس سے عجیب عجیب سین نظر آنے لگیں ـ کیونکہ جہاں دیکھو، نئی سڑک ـ میرے کھر کے سامنے سے 7 ایونیو گزرا کرتی تھی ـ بلکل سادہ سی سڑک ہے، مارگلہ سے قائدِ اعظم تک جاتی ہے، اور اس کے بعد آبپارہ ـ اب اس سڑک سے اسکا نام چِھن گیا ہے اور اس کے عین ساتھ، کہہ لو دو تین سو گز کے فاصلہ پر دو لین ڈبل روڈ بن گئی ہے، بمع انڈر پاس جو سیدھے آبپارہ جاتی ہےـ اس کا نام 7 ایونیو پڑ گیا ہے اور میری چھوٹی سی سڑک بے نام اور ناکارہ ہو چکی ہےـ اوپر سے مارگلہ پر ان دونوں سڑکوں کے لیے الگ الگ سگنل ہیں ، تاکہ آپ کا سفر رنگ برنکا اور خوشگوار گزرےـ

مگر میری سمجھ میں یہ بات نہیں آتی کہ ایک دم سے اس سال سٰ ڈی اے کو کیا سوجھی کہ اسلام آباد کے ساتھ یوں ترقی بالجبر ہو رہی ہے؟ قسم سے دو میٹر کے شہر میں سولہ میٹر سڑک کھینچ دی ہے، گھر ملے نہ ملے، گاڑی پر سیر کرنے میں کوئی دشواری نہیں ہوتی ـ بلکہ اگر آپ کو اپنا گھر نہ ملے، سمجھیں کہ سماج کی بہتری کے لیے اسکو کسی سوپر ہائی وے کی نذر کر کہ گِرا دیو گیا ہےـ

Ali Eteraz wrote an article for the Guardian a few hours after Emergency/Martial Law was officially imposed. It contained a general survey of the situation and an analysis on a) what was likely and b) what was best for Pakistan. And it was a fairly conservative and cautious analysis.

I don’t mind conservatism. I think caution is good and sensible, especially in a country where getting whooped upside the head for assembling in public is likely and has a long history. The conservative approach – that is to say, the approach that says “do only what is necessary and nothing more, conserve what is established” – has tremendous merit. But the fundamental problem with conservatism in regard to the current Emergency is that the status quo was heading towards further democratization in a somewhat organic fashion. It was organic to the freedom brought about by Musharraf, king of Enlightened Moderation, that the lawyers should come out and protest against the dismissal of the Chief Justice. It was organic to Musharraf’s regime of slow, three-stage democratization that there be freedom of the print and broadcast media. That section 144 has not been in effect in recent months is testament to the fact that Musharraf was, in fact, working towards a democratization, whether he realized it or not. Continue reading →

Dear Diary, today we had emergency!, no! martial law, no! emergency! declared on us by Gen. Pervez Musharraf, moderate and enlightened president of Pakistan.

Now this is what’s going on: I’m watching CNN IBN via internet streaming because all the private news channels have been suspended. Musharraf will speak via PTV at 11 pm. But he’s declared that the judiciary has overstepped its bounds and so needed to be dismantled. He was afraid that the Supreme Court would reject his candidacy for president in the upcoming election and so, speculation is and I think it’s true, he declared emergency and removed everyone against him would be out of power.

Interestingly , he did not (or has not yet) cite Swat, Chaman and the general unrest (unrest!) in the Frontier as the reason for the state of emergency. It would seem more credible to do that. Swat has been in an uproar and many Pakistanis have died on both sides. There are perpetual military operations in the Frontier, in Chaman, in Swat, in Waziristan and anywhere in between. Surely, there is a state of emergency in those areas. But instead, there’s a somewhat petulant complaint against the judiciary and an act that is the equivalent of yelling “mein nahi khelta!”, taking your marbles and going home.

Or send your friends home and lobbing their own marbles after them. Grenad-shaped.

For regular updates, I have found no place better than Pakistan Politics. I don’t know who runs it but will attempt to find out. In the meantime, they are my heroes, being so excited about giving news quickly that they misspell half the stuff they’re typing.

I’m at my computer for a good while. If anyone finds an internet link to what Pakistan Politics is calling the performance of “meray azeez hum watanon”, let me know. I don’t have a TV and my radio is having issues too.

Every Eid, I come to Islamabad and my family comes over for lunch. Every Eid we make more or less the same food – koftas, chicken and rice or some kind. This time it was dahi-chicken and biryani. And every Eid the women sit with the women and the men sit with the men.

I was just talking to a friend on the phone and remarked on this for the first time in my life as it being something odd. In my whole life, it’s never seemed odd. But living so long in Lahore has made it seem really weird that brother and sister don’t really socialize much if sister-in-law or brother-in-law are around. People just separate by gender.

I really get along with the male cousins that are in my age group. They’re a lot of fun. And I don’t see them very often outside of family occasions. So it’s a bit of a bummer.

What does happen however is that the women have much more interesting conversations. Today, for instance. Continue reading →

Miskeen is back! For those of you who know me well and long, this will be good news because it means a return to good lasagne and a varied menu at dinners. For those not in the know: Miskeen is a cook. He was our cook. For some 12-odd years. In this time, his relationship with my father and step-mother went up and down. He started his career by beating his wife and hurting her kidney; this made him persona non grata with Kathy, who thought he was and would always be evil. But we treated the wife and kept them around. He continued with nearly not educating his children; but with the paternalism that is inherent to the servant-householder relationshp, my father said, “Don’t you dare or I’ll fire you!” or something, and so all three boys have been or are being educated until at least Matric (10th grade). He nearly got himself into deep trouble by doing magic on my father and the house in general; he put little prayers, taveez and other thingies under carpets and in various nooks and crannies so that, I guess, Abu would become easier to live with. But since he continued to pick fights with the cleaning woman, the man who works in the office upstairs and the neighbour cooks, my father’s temper was not affected. (Freaked the heck out of him though. Oh, those were the times.) Continue reading →

An NBC piece about the National Art Gallery in Islamabad.

I ran into Muslim Hedonist via Natalia Antonova’s blog and read the heading “Why Don’t You Just Leave?” I was struck by this because I recently had the deep desire in my gut to hurl this at a foreigner.

I’ve been in Islamabad for nearly a month now, and I’m really enjoying being home. I taught the semester, then I taught Summer, with narry a break in the middle (in which I went to India, though) and just lazing about before the Fall semester is great. So I drive around Islamabad occasionally, visiting a plethora (well, 2) of friends who’ve returned to Pakistan from foreign lands and we all muck about.

The only problematic thing about doing this is the conditions of the roads. There’s massive expansion going on and all single carriage arteries are being made dual carriage, and things are dug up and they’re building an underpass practically right outside my house. So it’s annoying, veering around piles of dirt and whatnot, avoiding recently dug ditches full of monsoon water. By the time you get to your destination, you’re generally in need of some immediate distraction or a stiff drink.

Which is why, when one is driving behind a car with a red liscence plate (used by diplomats) or a blue one (indicating UN people), one wants to get out and go medieval on their ass. Their cars are usually large, especially the UN. This is in itself only a minor annoyance (she says, ducking behind her father’s SUV). What is troubling is that these foreigner cars seem to feel that they can straddle the centre line, flash you from behind if you’re in the fast lane, regardless of whether you’re about to turn form that lane and most annoyingly stand bang in the middle of a street (my street) chatting, asking directions, looking about without worrying that there’s a car (me!) right bloody behind them that would like to get past please and not watch you dick about, wondering how the fuck you ended up in this Godforsaken country!

Ahem.

Being stuck thus in my own street, not 100 feet away from my house, running on CNG and 1000 kilometers past when I should have changed the oil, you can imagine that I had just managed to get up the kind of speed and pick I like from my car when this asshead presented himself to my attention. And I swear to you: I wasn’t PMSing, I didn’t have a migraine, I had not recently fought with my anybody. But I had the deep deep guttural desire to get out of the car, knock on the window and say, “Listen, buddy, if you can’t figure out how to drive properly in this country or don’t care to do so just because you find the laws are lax here, if you’re lost, or are feeling lordy and first worldy, or are scared shitless of, say, me coming up to you in your car even though I’m always flashing a bit of cleavage and carry no bamboo sticks, why don’t you go back home?? Learn how we drive here or bloody well leave!”

Instead I honked like a bitch and the fucker moved. And this was fine.

But it led me to the analysis portion of our blog post: In the US, in liberalism school, we learned that asking someone to get out of our country (the US) was bad. It was a bad thing to do because you were being racist in faintly coded or totally uncoded terms. You were saying, “If you can’t do like the Romans, if you can’t assimilate, if you insist on being who you are and just doing that here, then you best bugger off.” And that’s bad.

Well, it is. I’m not pretending otherwise. I’m just wondering if, as intuition would have it, the rules are different when your residential streets are suddenly populated by diplomats and American marines who need barbed wire around their houses (which, for our American viewers, are already surrounded by high boundary walls, as Pakistani building convention has it) and guards outside post No-Parking signs are shooing away anyone who, as a friend did recently, might be local and asking for directions.

To an extent, I think they are. The anger is a little more righteous (though perhaps mine wasn’t, which in the incident above was completely mental) because circumstances have led to an urbane invasion of your home town, because it’s a capitol city and because it’s in Pakistan, and you’d like to go about your business unmolested by red license plates.

But I do wonder if it occurs to Pakistanis what we’re saying sometimes. Racial (and ethnic and gender and sexuality) slurs come easy to us. People are chinmin (“chinks” I suppose) and kaala (“blackies?” that’s what Brits ["Brits!"] used to call South Asians way back when, but it means black people); a man’s female love/lust interest is a bachchi (child of female gender); a gay man is gaandu (sodomist): and we bandy these words about easily.

I’m not one for self-censorship in the name of political correctness. At some point, any of these terms is relevant and useful, at the very least as humour among friends, one of whom might be a gaandu or a kaala.

But being as homogeneous as we are in terms of general looks and, particularly, religion, it might make it all the more stark. Difference is only tolerated when it can be diminished and reduced to humour, and shoved back into someone’s private life, from where it foolishly peered out. I used to teach middle school and one my students was half Japanese and half Pakistani. He was a complete terror most days, but it was easy to upend his bravado and 13-year-old equilibrium by making comments about his Japanese side – particularly by calling him Japanese, ironically, and saying he’s not Pakistani. Many trips to the principal that one caused.

I don’t have a conclusion. It’s just something I’ve been mulling over since I had the strong urge to grab a foreigner by the scruff of the neck and toss him out the front door of my country for driving arrogantly. We ‘re not really all the same, but we seem to have an even stronger desire for homogeneity than the empire of McDonald’s and the doctrine of multiculturalism.

PS. Check out this discussion of racist and sexist jokes. I wrote my post and then found this, oddly enough. Good stuff.

PPS. The title of this post is a line from a tori Amos song called “Datura”.

Screenshot from today’s BBCUrdu.com. BBC’s South Asia section doesn’t have any of these news pieces. Here’s a very functional, uninteresting translation.

• 52 die in 3 suicide attacks – in Hangu, Kohat and Hub
• The family of Maulana Abdul Aziz [killed in the Lal Masjid operation] released on parole.
• Protective measures: danger of suicide attacks, police station gates closed
• Lal Masjid [Red Mosque] will be repainted a different colour
• Inquiries continue into the Islamabad [suicide] bomb [at a rally for the chief justice]

What counts as a civil war? Collective action of one self-declared cohesive body over another? Or is that something that comes later, when we write the histories?

Hell. Hand basket. All that.

From Venial Sin:

I’m actually feeling physically nauseated. And never more so than when I see government spokespeople claiming that there’s absolutely no issue, nothing going on, no need for the Army or any other authority to step in and curb the violence. The head of the Aaj TV newsroom sounds slightly hysterical as he tells people that he has been asking for some sort of help from every major policing agency in the country for six hours, and hasn’t even received an acknowledgement. The spokesman for the MQM swears—as in the background, men wave his party’s flag and fire guns off at the same time—that if not for his party’s efforts, the city would be in ruins already, and that blood would be filling the streets.

There are dead bodies lying in the streets, and above them, in a display of jarring incongruity, is a sign stating that 2007 is the year of tourism for Pakistan, and I think that if I don’t laugh I’m going to cry, because how did this happen to us again? The scenes flashing past me look like images from Beirut or Baghdad, or Sarajevo. People crying, blood everywhere, fire licking at anything even remotely flammable, and no matter where you turn, moustachioed thugs with Kalashnikovs and carbines, firing at anything that moves.

That last picture he’s put up is almost pretty. Almost posed.

I have two pointless things to say:

1) A friend of mine – an acquaintance more than a friend, actually, with whom I went to college and who is from Karachi – said to me in a short stint of intense conversation that we had online last year that Karachi is a fucking miracle because it survives on its own, the site of the country’s contestations without being the recipient of any money, aid, attention, love from the country’s heart and coffers. Before he said that, I’d never thought of Karachi at all. I thought of it as a rich place, a cosmopolitan place, a snooty place of people who look down on my native city, Islamabad. But as he was talking about it, I thought about what I do know and put the pieces together in a jigsaw. And it seemed like he was very right. I looked at Lahore and Islamabad in my head and thought, yeah, they don’t much care whether Karachi’s on fire.

And so, now that they’ve set fire to it, killed its citizens willingly, what’s so surprising? Perhaps that shamelessness. Perhaps the almost flip way in which they – whoever they are – cover their tracks. Firing on ambulances – that’s a man’s job, eh?

2) In 1971, Yahya Khan, military man in charge of Everything, said about the Bengalis: “kill 3 million of them and the rest will be eating out of our hands.” And the West Pakistani Army killed three million. Or one million. Or 650,000. The numbers vary. Students, teacher, activists. And then there was Mukti Bahini. And then there was Bangladesh.

That’s all I’ve got.

I have to confess: I’m a bit of a pansy.

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away (Oberlin College), I used to have sharp teeth and razor claws, was a super feminist and a super Muslim; and so I could rip the guts out of any stupid argument.

Then I grew up. And while for the most part, the growing up involved acquiring wisdom, it also heaped on me tons of caution.

Caution = pansy ass behaviour.

You have probably heard about the goings-on at Lal Masjid and Madrassa Hafsa in Islamabad. If not, in addition to the links, here’s a brief run-down:

Men and women from Jamia Hafsa, the madrassa attached to Lal Masjid in Islamabad, went into the house of a woman now known widely as Aunty Shamim, kidnapped her, her daughter and her daughter-in-law, along with a 6-month-old baby, and dragged them in ropes from their house to the main Lal Masjid premises. Lal Masjid is possibly the most politically active mosque in Islamabad.

They accused the woman, Shamim, of being a madam and running a brothel and demanded that she do tauba, which is repentence, publically for her actions. The women, incidentally, were burqa-clad and carrying bamboos with them. According to the BBC, where I read Shamim’s post-release interview, they gave her three options. Either be handed over the civil courts for prosecution; or submit to a qazi adaalat (a religious court) that the mosque heads would convene to hear the case; or make a public statement renouncing her sinful life, doing tauba and promising to stay on the path of righteousness. Aunty Shamim chose the third option, made a public statement that she renounced prostitution and did tauba. She and her family were subsequently freed.

Now, the imam of the mosque has called for sharia law in the country and threatened suicide attacks. Further, they have established their qazi adalat, saying that sharia is already enforced in their madrassa, and will be extended first to their neighbourhood, then Islamabad, and then other cities in Pakistan until all of Pakistan is run by sharia law.

Let me tell you why this horrifies me:

1. There’s a religious militia in my home town.
2. It walked into someone’s house, and I don’t give a crap about that someone’s moral uprightness, and dragged three women and a baby out, tying them with ropes, and took them to a mosque where the mother was beaten until she threatened to convert to Christianity. Apparently the threat worked and she was not beaten anymore.
3. They exacted a forced confession from her and made her do tauba by force. Tauba by force is a contradiction in terms. It’s not a tauba if someone’s holding a gun, or in this case bamboo stick, to your head.
4. Because any religious scholar with two brain cells to rub together would know this about tauba, it is clearly and only a power play. It says, “We are stronger than you. We can make you use words we have written for you to condemn yourself. We can use you as an instrument against the government. Our fight is bigger than you. We are bigger than you.” And it worked. The woman is now, apparently, in the protective custody of the police, having been moved out of her neighbourhood.
5. They call themselves victorious against tremendous odds – kidnapping women is apparently very difficult – and the enemy they have vanquished are the instruments of the nation: the police, the city government, Musharraf’s enlightened moderation – all dubious characters to begin with.

But most of all, I’m horrified into making a decision about something I’ve never really made a decision about before: the burqah.

If you go to BBC South Asia, you’ll see what I’m describing here.

We’re used to thinking of the burqa as a sign of oppression – some poor woman forced by patriarchal society, hiding behind religion, to cover up and go unnoticed, become invisible, become ineffectual. In fact, we think of all forms of hijab this way. It suits the liberal mindset to denounce unequivocally the covering up of women and go from anywhere between squirming to all-out celebration and the uncovering of women. Shuttle cock – bad : cleavage – good.

I never thought so. Not since I grew up and became a full person. I thought that the hijab is something that’s not for me, but (after some initial growing pains when one of my best friends took it on) I thought hijab was an individual choice, a devotional act and therefore good. When it is worn under duress or coercion, hijab – bad. When it is taken on voluntarily, hijab – good.

I never thought it obligatory. I still don’t believe that it is.

However, while I stand by all hijabis who cover their heads and give the finger (or the cold shoulder) to anyone who derides them for it, the niqab, the burqa, the full covering of the face is un-Islamic, immoral and wrong.

It is the height of obscenity, fahashi, to invade a person’s home and kidnap them; to force them to say things that they do not want to say and do things they do not want to do; to use physical force as attack and not defense; and to walk in under cover of female modesty. Ach thoo. Lakh laanat.

No one’s going to touch a burqa-posh woman. That she’s holding a big bamboo in her hand is just an accessory to this supposedly obligatory armour. If someone had laid a hand on those women, and when someone in fact did by arresting two women who are teachers at the madrassa, they will be derided, abused, vilified for laying hands on a “decent God-fearing woman.” But that a swarm of some forty people laid hands on three adult women and a baby is righteousness in the way of Allah. Gharak hovo saray.

I don’t question their status as Muslims or believers because I believe it is a cardinal sin to do that to anyone. Takfir is a crime I don’t want to on my head. But in the spirit of nahi ‘an al-munkar I question their methods, their actions and their intentions.

Why am I blaming this on the burqa? After all, a generation and half ago, at most, women used to wear burqa most of the time in this part of the world, and certainly women in northern India who migrated to Pakistan. It was “just our clothes” as a friend’s mother said. But this burqa is different. This is not about modesty. This is about branding. This is about wearing the label that says Muslim to the Death, which is an obscene and immodest act. This is about wearing your assumed piety on your body as a symbol and then using that symbol as armour and then perpetrating zulm with it. It’s about knowing that no one will touch you because we live in a schizophrenic society that is itself so pansy-ass, it can’t decide what is right and what is wrong, and therefore wilts in the face of symbols: hijab, niqab, beards, public praying, ankle-exposing men; or, to veer away from religion, the quaid, the flag, soni dharti, allama iqbal; or, to veer away from the nation, westernization, modernization, girls in jeans, Zee TV culture, Indian hegemony, Bollywood.

We flatten ourselves in front of symbols and slogans and flags. We make no decisions; we only react. We express opinions that are completely ineffectual, we feel we’ve done our job and we leave.

The thing about the Bamboo Women and their men is this: they don’t. They act. They storm things. They do the wrong thing, but they act in the way they think will be most effectual. And because they read their victims absolutely right.

This has some interesting photographs of the danga-fasad in Islamabad two days ago, where the police stormed the offices of GEO TV. Now the government has sacked 14 police officers as a result of that event.

(For why redux, look here and here.)

From my favourite news source, BBCUrdu.com, and uploaded as an image for our unicode challenged PC users. The Police stormed the GEO news offices in Islamabad last night. English article here but the Urdu one is better, if you read Urdu.

I’m in Islamabad again. I haven’t been here the whole time since my last post; it’s just that I can’t seem to log into blogger from Lahore and, anyway, the bloody Brainnet internet card connection drops me every 12 minutes and I have to listen to the peen-pon peen-pon sound of my modem for ages before it’ll connect again – for 12 minutes!

But here! Here I have DSL and wireless! I’m in my room, plugged into only the bijli socket, with my Airport on and I’m online. It’s like heaven! I don’t want the bloody hoorein, or male hoorein, or whatever – just give me inernet access.

(Dear God, please disregard last comment; if I manage it into heaven, I’d like the full package, thank you, Ameen.)

But you know what they don’t provide in my neighbourhood in Lahore? Cable internet, DSL internet, any internet. You know why? Yeah, me neither.

Which is why I haven’t been writing for a while. Just so you know. And now, after this brief explanation, I will write a new post and you will be agog.

I think I’m losing my mind, no?

islamabad | exile | lahore