Opinion

Pakistan ’s Oral Society
By M. Shahid Alam
Boston , MA

(Author’s note: This essay was written in 1990, but there is little I would change if I had to rewrite it today)

I first became aware of differences between ‘oral’ and ‘literate’ societies when I returned to Pakistan in 1979, after some five years in the United States and Canada , to take up a research position at the University of Karachi .

During my first few weeks at the University, and in meetings with friends and relatives, I was at first quite charmed by their eagerness to engage in what appeared to be serious discussions on politics and religion. All conversations eventually turned to the momentous issues of the day in Pakistan and around the world. To my relief, they evinced a curiosity about the world which I had missed during my years in the United States and Canada .

But these impressions did not last very long. Soon the discussions I heard began to stale. They conveyed less and less information and even fewer fresh ideas. There was little evidence that my interlocutors were reading anything beyond newspapers. After a while, it appeared that everyone was talking about the same things, saying more or less the same things. An irritating monotony crept into the questions asked and the solutions proffered. More discouraging, the discussions did not lead up to anything. No plans on which work might begin here and now.

It was as if the problems of the world demanded endless vocalization. We had to talk about them obsessively. It was as if everyone had to describe his or her encounter with this or that problem, as a way of coming to terms with, making his or her accommodation with what could only be endured but not overcome. It was as if everyone was engaged in a collective ritual, participating in some magic act, exorcising their problems, making them vanish even as they talked about them. This train of thought led me to conclude that these endless conversations were the incantations of an oral society. The art of mending the world by talking about it.

All this is so different from what I have seen of literate societies. The important difference between oral and literate societies does not consist in the proportion of those who can read and write. It centers on the attitude of those who can read and write to the written word, and on the relationship of the written word to society. A literate society uses the written word to understand and change the world. Talk is ephemeral, and more often than not shallow. The written word gives it power and permanence. The ability to reach out to minds across space and time. The ability to change it across space and time.

Oral and literate societies are manifestations of nearly opposite states of mind. In one the word is cultivated as incantation, a few simple texts rehearsed endlessly to come to peace with a world one cannot change, the better to endure its ‘whips and scorn.’ It represents a social abnegation, a refusal to belong to the world, to take responsibility for it. It reflects a defeated will that feels no joy in engaging, acting upon or changing the world for the better.

It is the opposite in a literate society. Here the world challenges the will to action. Here the understanding engages the world in order to change it. Those who labor with the pen are exercising their will to change it. Scriptures, treatises, tracts, manifestoes, essays: in all its incarnations, the word is a declaration of intent to change the world. Here the will to change society first manifests itself in the will to write about it.

Oral societies have no use for books. They do not read, collect, lend, borrow, hand down, treasure books. Overwhelmingly, educated Pakistanis experience their final and definitive encounter with books when they appear for their last college examinations. The only books you are likely to find in their homes are what their children study at school. There are very few bookstores that sell anything other than textbooks and news or fashion magazines. There are even fewer libraries, whether maintained at public expense or operated for profit. Book clubs are unheard of.

There are fewer new books published in Pakistan today than in eighteenth century Japan . Most are collections of love poetry or short stories. There are few serious novels. Books on history, sociology, politics or economics are almost unknown. Even the political parties have little use for the written word. They communicate their programs through speeches, slogans and jingles. Political pamphleteering is rare. The official biography of Pakistan 's founding father was written by Hector Bolitho, an Englishman. More recently, Benazir Bhutto commissioned Stanley Wolpert, an American scholar, to write the biography of her father and Pakistan ’s slain populist leader.

All this is oddly paradoxical for a society that was conceived more than any other around a book. More than Christianity, Judaism or Hinduism, Islam is a religion of the Book. The central miracles of Christianity are the death and resurrection of Christ. The essence of Judaism is the history of a unique people, whose seminal events are recreated every year in a multitude of rituals. And Hinduism has no need for the written word. It is defined by the social order, rituals and etiquettes appropriate to every caste. In Islam alone God talks to mankind through the written word. And yet that Book and others are peripheral to Pakistan 's society.

A curious reversal brought about during the past two hundred years of Western domination over Islamic lands – converting Islam’s long and rich tradition of literacy to the present-day fossil of an oral society.

(M. Shahid Alam is professor of economics at a university in Boston , and author of Challenging the New Orientalism: Dissenting Essays on America ’s ‘War Against Islam’ - IPI Publications: 2006 forthcoming. He may be reached at alqalam02760@yahoo.com. © M. Shahid Alam)

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