Primitive and Evil?
By Khayyam Mushir
Islamabad, Pakistan
Listening to Akbar S. Ahmed at a talk held in Islamabad recently to promote his new book, I found my attention wandering to the visible reactions of the audience, as this eloquent and prolific scholar lectured extemporaneously on the importance of inter-faith harmony, religious tolerance, the need for an educated and expansive view of the world and the community of nations inhabiting it, drones, extremism in Pakistan and the need to dispense with our stage-of-siege mentality which informs our general reaction to the West.
There were perhaps a hundred odd in attendance. Men and women old and young, well-heeled English medium urbanites, educated yet obviously Urdu-medium rural backwater types, professors, civil servants, etc. Through the entire talk Dr Ahmed carefully referenced his pleas for humanity—to guide us in our approach to sectarian killings, minority rights, terrorism etc.— to examples from the Holy Prophet’s (PBUH) life, to sayings of saints and Prophets of other religions and to the just, egalitarian, secular vision of our own founding father M.A Jinnah. Where I could see dissent initially registering itself as frowns on the faces of many in this open and honest lecture on the very prickly issues of national religious, social and political importance, I then found it dissipating , almost like a balloon slowly letting out its air, as each of such persons registered the symbols of religious and national patriotic importance that Dr Ahmed skillfully invoked.
My confusion, my pain today concerns this national attitude that pervades the social and intellectual landscape in Pakistan. Civilization, whenever it happened to the sub-continent, created eventually the nation state. The state’s contract with its peoples governs their right to live freely, peacefully, securely and equally within the borders of the state. Taking another human being’s life is strictly forbidden with different punitive measures for the perpetrators of such heinous crimes enshrined within the state’s law. Civilization, a basic awareness of the law of the land coupled perhaps with that more nebulous innate construct we may refer to as our individual conscience, would cause us to immediately repudiate and condemn murder and any act of violence toward a fellow human being. It would allow us in the flash of a second to distinguish between accidental killing, killing in self-defense, killing with design, and senseless killing. It would tell us that accidental killing is unfortunate and tragic and perhaps even if the accidental nature is proven beyond reasonable doubt, the state may still require formal penance from the perpetrator. It would inform us that killing in self-defense is possibly unavoidable yet still tragic as it does result in the loss of human life.
Through civilization and exercise of our faculties we would understand that killing with design is diabolical and against the basic tenets of human rights law, for be it individual or state or army, the decision to take a man’s life cannot be justified by citing any lofty social, political or religious ideal as an ultimate objective. Finally we would indisputably believe that senseless killing is just plain evil. Hitler engaged in senseless killing in Auschwitz. Hitler was evil. Pol Pot’s massacre of nearly three million Cambodians to achieve his communist agrarian utopia was senseless. Pol Pot was evil. Saddam Hussein gassed Kurds without remorse because they were in a minority and because he harbored a personal hatred for them. Saddam was evil. Domestic violence because it targets women or children who are unable to defend themselves is senseless, therefore evil. Bombing a mosque or a church where innocent and faithful men and women unconnected to any political agenda come to pray, is evil. Accusing innocent men and women of blasphemy to fulfill private agendas of hate borne through intolerance is evil.
All of these are simple deductions that an average, reasonably aware member of civilized society should be able to arrive at without the need to invoke holy images or to make references to the Qur'an, Hadith, Sunna, the Holy Prophet or to M.A Jinnah. Yet in order for us to embrace and understand tolerance, for humanity and peace to become palatable for us, we need a divine context, a founding father's speech, a Prophet’s sanction. In the absence of the above we are generally, naturally inclined to hate; to discriminate against minorities; to support sectarian strife; to justify suicide bombings and terrorism as being necessitated by religious cause; to marginalize and exclude those who dare to think differently, believe differently. We do this by the curious agency of “blaming the victim” as my friend Harris Khalique always says with much anguish. Benazir Bhutto was shot dead and we blamed her for opening her car’s sun-roof; Salman Taseer was murdered and we said it was unavoidable, after all he committed the cardinal sin of supporting a poor defenseless Christian woman on the unproven matter of blasphemy; Shias get killed in this country like game, we the Sunni majority observe in smug silence, not even bothering to condemn such killings in our private spheres of influence, the home, the workplace, the country club. Instead we blame them for inciting the majority to act violently. The Taliban bomb bazaars and mosques and churches and we blame the state for getting into bed with America. We murder and rape thousands of innocent men, women and children in East Pakistan and we blame the Bengalis for conniving with the Indians. And this madness is accompanied by (borrowing from Terry Eagleton) a constant mad manic sniggering in the echelons and corridors of power in Pakistan creating an ambience akin to what one would expect to find in hell itself.
With all this then, would it be farfetched to conclude that we are basically primitive and evil? I don’t care much for examples of Western imperialism, Indian cunning, Jewish conspiracies, I’m concerned only with Pakistan and Pakistanis. I’m concerned with a national trend that suggests that the end of this madness is not in sight. I’m concerned that there will perhaps never be a large scale proliferation and evolution of intellectual thought in Pakistan or that it will be too slow and arrive too late. I wonder now if through the decades, this lack of humanity, lack of love for peace, this affinity to violence and destruction has not become hardcoded into our DNA? Or perhaps it never left us, because as the great Mughal emperor Babar observed in his memoirs, translated from Turkish into Persian and then English and written after he established his empire “from Badakshan and Kabul through the Punjab to the borders of Bengal”, (A history of India-Volume 2-Pelican) of Hindustan (which covers present day India and Pakistan):
“Hindustan is a country that has few pleasures to recommend it. The people are not handsome. They have no idea of the charms of friendly society, of frankly mixing together, or of familiar intercourse. They have no genius, no comprehension of mind, no politeness of manner, no kindness or fellow feeling, no ingenuity or mechanical invention in planning or executing their handicraft works, no skill or knowledge in design or architecture; they have no horses, no good flesh, no grapes or musk melons, no good fruits, no ice or cold water, no good food or bread in their bazaars, no baths or colleges, no candles, no torches, not a candlestick (Memoirs of Babur-translated by J. Leyden and W. Erskine-Oxford University Press, 1921)
One can only imagine the scale of Babur’s disappointment then. Perhaps we should only accept his perception with a pinch of salt, colored as it was with the contempt of a conqueror. But even so, while we have progressed much since, that progress appears banal and cosmetic.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Back to Pakistanlink Homepage
