Is There a Bonding between Ertughral and Dr Qadeer Khan?
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
Toronto, Canada
For a large section of the people of Pakistan forcibly confined to their homes because of Covid-19 pandemic, there’s some entertainment, after all, to soothe their disturbed nerves. The ‘relief,’ for whatever it may be worth of, has come from the Turkish tv drama serial, ‘Ertughral Ghazi’.
Ertughral is a Turkish television production, a sort of historical docu-drama, based on the life saga of Ertughral, progenitor of the great Ottomans who founded one of the greatest empires in the recorded history of mankind and ruled over three continents for six centuries.
The Pakistan Television Corporation (PTV) has been showing the serial since the onset of Ramadan in Pakistan. What’s special about this venture of the state-run television channel is that the Turkish drama serial is being shown at the specific direction of PM Imran Khan.
This scribe has old recollections of IK’s deep interest in Muslim history, long before he traded his star-standing in cricket for a contentious career in Pakistan’s Byzantine politics. As Pakistan’s political leader, since donning the mantle of PM, Imran seems to have taken a deep interest in broadening the spectrum of Pakistan’s historic relations with Turkey. He has been on the front foot to cultivate deep personal equation with Turkey’s bold and intrepid President, Recip Tayip Erdogan.
So, it makes perfect sense for IK to have an interest in the lives of Turkish heroes and educate himself more on their heroics and achievements. That’s quite understandable.
But why should the PM’s personal interest be transposed on to the people of Pakistan? Why should the state-run PTV be prompted to the extent of having the Turkish serial dubbed into Urdu so it may be easier for the Pakistani audience to follow it?
Another Turkish TV serial, My Sultan based on the Harem life of the greatest of all Ottoman Sultans, Sultan Suleiman the Great, has had a very successful run on Pakistani television and was hugely popular with the Pakistani audience. Ergo, there’s every logic in it that PTV should have the heart to repeat the experiment with another Turkish television serial of the same genre.
What could ideally explain IK being so keen to flaunt his taste in history for his Pakistanis and enable them to entertain themselves with another popular Turkish serial, may have another dimension, too.
Ertughral—a ghazi according to the Turkish taste of hailing their heroes as conquerors—was a nation builder. His father, Salman Shah, leader of a Turkish tribe by the name of Qai had fled northern Iran under the Mongol onslaught in the latter-half of the 13 th century and wandered into Anatolia, present day Turkey. He died crossing a river, but his valiant son, Osman Ali—known in Turkish language as Osmanli—not only held his tribe together but welded disparate Turkish tribes into one nation that established its writ over much of Anatolia and also threatened the rump Eastern Roman Empire, with its seat of power limited only to Constantinople. It was Osmanli who became the founder of the Ottoman Sultanate, or Empire, in 1301.
It’s quite possible that in his mind’s eye IK sees himself in a similar role as Ertughral or Osmanli. They were two characters who welded a Turkish nation out of disparate and divided Turkish, often gypsy, tribes. IK, after all, unfurled his rule under the banner of a ‘New Pakistan.’
His personal vision of grandeur apart, his spirit of infusing a new vision and a new sense of oneness in the people of Pakistan should be regarded as a commendable initiative. His sense that Pakistan’s known and notorious klaptocrats—Zardari, Nawaz and their ilk—have put the people of Pakistan’s faith in their country under enormous strain isn’t misplaced or exaggerated, after all. The morale of the people of Pakistan was no doubt hammered, enormously, by Zardari and Nawaz.
IK may see it as his primary obligation to restore the people’s faith in their country. What better ways of doing it than educating them, through a television drama serial, how other people purged themselves of disunity and despondency to revive their spirit?
But this initiative of his has invited a backlash from his political rivals and a bevy of media detractors in hog to the ancient regime.
There’s absolutely no merit to murmurs of protest from IK’s political rivals who are acting according to the script cast in stone from the day he stepped into power. They must oppose all and everything he does, often behaving like parrots or broken record stuck in its groves. Some of these political detractors may never have heard of Ertughral or where he belonged to.
The media hacks are crying foul because their shrill howling pleases their political mentors in the ranks of PPP and Nawaz League. Besides, since it’s at IK’s behest that PTV is showing the serial they think it’s their right to denounce him for promoting an alien hero instead of our own national heroes. Their pique at IK’s initiative is also part of the agenda given to them by their pipers.
But what’s being missed, inadvertently or deliberately, in all this cacophony of IK-bashing is that the Turkish drama serial has an innate message in it for the people, as well as for the elite, of Pakistan. That lesson is that proud nations, like the Turks, are always prepared to acknowledge, with grateful regard, their heroes and nation-builders. They remember their benefactors with pride and don’t shy away from immortalizing their contributions in history. In this age of technology, what better means than television to record a grateful nation’s abiding debt of gratitude to its benefactors.
That the nation of Pakistan has sadly been lacking in this attribute is an open secret. And one doesn’t have to go searching in its short history to illustrate the point.
By sheer coincidence, as arguments for and against serializing Ertughral Ghazi’s docu-drama on PTV raged with intensity in social media, Dr Qadeer Khan, father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb, made headlines in the media with his petition to the Supreme Court of Pakistan to end his virtual house-arrest. He has been forced to knock at the door of the apex court after having failed to get any relief on his petition at Islamabad and Lahore High Courts.
Dr Qadeer Khan has been a prisoner of Pakistan’s notorious ‘Establishment’ since 2004 when he was unabashedly ‘outed’ and thrown to the vultures by the then military dictator, General Pervez Musharraf.
Musharraf’s own track record is of a man who didn’t hesitate to serve Pakistan on a platter to the Americans—on the heels of 9/11—in order to get Washington’s blessings for his consolidation of personal power. So, it wasn’t out of his shameless character to offer the sacrifice of Dr Khan to those who had waged a relentless campaign against Pakistan’s so-called ‘Islamic bomb.’ To please his masters, Musharraf had no compunction in holding Dr Khan responsible for alleged ‘proliferation’ of nuclear bomb technology. It was a charge as devoid of truth as Musharraf sans any dignity or self-respect.
But Dr. Qadeer Khan hasn’t been allowed to live a life of freedom in his own country. Not only that, but his services to the cause of making Pakistan a nuclear power have also gone largely unacknowledged among the ruling elites of Pakistan, including those who proudly flaunt themselves as guardians of Pakistan’s nuclear shield.
But the contrast between the national psyches of the Turks and the Pakistanis couldn’t stand out with sharper clarity in this backdrop. There are the Turks still full of reverence and pride in their debt of gratitude to a hero like Ertughral, though nearly 8 centuries divide his time from theirs.
On the other hand, there’s a living hero and benefactor of the Pakistanis begging that he be allowed to live the life of a free man. He isn’t asking for anything more. The hostility of our hallowed ‘establishment’ to Dr Khan is something that should force every Pakistani to protest against it and decry the wanton behaviour of disparaging a national hero. That there’s almost total apathy at the level of the people of Pakistan in regard to Dr Qadeer’s stolen freedom, and no murmur of protest against the shabby treatment meted out to him, is all the more lamentable. But it sheds a light on what kind of a people we are.
One should keep their fingers crossed as to how Dr Khan’s petition would fare at the apex court. But one should pray—with all the more fervour in this blessed month of Ramadan—that after getting acquainted with the Turkish people’s paean to a long-buried hero, the Pakistani viewers of the tele-serial would have some pangs of conscience and realise how pitifully they have been falling short in doing justice to a living hero of theirs.
How close to the point the great poet Josh Maleehabadi was to this sorry aspect of the Pakistani national trait, when he intoned in a couplet that should remain haunting with the Pakistani people, and should go down as a foot note to their malaise:
Yeh murda hein zindon se inhain kya matlab
Jab murda banogey to yeh pehchanein gey.
(They are dead themselves so have no truck with the living.
They will acknowledge you only in death.)
(The author is a former ambassador and career diplomat)
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