Book review: Reflections on Struggle, Suffering, and Creativity in Pakistan. By Khaled Ahmed
Anyone will be moved
by the latest book by Harris Khalique, one of Pakistan’s leading intellectuals,
Crimson Papers: Reflections on Struggle, Suffering, and Creativity in Pakistan
(2017), especially the chapter about women killed by men fired by a
religion on the basis of which they claim Pakistan was created. Of course you
have to leave aside Benazir
Bhutto, the political icon, to focus on the less renowned but extraordinary
women who didn’t fit the paradigm of Pakistan. It is the sense of waste that
makes one write with pain today.
Khalique tells about
Shabana, a pretty singer-dancer of Swat, who wouldn’t heed warnings from the
Taliban to give up her “sinful” life. Her folks had done it for ages in Swat’s
friendly valley - friendly because the people there were mild and tolerant. It
is only when a coalition of religious parties came to rule in Peshawar - the
capital of the province that administered Swat - that the Pakistan’s ideology
started taking hold and the Taliban began throwing their weight around. In time
they were to destroy all the girls’ schools and nearly kill Malala Yusufzai,
the Nobel Laureate from Swat, because she would defy them by attending school.
Shabana was killed in 2009.
“Before being killed,
she begged the men who had dragged her out of the house not to slit her throat,
which they would usually do, but shoot her instead. They fulfilled her last
wish and shot her in the head. Her corpse was hung from the lamp-post like
those of other such victims in the main square of the chief city of the Swat
Valley, where such executions were regularly being carried on.” Because she was a
dancer her death was hardly registered. Muslims, after such an outrage, will
think, not of losing an innocent life but of the edicts of religion and dismiss
the murder by assigning it to that part of their mind which thinks like the
killer: Good riddance of a woman who danced, which is forbidden by Allah, and
who defied Him by not remaining in purdah. Each time the Taliban kill our
women, our calculated piety before God goes up a notch. In this era of
religious terrorism, this is one way I can feel good about myself, by
condemning Shabana, who was shot in the head at her own request.
Khalique feels equally
for Asia Bibi, a poor illiterate Christian girl of Sheikhupura near Lahore who,
a cleric said, had blasphemed. A dirt-poor Asia Bibi was to die for all the
devotees of the faith.
The world begged us to do something; the Pope appealed, only to get an unworthy repartee from Pakistan’s bearded firebrands as the government found itself familiarly hamstrung. The president wouldn’t pardon her because he couldn’t challenge the clout of the clergy at its strongest; he had just signed on the appointment of a harsh cleric to the Council of Islamic Ideology (CII), who thrives on violence mandated by law. A moderate CII former member Javed Ghamidi was on the run from Islamic terrorists as he had criticised the bad law that hands down death for blasphemy without the normal criteria of justice, such as intent and level of consciousness.
The world begged us to do something; the Pope appealed, only to get an unworthy repartee from Pakistan’s bearded firebrands as the government found itself familiarly hamstrung. The president wouldn’t pardon her because he couldn’t challenge the clout of the clergy at its strongest; he had just signed on the appointment of a harsh cleric to the Council of Islamic Ideology (CII), who thrives on violence mandated by law. A moderate CII former member Javed Ghamidi was on the run from Islamic terrorists as he had criticised the bad law that hands down death for blasphemy without the normal criteria of justice, such as intent and level of consciousness.
Asia
Bibi rots in jail in 2017. Governor of Punjab Salmaan Taseer was killed by his
police guard for speaking out in her defence. Taseer is unsung, but his
killer’s anniversary is celebrated every year religiously at the mausoleum the
state allowed to be built for a killer hanged by a judge who had to flee Pakistan
after signing the death sentence.
Perween Rahman was
shot dead in 2013. Khalique writes: “I was terribly sad, but not surprised,
when she was shot and killed. This is how we have been honouring the brave and
the brilliant for some time. Perween worked at the Orangi Pilot Project, which
was housing for the poor built by Dr Akhtar Hameed Khan, who started his
pioneering work in Bangladesh before being recognised by the world.” (He was to
become the victim of a blasphemy charge in Pakistan although he lived the life
of a bedraggled saint in Karachi worshipped by the poor but snubbed by the
state that wilted before the cleric.) Perween was equally
saintly, “bringing dignity and self-respect to those who were treated like dirt
by the rich and the powerful, claiming a decent physical space for the working
class of Karachi”. Just as Khan was accused of belittling the Prophet PBUH,
Perween too was seen as a harmful person and killed for not taking the veil and
not sitting at home according to Bahishti Zevar. Two men on a motorcycle
emerged from the darkness and opened fire on her car; Perween died on the spot.
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