Pakistan: A Hard Country (8 page)

My own recent researches in Pakistan have been not nearly as long as I would have wished, owing to teaching commitments and a short deadline for this book; but they did give me the chance to talk to hundreds of ordinary Pakistanis from every walk of life, most of whom had never been asked for their opinion before by any Pakistani or Western observer or organization. The views of these voiceless masses form the heart of this book, and I have tried to reflect them as faithful y as I can and draw from them an understanding of Pakistani reality.

This has not always been easy. I remember a conversation with an elderly leader of the Awami National Party in Peshawar in 2008. In his garden were a pair of strikingly graceful long-legged grey birds with crests. I asked him what they were. ‘Flamingos,’ he replied.

‘Um, I don’t think so, sir ...’

‘No, you are right of course, they are not flamingos. They migrate to Russia in summer, sensible birds, and then come back here again to lay their eggs. We hoped one of them was female and would lay eggs, but it turns out they are both males. So they fight al the time or stand at opposite ends of the garden sulking.’

‘Like Pashtun politicians, sir, perhaps?’

With a deep laugh: ‘Oh yes, yes indeed, unfortunately! But what are they cal ed now in English? We cal them koonj.’ Turning to his staff, he asked, ‘What are koonj in English?’ And with absolute, unquestionable conviction, one of them replied:

‘Swans!’20

So if in the course of this book I have sometimes mistaken flamingos for swans, or indeed pristine Pakistani political swans for ugly ducklings, I can only plead in self-defence Pakistani society’s ability to generate within an astonishingly short space of time several mutual y incompatible versions of a given event or fact, often linked to conspiracy theories which pass through the baroque to the rococo.

Conflicted Pakistani relations with reality notwithstanding, I am deeply attached to Pakistan, which has provided me with some of the best moments of my life; and Pakistan’s people have treated me with immense kindness and hospitality. Pakistan is one of the most fascinating countries of my acquaintance, a place that cries out for the combined talents of a novelist, an anthropologist and a painter. But after twenty years of intermittently covering Pakistan, this is a clear-sighted affection. I have good friends among the Pakistani elite, but I also take much of what they say with several pinches of salt – even, or especial y, when their statements seem to correspond to Western liberal ideology, and please Western journalists and officials.

The problem goes deeper than this, however. Western-style democracy has become so associated over the past generation with human rights, wealth, progress and stability, that to accept that a country cannot at present generate stable and successful forms of it is an admission so grating that both Westerners and educated Pakistanis natural y shy away from it; Westerners because it seems insulting and patronizing, Pakistanis because it seems humiliating.

Both, therefore, rather than examining the reality of Pakistan’s social, economic and cultural power structures, have a tendency to reach for simple explanations concerning the wicked behaviour of malignant forces, whether the generals, the ‘feudals’, the mul ahs or the Americans.

Seen from a long historical perspective, things look rather different.

Modern democracy is a quite recent Western innovation. In the past, European societies were in many ways close to that of Pakistan today – and indeed, modern Europe has generated far more dreadful atrocities than anything Islam or South Asia has yet achieved. In the future – who can say? The virtues of courage, honour and hospitality, in which Pakistanis excel, do after al have their permanent worth.

It may also be worthwhile in this context to recal the words which the science fiction novelist John Wyndham put into the mouth of a professor asked to give advice on future careers in a world threatened by radical climate change. He had two recommendations: ‘Find a hil top, and fortify it’; and ‘Enlist in a regiment with a famous name.

There’l be a use for you.’21 Pakistan has plenty of famous regiments, and local chieftains have been fortifying hil tops for thousands of years.

They may yet cope better with the future than the successful elites of today’s world.

A NOTE ON KINSHIP TERMS

That kinship is of critical importance in Pakistan is something on which al the academic experts agree – which is nice, because they tend to agree on nothing else about the subject. For me, the definitive word was said 100 years ago by the great British civil servant and ethnographer Sir Denzil Ibbetson. After an official career lasting decades in the Punjab, he wrote:

An old agnostic is said to have summed up his philosophy in the fol owing words: ‘The only thing I know is that I know nothing, and I am not quite sure that I know that.’ His words express very exactly my own feelings regarding caste in the Panjab. My experience is that it is almost impossible to make any statement whatever regarding any one of the castes we have to deal with, absolutely true though it may be for one part of the province, which shal not presently be contradicted with equal truth as regards the same people in some other district.22

Thus the English term ‘tribe’ can be translated into several different local words, which overlap with other English meanings. Qaum can mean tribe, people, ethnicity or even nation. Zat is related to the Indian word jati, for a ‘sub-caste’ in Hinduism. ‘Tribe’ can also mean several very different things in different parts of Pakistan. Among the Baloch tribes (not just in Balochistan but in Sindh and southern Punjab as wel ), a tribe means something like the old clans of Scotland, a tightly knit group under an autocratic chieftain.

Among the Pathans, however, while tribal membership is a tremendously important marker of identity and status, the tribes are divided into endless rivalrous sub-tribes, for which new leading men emerge in every generation. Meanwhile in Punjab, the Rajputs, Jats, Guj ars and others were presumably tightly knit nomadic tribes in the distant past, but long ago spread out and intermingled territorial y across the whole of what is now northern India and Pakistan (the Guj ars have given their name to a state in India as wel as a city in Pakistan, among many other places).

Original y assimilated to the Hindu caste system as kshatriyas (the warrior caste) thanks to their conquests, many Jats, Guj ars and Rajputs later converted to Islam or Sikhism. Within Pakistan, they have no col ective overal political identity at al , but have a certain community of sentiment, including a strong sense of superiority to everyone else, and a strong preference for marrying each other. An appeal to fel ow Rajput or Jat feeling may gain some limited help when al else fails. More important in terms of loyalty and mobilization is the local sub-clan, as in Chauhan Rajput, Alpial Rajput and so on. The Sayyids and Qureishis are groups peculiar to Islam, being (ostensibly) descendants of the Prophet and his clan, and therefore of Arabic origin. Yet their role and status in South Asian Muslim society has certain limited affinities to that of the Brahmins in South Asian Hindu society.

Meanwhile, other kinship groups are descended straight from the lower castes of the Hindu system. These include the kammi artisan and service groups of the towns and vil ages; and below them, the old untouchables and tribals, who are so far down the system that no one even bothers much if they are Muslim, Hindu or – what most real y are – pre-Hindu animist. As in India, these last are the most vulnerable groups in Pakistani society, liable to be preyed on economical y and sexual y by local dominant lineages and by the police.

As to effective political roles within kinship groups and in wider politics, this spreads outwards from the khandan – denoting both the immediate family and the extended family (often a joint family, in which several brothers and their families live together under one roof) – to that hel ish concept, invented for the confusion of mankind: biradiri (related to the Indo-European root for ‘brother’), which is supposed to denote the descendants of one common male ancestor. To judge by my interviews, however, biradiri can be used to mean almost any kind of wider hereditary kinship link depending on context. In this book, I have therefore used ‘kinship group’ or ‘kinship network’ rather than biradiri when speaking of such wider groups.

2

The Struggle for Muslim South Asia Then We made you their successors in the land, to see how you conduct yourselves (The Koran, Surah Yunus 10, verse 14)

When we lowered the boat of our existence Into the river run with pain

How powerful our arms were,

How crimson the blood in our veins!

We were sure that after just a few strokes of the oars

Our boat would enter its haven.

That’s not how it happened.

Every current was treacherous with unseen maelstroms;

We foundered because the boatmen were unskilled;

Nor had the oars been properly tested.

Whatever investigations you conduct; Whatever charges you bring,

The river is still there; the same boat too.

Now you tell us what can be done.

You tell us how to manage a safe landing.

(Faiz Ahmed Faiz)1

This chapter is not intended to provide a history of the territory of what is now Pakistan – something that would take several books (a chronology of the main events of Pakistan’s history is, however, included as an appendix to this book). Rather, this chapter wil try to draw from the history of the region, and of Islam in South Asia, those events and elements which are of greatest relevance to the situation in which Pakistan finds itself today: notably, the intermittent but recurrent history of Islamist mobilization against Western forces in the region; recurrent attempts by different administrations radical y to change Pakistan; and an equal y recurrent pattern of governmental failure which is common to both civilian and military regimes, and results from a combination of state weakness and entrenched kinship loyalties, religious al egiances and local power structures.

‘ISLAM IN DANGER’

As with the Muslim world more widely, the single most important thing to understand about patterns both of Muslim history and of Muslim consciousness in South Asia is the tremendous rise of Muslim power up to the seventeenth century, and its steep decline thereafter. Before 1947, the glorious history of Muslim rule and cultural achievement in South Asia helped make it impossible for Muslims to accept a subordinate position in what they saw as a future Hindu-dominated India. By the same token, for a long time after independence and to a degree even today, Pakistanis have felt that they not only must compete with India, but must compete on an equal footing; and that to accept anything less would be a humiliating betrayal.

This history also contributes to the fact that, in the words of Iqbal Akhund,

The Pakistani Muslim thinks of himself as heir to the Muslim empire, descended from a race of conquerors and rulers. There is therefore a streak of militarism in Pakistan’s ethos, even at the popular level.2

By 1682, when Ottoman Muslim troops were battering the wal s of Vienna, the Mughal empire ruled (albeit often very loosely) almost the whole of South Asia. The Mughals built on previous Muslim sultanates of Delhi that had ruled most of north India since the thirteenth century.

Even after the Mughal empire began to fal to pieces in the first half of the eighteenth century, great Muslim successor dynasties in Awadh, Bengal, Bhopal, Hyderabad and Mysore continued to rule over most of what is now India.

While Muslim soldiers conquered, Muslim missionaries converted – but much more slowly. Outside what is now Pakistan, only in Bengal was a majority of the population over a large area converted to Islam.

A central tragedy of modern Muslim history in South Asia has been that, as a result, the greatest centres of Muslim civilization in South Asia were established in the midst of Hindu populations, far from the areas of Muslim majority population. The decline of Muslim power, and the partition of 1947, left almost al the greatest Muslim cities, monuments and institutions of South Asia as islands in an Indian sea, towards which Pakistanis look as if from a distant shore towards a lost Atlantis.3

The old Muslim dynasties of South Asia were as a rule not severely oppressive towards their Hindu subjects. They could not afford to be, given Hindu numerical predominance and the continued existence of innumerable local Hindu princes. At the popular level, Hindu and Muslim religious practice often merged, just as in Europe Christianity took on many traditions from local pagan religions. At the highest level, the Mughal Emperor Akbar (1542 – 1605) founded the Din-i-Ilahi (Divine Faith), a syncretic cult containing elements of Islam, Hinduism and Christianity.

Nonetheless, in the Muslim kingdoms there was no doubt which religion was foremost in the state, as the great mosques which dominate the old Muslim capitals testify, and were meant to testify. The Din-i-Ilahi cult failed completely to root itself, while – like al attempts to dilute or syncretize Islam – provoking a severe backlash from orthodox Muslim clerics, which undermined Akbar’s authority. The last great Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb (1618 – 1707), responded to the increasing problems of his empire with a programme of strict religious orthodoxy.