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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Reporting & Essays |
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Essay |
The Truth about Pakistan?
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| Neither the Western media’s shallow coverage nor domestic outrage over it does justice to the complexity of Pakistani society |
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Published : 1 October 2010 |
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ADREES LATIF / REUTERS |
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| Model Nadia Husain is photographed during Fashion Pakistan Week in Karachi in September 2009.
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| "W |
ITHOUT SHEPHERDS is a feature documentary that looks beyond the headlines and breaks open the stereotypes of the most dangerous country in the world,” declares the movie’s press kit. It’s almost as if the American filmmakers crafted this description with the specific aim of exasperating a certain kind of Pakistani.
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The kind who, like myself, follow Western media coverage of the country, and have developed an almost knee-jerk negative response to what is known domestically, not without some derision, as reporting on Pakistan’s ‘softer side.’
“In the wake of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination as violent attacks ripple throughout Pakistan and tensions escalate with the West,” the film’s creators continue, “Without Shepherds offers a rare glimpse into real life in the shadow of the war on terror…a window for world audiences to look deep into the heart of this misunderstood country.” The film has yet to be released, but its trailer reveals that it will attempt to do this by shadowingfollowing six Pakistanis who lead very different lives: supermodel Vinnie, cricketer-politician Imran Khan, ‘Sufi-rocker’ Arieb Azhar, an ex-militant, a fi- nancially struggling trucker, and a female journalist on the Taliban beat. Male and female, privileged and poor, sexy and modest, liberated and oppressed, liberal and conservative, famous and faceless—the film contains all the right dichotomies required to grab the attention of newspapers and festival juries and to reach the shocking conclusion that Pakistan contains diverse people, as if that is somehow not true of every country in the world.
Shaping all of this is, of course, the persistent spectre of Islamic extremism. In their own ways all six protagonists are crafting their lives in response to it, or have at least been pictured by the filmmakers as doing so. Khan has to develop his stance on the phenomenon as a politician, and Azhar’s Sufi rock is rebellious “in a country where religion opposes music.” Laiba is a female journalist “reporting from behind Taliban lines,” and then there is, “perhaps, most importantly,” Ibrahim, who leaves his militant group only to return home to that incubator of extremism, South Punjab. Even lives seemingly disconnected from religious ideology, politics or militancy are somehow made to plug into it, no matter how tenuously; Vinnie “launched a clothing line and a fashion channel for television, and each project in her mind is a subliminal, subversive act of feminism,” and Abdullah the trucker becomes an expert on “what the US really wants” by virtue of travelling across the country for work.
Since 2007, when the Lal Masjid siege and the lawyers’ movement sparked off the intense international reporting on our country that breathlessly continues today, what many Pakistanis who follow it have found most maddening are occasional attempts to report on the human aspects of life in a country that is apparently constantly on the brink of political implosion, economic collapse and violent extremist takeover. Now heading to a film festival not near us is what seems to be yet another Western depiction of Pakistan that is inevitably—and for many of us, tiresomely and simplistically—defined by and against the country’s problem with militancy. That, in essence, is the domestic critique of depictions of the much-touted Pakistan ‘behind the headlines.’ There is too much safety and ease, both commercial and intellectual, in those headlines about Taliban safe havens, nukes at risk, the ISI’s ambiguous loyalties and Pakistan’s position on failed state indices. They have created a convenient framework that no one really wants to stray too far from.
As much as I’ve often agreed with it, this is a comfortably defensive line to take. And, as it turns out, a dishonest one.
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N november 2009, foreign correspondents whose usual beats consist of suicide bomb attacks in Peshawar and lawyers’ protest marches in Rawalpindi infamously descended on Karachi to write about how much skin Pakistani women— with tattoos, no less!—were revealing on the runway.(One suspects they were also ready for something easier on the eyes than hirsute Pakistani men). No militants were to be found anywhere near the heavily guarded luxury hotel that was hosting the |
country’s hotel that was hosting the country’s first fashion week (though certainly not its first fashion show) a few doors down from the barricaded American embassy and the doggedly colonial Sind Club, where almost as much scotch is consumed as water. But the stories that appeared in British and American newspapers would lead one to think the event was held within rocket-launcher distance of a training camp in South Waziristan.
The Reports led to an intensely negative response in Pakistan’s English print media and blogosphere. “Can we do anything in Pakistan without it being linked in some way to either appeasing the Taliban or kicking sand in their faces?” was the now well-known reply on Pakistani media blog Café Pyala to one correspondent who, flying in the face of the criticism that followed the November stories, filed a report for the The Times in the same Taliban-centric vein after another fashion event held in February this year. We rolled our eyes at the skin-takeson- mullahs narrative, felt patronised because it failed to acknowledge our long history of fashion, and discussed in the comfort of our air-conditioned drawing rooms just how out of touch foreign correspondents can be. But while a handful of designers showing at November’s Fashion Pakistan Week stood out for their creativity, vision and skill, no one was there just to view the 30-plus collections that had been packed into four nights. Some of us came to write, friends, family and industry types came to show support, a handful came to buy commercially, and everyone came to see and be seen. But what also bound together the nearly 800 people who crowded into a tent hidden in the back section of a fortified hotel every night was a certain approach to life, a decidedly liberal one that says a woman should be able to bare as much or as little as she chooses to.
This is not to endow exorbitantly priced clothing with the power to win Pakistan’s fight against terrorism. Fashion shows with ten models baring thighs to a few hundred socialites and the husbands who finance their overpriced purchases will not, despite what the Western press has to stay, stop the Taliban in their tracks. Nor is the freedom to display skin nearly as important as girls’ education or a woman’s ability to move freely outside her home or any number of other women’s rights issues. But events like these represent a rare space outside the home, even if an exclusive one, where women have the right to choose how much they will, or will not, cover up. They are very much a rejection of a certain way of life—one that has taken on a violent, coercive face—and the acting out of quite a different one. That alone makes their stories interesting.
The truth is that many of us who read and critique the English-language foreign press care about the same things it cares about: signs of progressive values in a country where, by our own admission in our own writings and opinions, these values—and people’s ability to simply live their lives— are threatened. The real disagreement, then, is over who gets to speak for Pakistan, and it is born of the liberal guilt of a privileged minority that believes desperately in its own way of life but remains unsure if it is entitled to speak for a population that cannot speak to the world for itself. This includes outraged fellow journalists writing in English who may have, on reading my suggestion that a fashion week might have some political importance, knocked their mugs of black coffee onto the laptops that cost them as much as the average Pakistani makes a year.
Nor would their reaction be entirely uncalled for. More than any other single factor, it is class that determines one’s experience of this country, and it would take a high degree of either obliviousness or callousness to remain unaffected by the horrific disparity in quality of life that is an unmistakable, undeniable truth about Pakistan. The trouble lies with the claim that the wealthy live such sheltered, protected lives that nothing they do can be considered an act of defiance against extremism. A woman whose man has been socialised and educated into having some level of respect for her, the argument goes, isn’t really pushing the envelope when she wears what she wants to off that runway. Her choices, made inside the bubble of her privileged, Westernised life, have no political relevance whatsoever. Nor do those of the rock stars, talk show hosts, contemporary artists and Harvard-educated lawyers that the Western media keeps trotting out as bastions of progressive Pakistan.
While the gendered aspect of it makes it useful, it is unfortunate that a fashion show became the lightning rod for this debate. Fashion is susceptible to all sorts of intellectual and political snobbery, and in this case it has confused the real issue, which is a rather simple one: a violent group of people is trying to impose its version of Islam on us. Someone did something despite that imposition. That will not scare those people away. But it is both interesting to write about, and a statement. To disregard it would be to disregard its wider context, to imply that it is invalid just because the people carrying it out are not at direct risk of being blown up or even of having to change their own lifestyles. By that token, we should stop celebrating any literature written in exile or art painted by anyone privileged who ever did anything against the grain in an unequal society and especially, god forbid, any fashion shows they might have organised.
It might be de rigueur in Pakistan now to insist that an event like this one is utterly irrelevant. But the political context that frames all our activities today is undeniable. And in this country at this time, the spirit behind events like these makes it tolerable for the same Pakistani liberals who criticise Western coverage, whether we admit it to ourselves or not, to live in a country that, whether we will admit it to the world or not, has become susceptible to deeply conservative thinking.
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