The federal interior ministry has reportedly dispatched a most “immediate” letter to all “relevant departments” across the country ordering them to put a lid on fashion shows and other such “objectionable” displays of “vulgarity” at hotels and public places that “militate against our national culture and Islamic values”. Apparently, no less a personage than the great Zafarullah Jamali, the busy, do-gooding prime minister of Pakistan, was seized of the necessity to protect the fragile morals of this Great Nation of Pious Believers. This “directive”, it is learnt, was apparently provoked by a recent fashion show at the Lahore Fort in which shimmering female models in glittering dresses from Muslim Turkey swept across the stage, subverting nearly 400 members of the “horribly westernized elites” of Lahore. Another fashion show at a “posh” hotel in Islamabad a couple of days ago was the last straw that broke Mr Jamali’s inflexible back.
A resurgence of self-righteous public piety in the name of Islam began with the Taliban in Afghanistan a few years ago when music and film and sport and all other manifestations of leisure were banned. The virus spread to Balochistan and the Frontier and provoked our own band of holy warriors to wage a violent jihad against video, cassette and TV shopkeepers. Next in the firing line were billboards across the country advertising such seditious products as milk and soap and toothpaste. Epidemic proportions were reached when a couple of Lahore’s most pious citizens petitioned the High Court to stop the beautification of the environs of the Great Mosque in the old city on the plea that the lights would attract the youthful hoardes to the area and erode their morals. The ever-alert District Coordination Officer pitched in and banned all stage shows in theatre halls for reasons of “vulgarity” and “obscenity”.
Then suddenly, like manna from Heaven for the starving masses, the gates of the Lahore High Court were flung open by a couple of discerning judges and a most judicious verdict was pronounced. “Obscenity” and “vulgarity” are relative terms in time and space that have not been sufficiently defined in our law books, observed their honourable Lordships, so instead of wasting everyone’s time trying to be holier than thou the administration was advised to concentrate on municipal matters of greater concern like garbage disposal, poverty alleviation, job creation, education and crime.
Accordingly, the scene of the crime then moved to Karachi university where enraged “student” mobs belonging to Pakistan’s leading religio-political party ransacked the Visual Arts department because it was holding classes in music and sculpture and drawing during the holy month of Ramadan when “otherwise kosher activities become haram”. We were immediately reminded of the high sounding morality brigade in the English Department of the Punjab University who took refuge earlier this year behind some khaki’s pips to try and “cleanse” the great classics of English literature of all “objectionable” matter therein.
Is it Mr Jamali’s intention to transform Punjab and Islamabad and Sindh into wastelands like the NWFP and Balochistan so that the world’s perception of us as the back of beyond is reinforced? Or is the cunning prime minister taking a leaf from the dog-eared book of Mr Akram Durrani, the newly bearded chief minister of the NWFP, who is offering a “vice and virtue committee” along with a clutch of suffocating laws to the citizens of his province instead of roads and jobs and hospitals and education and economic uplift? What is it about politicians and rulers who are wont to pander to the lowest common denominator of shrill minorities when they should be concentrating on weighty issues of everyday life and death relating to the silent majority?
The desertification or impoverishment of leisure – and therefore of culture — in any society is a manifestation of insecurity and introversion. But when this landscape is flattened by fiat, decree or vigilante action, as in Pakistan’s case, it demonstrates a frightening intolerance on the part of government and state that threatens to violate the rights and freedoms of citizens. Coming amidst General Pervez Musharraf’s continuing exhortations for “moderation and enlightenment in Islamic lands”, his own government’s slide into cultural medievalism is especially alarming.
We are bothered that “Musharraf’s Pakistan” is under attack from reactionary forces in and out of government and he is doing nothing about it. If Mr Jamali’s most recent decree had been only misguided but well meant, he could have been forgiven his transgression.
But it is suggestive of an entrenched negativist mindset stuck in medieval grooves harmful to Pakistan’s national interests. Instead of pandering to this mindset, the state needs to attack and uproot it from our textbooks, from our Pakistan Television programmes and from our educational institutions. We must stamp out vigilante action. We must make the organs of the state more tolerant of dissent. We must build a composite culture of liberal, egalitarian and tolerant values. Our belief systems should be informed by light and rationality rather than crippled by superstition and darkness. Things must always be discerned in shades of being rather than frozen in black and white.
For only Allah knowest all and only Allah is infallible.