Professor C.M. Naim once wrote that the Pakistani Urdu press revels in nasty personal attacks and ugly innuendos, communal and sectarian provocation, using rabble-rousing language, hatching great conspiracies without an iota of logic or evidence, and making amazing prophecies.

In his few sentences that I have paraphrased, Naim has summed up the experience of modern-day popular journalism in Pakistan. Urdu is the language of public discourse and some of its opinion writers command influence over a significant reading population. They have cultivated their own constituencies of not only semi-literate and half-witted followers, but also cast an impression on the otherwise intelligent but gullible Pakistani mind in search of a meaning for its existence — with an unending quest for a stable national identity in which this mind can anchor itself.

No-holds-barred, from the writings of Haroon-ur-Rasheed to Dr Ajmal Niazi, from A.Q. Khan to Amir Liaquat Hussain, Naim evaluates the wild fantasies, misconstrued facts, inherent prejudice and lack of a sense of history upon which argument upon argument is built. He demolishes the very foundation of our fictional narrative of worldly grandeur and Divine splendour pushed continuously in different ways by scores of our well-known columnists. He is scathing and direct, but does acknowledge where praise is due. In fact, he dedicates his collection of polemical essays on Pakistan, A Killing in Ferozewala, published by City Press, Karachi, in 2013, to Pakistani journalists who were killed or have disappeared for what they believed in.

Although Naim’s main source seems to be the regular op-ed columns and news analyses in mainstream and popular Urdu newspapers, with some occasional mention of what is written in the English-language press, the book is not simply an exposition of Pakistani print media. It deals with larger issues of religious orthodoxy and exclusion leading to violent extremism against Ahmadis and other minority communities, in addition to understanding the promotion of bigotry and irrationality in a consistent and systematic fashion. Some of the essays are made more worthwhile by political and literary references from the past, quotations from classic poetry and prose and placing the turmoil of present times in the broader historical context of South Asian Islam.

Naim, an octogenarian professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, is one of the most distinguished scholars of South Asian languages and civilisations from our part of the world. He has outstanding academic writings on various aspects of Urdu language and literature behind him, fluent translations of select fictional work which he did from Urdu and Hindi into English, and the experience of editing and co-editing leading journals in the United States. He has quite a bit of journalistic writing to his credit, but that, too, is of a serious nature. The man is known for his erudition and scholarship, passion for literary theory and appreciation of creative writing. Then what bothered him so much about Pakistan that he first took to writing occasional pieces, and then turned them into polemical essays on our country and society?

In terms of civilisational and ideological moorings, Naim is rooted in the pluralistic intellectual tradition of South Asian Muslims with a staunch belief in our composite heritage. He questions the rise of radicalism in India as much. But the book being discussed here is based on his engagement over the years with Pakistan and Pakistani Muslims. He has never lived in Pakistan, but visits. He keenly follows the happenings and events in the social, cultural and political spaces of the country. But since he does not live in India either and spent more than half a century in the US, he problematises the issues we face in Pakistan with a certain detachment. But what provokes him to write and challenge the hack writers in Pakistani newspapers who stand nowhere compared to Naim’s own stature, is his concern for us losing our sanity in our desire to invent a past and evade the questions thrown at us by the present.

We need to think about the future and carve our destiny as a modern nation instead of wasting time in establishing fake antecedents.

The writer is a poet and essayist based in Islamabad

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, February 4th, 2018