Requiem for whom?
ONE question that always bothers me is: who is the big brain that this part of the world has produced? As if defining the criteria were not difficult enough, the ring-fencing of the geography under consideration and the pre-post-Partition division of the eras make it even more intractable. Before parading the father-of-this and daughter-of-that variety of famous personalities, please bear in mind that we are aiming for slightly higher intellect here, that of the Abul Kalam and Edward Said calibre, that rare combination of intellect, character, and impact.
Ambedkar, Iqbal, Maududi, Aurobindo, Rabindranath, and many others are from another time and space. People born around Partition, nearer to what constitutes Pakistan today, who occupied the public sphere close enough to today’s generations to remember, are rarer, nay, extinct. Whenever I grappled with this question, only one name came to mind. I never met him and did not even attempt to. I am unsure if it was his intellectual heft or if one was mindful of the saying, ‘maintain a painting and a book’s distance from artists and writers, respectively’. Khaled Ahmed left us recently. An editor, a writer, an etymologist, but above all, a recluse. A trait that sets true intellect apart from ‘public intellectuals’ and practitioners of ‘verbal virtuosity’.
The discourse has dumbed down, especially after social media’s advent. Cross-media ownership, which in our context means anything from cooking oil to real estate, and from detergent to tobacco, could also be cross-subsidising a TV channel or a newspaper. TV anchors can switch between talk shows and positions ranging from interim chief ministers to national security advisers to home ministers. This is one area where the Americans are still playing catch up. In such dire straits, it is no surprise that you would never see him participating in shouting matches that are taken for current affairs programming today.
He held forth on our descent into extremism and militancy — the swing from being a country whose majority were followers of ‘low-church’ religion to a state that adopted ‘high-church’ theocracy for external gains like the Afghan ‘jihad’ and the unresolved issue of Kashmir — with such ease as if discussing the weather — pre-smog that is. The shallowness of the ‘strategic depth’ doctrine, the hand-in-glove nature of theocracies and exclusion, the implosion of exclusionist states, is dealt with in detail in his seminal work, Sleepwalking to Surrender: Dealing with Terrorism in Pakistan.
The discourse has dumbed down, especially after social media’s advent.
He has dealt in detail with the shift from the Barelvi, Sufi-centric practice of Islam in Pakistan to the theocratic Deoband school of thought to attract the cannon fodder for the proxy wars that the state indulged in. The extraterritorial control over parts of Pakistan by the Gulf sheikdoms, initially in the guise of hunting concessions in southern Punjab complete with private landing strips, gave way to international funding of seminaries that led to the ascendance of the stricter Deoband and Wahabi stream. Khaled Ahmed has traced particular sets of legislation and interpretation by the Council of Islamic Ideology to particular clerics in the Saudi religious hierarchy.
It is more than surreal that only days after his death, the PTI leader’s spouse delivered what is being described as an ‘explosive’ video message from her husband and party leader, Imran Khan, insinuating that his ouster from power and imprisonment was caused by the Saudis’ move away from enforcement of Sharia. According to her, they saw his barefoot pilgrimage to Madina as countering their moves to recast themselves.
The reaction from the government and its allies in support of the Saudi establishment and condemnation of Imran Khan and his party for wrecking Pakistan-Saudi ties based on ‘unconditional and selfless’ reci-procation of brotherhood is as predictable as the absurdity of the PTI’s de-fence of Mrs Khan’s tirade.
PTI spokespersons were at pains to describe the close ties Mr Khan enjoys with the Saudi crown prince, claiming he was the first dignitary to call him after he was attacked at a public rally in Wazirabad in 2022. Don’t be surprised to see in the PTI’s social media photos from the prince’s past visits to Pakistan Mr Khan playing chauffeur in clear protocol violation.
People have not forgotten the then deputy speaker Qasim Suri’s very audible whisper into Mr Khan’s ear at a rally, urging him to employ the ‘Islami touch’ to his address. His leader obliged without missing a beat. The clay on Khaled Ahmed’s grave had hardly dried, and yet another religious stroke, this time by the PTI leader’s better half, was added. This is as much a requiem for Khaled Ahmed as it is for a once moderate polity.
The writer is a poet. His latest publication is a collection of satire essays titled Rindana.
Published in Dawn, November 29th, 2024
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