What a Wonderful World!

Before turn­ing Mus­lim at the air­port of Heathrow, I had left behind Ahma­di­at at Alla­ma Iqbal Inter­na­tion­al Air­port. From one air­port to anoth­er, I was two peo­ple both per­cep­tu­al­ly so rad­i­cal­ized in their sub­jec­tive make­up with­out my har­ness­ing, and at once polar to each oth­er, it made me split in half. I have a per­son attached to me, but the crack isn’t fill­ing. There are times when that per­son is me, but oth­er times, in fact most of the times, it is just the crack that is me.

George Orwell defines free­dom as the abil­i­ty to say two plus two makes four. If that much, he says, is grant­ed, things should fol­low. I count­ed my two halves as one, but the crack makes quan­ti­fy­ing my exis­tence as a whole impos­si­ble. Then the cold month of Decem­ber walks in: Syr­i­ans are refused life because they are Mus­lims. Ahmadis are refused life because they are ‘Kafirs’.

Recent­ly, a Sun­ni Mus­lim geol­o­gist liv­ing in our neigh­bor­hood had a grand­son, whom the fam­i­ly gave an Eng­lish name. They want­ed to pro­tect the child from all the hate Mus­lims are being exposed to in North Amer­i­ca. It is a dis­cur­sive tac­tic, and would­n’t pro­tect the child at all. It will only shield his par­ents from the fear that they did­n’t do enough. That is the thought behind all the mobil­i­ty that has tak­en place around the world in the last many decades on the heels of neo-lib­er­al­ism, impe­ri­al­ism and rad­i­cal­ism spread­ing roots: peo­ple sink in seas than die at the hands of guns think­ing they will pro­tect their chil­dren. That they tried is emblem­at­ic of the evo­lu­tion­ary instinct that we must pro­tect our chil­dren.

Arund­hati Roy, in her lat­est arti­cle on her vis­it with Snow­den, won­ders if the inva­sion of Iraq could be called a geno­cide after the expo­nen­tial dam­age to human life, not to men­tion the col­lapse of the land we once knew belonged to peo­ple who con­tributed tremen­dous­ly to the sci­en­tif­ic world, as it stands today. I shook my head at the notion. When Shias of Pak­istan try to claim the word “geno­cide” in atten­tion to their own plight, they are sub­ject­ed to the issue of quan­ti­ta­tive accu­ra­cy of the word in rela­tion to how it has been used his­tor­i­cal­ly. They are denied the usage, because the num­ber of Shias killed is appar­ent­ly ‘not enough’. We are mak­ing sure that the chil­dren fall­en in the soil of Pak­istan meet the exact­ing num­bers for it to be called geno­cide.

Speak­ing fur­ther of num­bers, there were 40 Ahma­di fam­i­lies who hid in the grit­ty nalas (read: gut­ters) of Jhelum at 3 am to escape the men Pak­istani news­pa­pers labelled as arson­ists. That too is a mat­ter of con­cern. Those who kill minori­ties in Pak­istan are arson­ists: peo­ple with maligned inter­ests, but no exact­ing pur­pose. At such inter­sec­tions, one begins to won­der about lan­guage, and the lim­its it impos­es on us to pitch our agency. While we engage to find com­mon denom­i­na­tors amongst all that we must con­sid­er in order to make a log­i­cal claim, just so that we are able to count and make sure that two plus two is indeed four in Orwellian fash­ion, boats sink, trees fall, chil­dren halt breath­ing.

Ear­li­er this year while Pak­ista­nis were cel­e­brat­ing or denounc­ing the news (depend­ing on who you were) of legal­iza­tion of gay mar­riage in Amer­i­ca, anoth­er impor­tant and local news lost the for­tune of mak­ing as many head­lines as it deserved. A gay cou­ple was arrest­ed in Jaf­farabad dis­trict of Baluchis­tan after reports of their mar­riage spread. You heard it- a mar­riage between same-sex part­ners in accor­dance with Islam­ic tra­di­tion.

Accord­ing to an arti­cle on tri­bune, “a med­ical report sug­gest­ed the cou­ple had sex”. It is intrigu­ing to note that it is unclear whether the “car­nal act” of which they are accused of, and arrest­ed there­after, even hap­pened. Nev­er­the­less, it result­ed in the invo­ca­tion of the sec­tion 377/34 of Pak­istani Penal Code- which it was said is the first time ever that the archa­ic, colo­nial law has been put into effect. A third man, who read their Nikkah, was also arrest­ed. In Pak­istan, a mar­riage between same-sex part­ners is as com­mon as the sight­ing of humans on Mars. As a result, it cre­at­ed the deep­en­ing of a fear for the com­mu­ni­ty of sex­u­al minori­ties: fur­ther exclu­sion and stigma­ti­za­tion. So when the news from the USA sur­faced, it brought home some reas­sur­ance- that some­where in the world, the strug­gle to gain equal­i­ty in the legal sphere has met with suc­cess. Well, until Hamza Ali Abbasi stole the peace. But despite severe crit­i­cism from dif­fer­ent quar­ters of soci­ety, as the hash­tag of uni­ver­sal love went viral, the resilient gays in Pak­istan were say­ing, “it is nor­mal to feel car­nal love for peo­ple from same-sex”.

I wrote this note in reflec­tion of the recent trib­u­taries of vio­lence that have erupt­ed from Turkey to Syr­ia to the US, gen­er­at­ing news on my feed, as if all there is to this life is a sub­jec­tive flu­id­i­ty, I con­sid­er my own crack as a con­tin­u­a­tion of the wounds we col­lec­tive­ly endure as our human rights activists are mur­dered in broad day­light from Pak­istan to Turkey. I am not a nar­cis­sist and by no means do I hurt more than oth­ers, but when I become cog­nizant of my crack, I remem­ber Rashid Rehman- Junaid Hafeez’s first lawyer- who took his case amidst death threats, and died defend­ing not a man accused of blas­phe­my, but the idea that nur­tures that all human life is pre­cious. So, I think to myself: What A WONDERFUL WORLD!