(2009)
Fear and Silence
WHY ARE AHMADIS persecuted so ferociously in Pakistan?
The reason can’t be that their large numbers pose some sort of “threat from within.” After all, Ahmadis are a relatively small minority in Pakistan. They make up somewhere between 0.25 percent (according to the last census) and 2.5 percent (according to The Economist) of our population.
Nor can the reason be that Ahmadis are non-Muslims. Pakistani Christians and Pakistani Hindus are non-Muslims, and similar in numbers to Pakistani Ahmadis. Yet Christians and Hindus, while undeniably discriminated against, face nothing like the vitriol directed toward Ahmadis in our country.
To understand what the persecution of Ahmadis achieves, we have to see how it works. Its first step is to say that Ahmadis are non-Muslims. And its second is to say that Ahmadis are not just non-Muslims but apostates: non-Muslims who claim to be Muslims while rejecting core tenets of Islam. These two steps are easy to take: any individual can choose to believe whatever they want about Ahmadis and their faith.
But the process goes further. Step three is to say that because Ahmadis are apostates, they should be victimized, or even killed. We are now beyond the realm of personal opinion. We are in the realm of group punishment and incitement to murder. Nor does it stop here. There is a fourth step. And step four is this: any Muslims who say Ahmadis should not be victimized or killed should themselves be victimized or killed.
In other words, even if they are not themselves Ahmadi, any policeman, doctor, politician, or passerby who tries to prevent, or just publicly opposes, the killing of an Ahmadi deserves to die. Why? Because people who defend apostates are apostates.
Aha.
This is what the persecution of Ahmadis achieves. It allows any Muslim to be declared an apostate. For the logic can be continued endlessly. When an Ahmadi man is wounded in an attack and goes to a hospital for treatment, if the doctor agrees to treat him, she is helping an apostate, and therefore she becomes an apostate and subject to threats. When a policeman is deputed to protect the doctor, since she is an apostate, the policeman is helping an apostate, so he, too, becomes an apostate. And on and on.
The collective result of this is to silence and impose fear not just on the tiny percentage of Pakistanis who are Ahmadis, or even on those who are Christians and Hindus, but on all of us. The message is clear. Speaking out against the problem means you become the problem, so you had better be quiet.
Our coerced silence is the weapon that has been sharpened and brought to our throats.
This is why Nawaz Sharif’s statement in defense of Ahmadis met with such an angry response. Because the heart of the issue isn’t whether Ahmadis are non-Muslims or not. The heart of the issue is whether Pakistanis can be silenced by fear.
Because if we can be silenced when it comes to Ahmadis, then we can be silenced when it comes to Shias, we can be silenced when it comes to women, we can be silenced when it comes to dress, we can be silenced when it comes to entertainment, and we can even be silenced when it comes to sitting by ourselves, alone in a room, afraid to think what we think.
That is the point.
(2010)
Feverish and Flooded, Pakistan Can Yet Thrive
LAST MONTH, it began to rain here in Lahore. It was my baby daughter’s first monsoon. I took her out onto a balcony and held her as she stared blinkingly up at the dark sky. She was delighted. She laughed and kicked and reached for the drops shattering on her bare arms. The Pakistani monsoon is an amazing and beautiful thing.
The rains continued and, after particularly heavy downpours, the city’s streets were transformed into temporary canals, cars either stalling or downshifting and revving their engines to pass. But Lahore drains quickly, and inconveniences in the city were for the most part brief. From elsewhere in the country, though, reports of crop damage and swollen rivers flooded in. The price of vegetables rose. Still the rains continued, and dikes that had held strong for decades gave way. The homes of many millions were ruined.
For me, to live in Pakistan is to know extremes of hope and despair. Hope takes many small forms. One of these is Coke Studio, a televised jam session that throws together unexpected musical combinations, such as a soulful and powerfully voiced ex — fashion model accompanying a traditional male folk singer. It is part of a vast and downloadable music scene that circumvents the security concerns of live concerts through the use of mass media, the Internet and the country’s one hundred million mobile phones. I have heard its songs as the ringtones of people ranging from bankers and shopkeepers to carpenters.
Countless individual responses to the floods also inspire hope. Massive collections are under way in Lahore. Virtually everyone I know is donating money, time, or goods — or all three — to the relief effort. Societal safety nets, the welfare micro-systems of families and friends that bind Pakistanis together in the absence of a strong and effective state, are doing what they can to help with the unprecedented load.
Hope also comes from the rise of a powerful and independent news media, and from a judiciary that has fought for — and won — remarkable freedom. Pakistan’s airwaves and front pages, blogs, and cafés are full of the debates of a rambunctious multiparty democracy, one of precious few in the region between India and Europe.
Yet the battle against despair is a constant one. I feel it after each deadly terrorist attack, of which this year there have been half a dozen in Lahore alone, killing some two hundred people. I try not to think too much about the snipers on the rooftops of primary schools and the steel barricades at their gates, telling myself that my daughter still has some years left before she has to enroll.
It is difficult, however, to ignore the fact that the electricity to my house is cut off for a third of the day, Pakistan having failed to plan for rapidly growing demand. It is also difficult to ignore a general sense of malaise, of steadily dropping official standards, brought home recently by a tragic aircraft crash and multiple aviation near accidents in a single week.
And now there are the floods. The worst natural disaster in living memory, they have brought devastation to fourteen million Pakistanis, a number almost as large as the populations of New York and London combined. Pakistan normally ranks fourth in the world’s production of cotton and milk, and tenth in wheat — but this terrible year it will not.
Slowly and painfully, however, Pakistan should recover. And beyond that, its future need not be bleak. The country’s assets are enormous, after all. It has the world’s sixth-largest population, with more children under the age of fourteen than the US. While poor, it has appreciably lower levels of hunger and child malnutrition than India.
Vitally, the country is building up its democratic institutions. This matters. For at its core, Pakistan suffers from two related ailments: a state doing too little for its people, and challengers seeking to supplant the state. Its fragile democracy holds the key to tackling both.
The first aspect of Pakistan’s crisis can be boiled down to this: tax collection amounts to a paltry 10 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. But the need to fund voters’ expectations is creating pressures for change. If Pakistan is able to increase taxes as a proportion of GDP to India’s 17 percent or Sri Lanka’s 15 percent, the additional revenues would far exceed all foreign aid the country currently receives and make possible investments Pakistanis desperately need.