Pakistan on global stage: ‘We’re taught to be xenophobic’

Speakers at discussion call for greater debate on alternative narratives.

LAHORE:

Pakistanis need to gain greater knowledge and understanding of themselves and other nations in order to cast off the traditional xenophobic narrative about the outside world being out to destroy the country, said speakers at a discussion here on Sunday.

“We are looking at a modern world through a pre-modern lens,” said lawyer and columnist Saroop Ijaz, speaking at the third session – titled ‘Pakistan on the global stage: hopes and fears’   on the last day of the Khudi Festival of Ideas.



Ijaz said when seen in a global perspective, it seemed that “Pakistani history” taught people to be xenophobic. He stressed the need for alternative narratives, but acknowledged that these would make people uncomfortable. “When what you have believed for so many years is challenged, there is bound to be a certain degree of discomfort,” he said.

This was the reason that there were such contrasting views on Malala Yousafzai within the country, he said. “Malala’s narrative makes us uncomfortable because it does not conform to what we have in mind as the role of a 15-year-old girl in Pakistan,” he said.

Ijaz also called for greater discourse between those termed conservatives and those called liberals in Pakistan. “At some stage, liberals and seculars will need to come out of their comfort zone and engage with conservative ideologies, which are far more popular than their own,” he added.



Former Radio Pakistan director general Murtaza Solangi said Pakistan’s current woes were in large part due to the deficiencies of the education system, which discouraged critical thinking. “We are not standing at a sensitive juncture in history, we are in fact in an existential crisis,” he said. The focus on parliamentarians’ fake degrees, he said, was misplaced. “I find this not to be the issue. The real issue is the presence of [people getting] genuine degrees without any knowledge,” he said.

Solangi said that the country’s political institutions had performed better in the last few years.

“Confusion is the first step to wisdom. That is when you start seeking and that is when single narratives are challenged,” said Dr Daanish Mustafa, who teaches at the geography department at King’s College, London.

He called for greater investment in various disciplines, particularly the performing arts, so as to encourage cultural diversity and create alternative narratives. These alternative narratives needed to be taken to a broader audience in order to challenge the old narrative.

Dr Mustafa said he was hopeful that the country would move forward. “All is not lost. I don’t see suicidal tendencies in the young. They are hopeful,” he said.

Writer and activist Dr Mubarak Haider said Pakistan could either change itself, or the world would change it. The latter, he said, seemed more probable. “The Muslim Ummah and specifically the Pakistani nation is narcissistic, and the more you try to tell them that the more they deny it,” he said.

Dr Haider said the country had no global partner. “Even countries like Saudi Arabia do not completely stand by us. We are isolated as a nation on a global platform,” he said.

Because of insecurities about religion, Pakistan seemed always to be preoccupied with trying to defend the faith. The country’s supreme governing body, he said, was not parliament but the Council of Islamic Ideology. He said: “Why are we so frightened that something may happen to our religion? Why do we feel so threatened?”

Published in The Express Tribune, October 28^th, 2013.