In the windmills of our minds

So caught up we are in Pakistan’s day-to-day worries that we sometimes tend to lose sight of the big picture. We moan about killer Qadri’s urban lovers, fume at the incessant drone attacks, despair at our leaders’ real and perceived corruption and battle with our confusion over the military’s overarching role in the country’s politics.

In these day to day battles that seem to have secured a permanent place, like deities of dogma that stand tall, within the temples of our skulls, we talk a lot about religion, about morality, about the glorious Islamic civilisation spanning long-forgotten centuries, about imagined promises of a nishat-e-saania (the renaissance). We focus on the minutiae — Veena Malik on Big B, Shoaib and Sania, Asif Zardari and Sarah Palin — while ignoring the visuals screaming at us across a canvas that accounts for one-fifth of the world’s population.

We listen to illiterate maulvis terrorising us with absurd make-belief horrors of the grave, we stand silently and watch two teenage brothers being bludgeoned to death by criminals who do so, not because they hate them, but because they know they will get away with it, we love our TV anchors who stir cauldrons of hate and venom day in and day out and we shamelessly tell ourselves that it is actually America that is responsible for the scum that has risen within us. That, indeed, has become our opium.

No wonder, then, that we marvel at how swiftly a frustrated young Tunisian’s act of self-immolation seems to be setting large parts of the Arab world on fire. We wonder, indeed, because we refuse to understand. As fresh images from Cairo, Suez and Alexandria race across the airwaves, our agenda-driven TV anchors rave and rant at our political indifference that is allowing our corrupt leaders to stay in office. We draw parallels where none exist and fail to notice the ones screaming for attention.

After Tunisia, demonstrations have broken out in Egypt, Yemen, Algeria and Jordan. Just look at what had been happening there. The Tunisian ruler had been around for 23 years, the Egyptian ruler for 30 and his Yemeni counterpart for 32. Algeria has been under a state of emergency for 18 years. But the place of honour goes to Jordan, where granddad, dad and son have ruled for over 90 years.

What is it that allows Muslim majority countries to have such long and often dynastic political nightmares? What is it that makes us believe, or hope, that these seemingly interminable tenures will not result in political oppression, corruption and misrule?

In the bigger picture, even these countries do not seem so bad compared to some where even acts of self-immolation — the ultimate expression of despair — will not stir any conscience. How many of us know that only days after the Tunisian uprising, a Saudi man had also set himself aflame for exactly the same reasons? Did we see any protests on the streets of Riyadh, Jeddah or Mecca? Does this tell us something about the state of political oppression there?

More as a mindset than as a nation, we instinctively try and look for our opium in fancy-sounding constructs such as the West’s Islamophobia. And somewhere in this self-serving pursuit, we successfully manage to close our eyes to the fact that it is not the West that needs to fear us, it is us who need to fear ourselves, the confusion that drives us and the deities of dogma that stand tall within the temples of our skulls.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 30^th,  2011.