Thank God we are in the semis

The older generation of Indians, do not remember Imran Khan ever having prefaced a interview with praise to God.

Pakistan are through to the semi-finals of the cricket World Cup, and they have got there by dint of some terrific performances. But one of the drawing room talking points in India (and I suspect in Pakistan) is the now standard format of a Pakistani captain’s interview: “First of all I would like to thank Almighty Allah…”

The older generation of Indians, do not remember Imran Khan ever having prefaced a post-match interview with praise to the Almighty. If anything, they joke, he praised himself: They remember his 1992 line about him winning the World Cup for Pakistan.

In recent times, though, Pakistan captains have been cut from different cloth. Shahid Afridi, Inzamamul Haq … that fellow who married Sania Mirza.

Shoaib Malik wasn’t the first to insinuate God into an interview, but he did something else: He brought religion in — the distinction is important. After Pakistan’s loss in the T20 World Cup in 2007, Malik said he wanted to thank people in Pakistan and “where the Muslim lives all over the world”. Malik’s English isn’t that good, and this can lead to misunderstandings. But he wasn’t given that benefit of doubt in India.

The reason for this could lie partly in the growing atmosphere of polarisation through the 2000s, but partly, it lay in the Pakistan dressing room. While it could be argued that the dressing room was merely reacting to the world around it, it is true that faith became an important player through this period.

Saeed Anwar and Inzamamul Haq led the way, encouraging cricketers to become good Muslims, take religious instruction, grow beards, party less and so on. It came to a point where the Pakistan cricket administration felt it had to step in and have a chat with Inzy, to bring about a “balance between religion and cricket”. One point of view was that players’ adherence to faith (or lack of it) was deciding places in the squad, causing tensions.

People like Aquib Javed (an Imran protégé) were concerned about the ‘image’ of a team with too close an association with religion because of how they turned out. Some time in the mid 2000s, there was a similar controversy about how employees should behave and turn out in Habib Bank. The bank, too, was concerned about their ‘image’ and asked employees to trim beards, dump the shalwar kameez in favour of a shirt and tie and so on. This was stupid, and unacceptable, because it undermined personal freedom. But curiously, the bank ‘revised’ the dress code solely for the branch where an employee had protested.

Bankers or cricketers don’t have to look a certain way or pray in a certain direction to play good cricket or be good bankers. You needn’t look further than Hashim Amla, a man who has a cult-following of strap-on-beard sporting fans. The Amla beard is about his batting, and it is inclusive and ‘cool’.

So what makes Afridi or Inzy different? The lens they are viewed through, for one. They are not the only sportsmen who have expressed their religious faith in the arena. The golfer Bernhard Langer said his ’93 master’s victory was more fulfilling because he “won as a Christian”. The record-breaking triple jumper Jonathan Edwards wouldn’t compete on Sundays, no matter the importance of the event, though he renounced religion later saying it wasn’t rational. Among cricketers, there are devout Christians like Matthew Hayden, Shaun Pollock and Robin Utthappa.

Sportsmen, like Oscar winners, often thank God for His blessings. This is purely a matter of personal choice. What makes the Pakistanis different is this: The phenomenon is a recent one; and it may or may not be a purely personal choice — it is something that a constituency in Pakistan expects.

This is certainly true of Shahid Afridi, the Pathan from the northwest. The expectation of his constituency is that he not just thank God, but that he thank Him by a specific name. The question to be asked is, suppose a future Pakistan captain chooses to thank the fans and his teammates without any mention of the Almighty — how will it play out in today’s Pakistan?

Published in The Express Tribune, March 25^th, 2011.