The Pakistanisation of lunacy

Norway, like Pakistan understands that actions of a random extremist is not representative of the majority.

It is an odd thing to feel relief when 76 people have died. But then, being Pakistani has become an odd thing to be. When the news coverage of the grotesque terrorism in Oslo began, the world watched it unfold with a sense of sadness. In Pakistan, we watched it with gritted teeth and clenched expectations. We had but one prayer, selfish but understandable: Please don’t let it be a Muslim. Specifically, please don’t let it be a Muslim who had received training on our soil. The eventual revelation that a blonde man with a distinctly ethnic Norwegian genetic skin tone had been arrested gave us a moment’s respite before we then started worrying about his being a convert. We are always told that Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world. Unfortunately, no one details which Islam. The one practiced by the people around me who have a deep and unshakeable belief in the Almighty and his Messenger and find it a source of peace and comfort? Or the Islam that is subscribed to by the people running amok through the lives of those just described who have somehow found the message of submission to be one that requires mass murder and destruction. Fortunately, for the first time in recent memory, the attack was perpetuated by neither of these adherents. Instead, it was a lone lunatic who felt that the best way to protect his nation from dark forces he perceived was to slaughter the young. And so we all let out a sigh of collective relief, a sound that was effectively drowned out by the frantic back-scrabbling of ‘expert’ commentators on every single foreign news channel.

From the moment the first gunshot echoed through Utoya Island, and that last pane of glass shattered in central Oslo, every single person who had ever attended a class on foreign affairs or had passed within pinching distance of a Muslim was loudly proclaiming the clear guilt of al Qaeda. They did it with such solemn sagacity that one feels they are actually disappointed now that it has been proven to not be a Muslim at fault. The discovery that extremists can belong to any belief system and maybe it is something inherent in the person himself and not in the religion he subscribes to, that paradigm shift is causing them all sorts of motion sickness. All the nations who put a comforting arm around Norway in the initial moments of the attack, promising unity against this Muslim terror, are now backing away as if Norway vomited over it’s own furniture, telling it that it’s on its own in the clean-up.

The irony in all this, if you can manage to consider such a tragic event with cold scrutiny, is that the killer feared the “Pakistanisation of Europe”. His understanding of that phrase was that Europe would be full of small Muslim countries with extremist views. But his actions, instead, created another form of “Pakistanisation”, in the way that we Pakistanis understand it. Norway is truly like us now in that it, too, understands that the actions of a random extremist with a head full of bad wiring is not representative of the majority. That it takes a single day planned with fanatical focus to completely redefine a nation’s sense of security and identity. And that it will require the patience and understanding of a multitude to cope with the changed world that they now exist in. It is a reality we Pakistanis struggle against every day.

The primary description of the attacker in the media is that he is a ‘lunatic’. Let us hope that the next time an act of terror on such a scale occurs anywhere in the world, the same description is applied to the culprits, regardless of religion.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 28^th, 2011.