My grandmother had a saying about food being cooked in the house. She would tell my mother that its aroma must not waft beyond the boundary walls of the house. It would be wrong for anyone passing by who may be hungry and unable to feed themselves to smell the food and feel less than us.
The saying, of course, is about the immorality of showing off your wealth. Whatever fortune bestows upon you is not to be flaunted. This is the basis of the short shalwar/short robe concept in Islam. In Arabia, during the time of the Prophet (PBUH), it was customary to display one’s wealth by the length of one’s robe. The longer the robe’s train trailing across the floor, the wealthier the person wearing it. To put a stop to this show of wealth, Muslims were ordered to wear robes that ended above their ankles.
If we practice Ijtehad, as is mandatory in Islam, we would realise that the symbols of wealth today are not long robes or sweeping trains. Today’s symbols of wealth are the brand of phone we carry or clothes we wear, the car we drive, the size of the house we live in or where we ‘vacation’.
In the world we live in today, simplicity is glaringly missing from all aspects of life, in both religious and secular spheres. This is because we have bought into the hype of capitalism, hook, line, and sinker. The constant acquisition of things in a capitalist world is the very antithesis of Islam’s simplicity.
Buy, buy, buy!
Capitalism has one goal: to convince consumers to buy products. All it needs is for us to believe we must buy something, even if we don’t need it.
A couple from the US I’m friends with is neck deep in the disease of consumerism. Not quite hoarders, they nevertheless possess inordinate number of things. When I stayed with them last, they apologetically put me in a room full of boxes and piles of magazines and papers. The papers were mostly junk mail— coupons, promotions and flyers from every store they frequented. Most of us would think of junk mail is just that — junk to be thrown away — but my friends were sure the coupons would be useful the next time they wanted a new set of towels or car freshener.
The closet in that room was similarly filled with different coats of varying weights — for summer, for winter, for autumn, for spring, for the rain, for the snow, or just for warmth.
I have one coat that I wear in all weather whenever I visit the US (or when I lived in Islamabad). I am from the generation that uses something until it wears out completely.
When my friend’s husband decided he wanted smoothies, they went out and bought a blender specifically for it. It was irrelevant that they had a complete Cuisinart at home that would have blended fruit just as efficiently.
Whenever they couldn’t find something in the house they would simply go out and buy it. As a result, they had several different kinds of Tupperware, much of it unused, cluttering up the house. The clutter spilled into their cars, which were often loaded with gadgets and more papers, sometimes cartons of drinks, and they never parked in the garage, because it too was filled to the brim with things.
A lot of this is a result of a culture of ‘keeping up with the Joneses’, which permeates the fabric of Western society like a plague. It comes on the fag end of the concept of buy now, pay later.
Pay later
A large number of people, to emulate the lifestyles of their neighbours, will buy things they don’t need with money they don’t yet have. Almost everyone in the US is in debt. What they don’t realise is that, having bought everything you could not afford today, you now have to work for the rest of your life to pay it off. There are people who can’t afford to get sick, to take time off, or to be fired because that would bring down their carefully constructed house of cards. People who lose their jobs tend to lose almost everything because they can’t keep up payments on their houses, cars, their fancy gadgets, and home appliances.
This corporate slavery isn’t a common concept, rarely discussed or mentioned, but it exists. It’s a result of a credit economy, where living within your means is lost to the wayside. Whatever life you aspire to, you can have today, even if you can’t afford it. Buying a house in Pakistan, for example, is well beyond the means of the majority of the population. It can be achieved by taking out a loan, the markup on which is so exorbitant that you’ll be spending the rest of your life working to pay off the loan. If at any time you are unable to keep up the payments, the bank has every right to take your home away. And if you cannot pay it off, it will fall to your children or grandchildren to pay off the loan.
To keep up with paying off your debts, you become a slave to corporations and all their unreasonable demands. Twenty-five years ago, this was a theoretical conversation with my CEO and he laughed off the idea of corporate slavery. You get paid and in some cases, very well. But your time and your dreams are not your own.
Capitalism in the US is structured to entice people to buy. As the market has grown, companies no longer create products that fulfil a need in the market — it’s now the other way around. Products are created and the desire for that product is artificially generated, using some of the most sophisticated psychological marketing techniques known to man. People are compelled to buy things, to fill up all conceivable empty spaces with stuff that is often useless, unneeded, and irrelevant except for the profit it generates for the seller.
Pakistani aspirations
When we were kids, my mother taught us that good things come to those who wait. She instilled the idea of saving up to buy what you wanted, making it all the more sweet when you eventually had it. She reiterated that we must live within our means.
Americans, on the other hand, have no patience. The concept of waiting is alien to their DNA because capitalism doesn’t like it when consumers wait. Capitalism prefers it if you get everything you ever dreamed of today and paid later.
We have now acquired this American consumerism in Pakistan. It’s important to us what brands we wear, what phone we carry, what car we driv, and where we live. In Karachi, it’s about what side of the bridge you live on (Clifton Bridge, Kala Pull, the Southern Bypass). In Islamabad, acceptable sectors are E and F.
Twenty years ago, I was part of a project with four other artists and writers, all of whom lived in DHA. I was the only one who had not grown up in Pakistan. I’d been there for less than ten years at that point, yet I was the only one who knew the way from DHA to Federal B Area or Lalukhet because my colleagues rarely felt the need to cross the bridge. Their image was built on it.
Our consumerism is equally discriminatory. We routinely eschew Pakistani products, making it an uphill climb for local producers to sell to our middle class. It’s irrelevant to the vast majority here that we make better fabric than India — they prefer Indian saris to our own Banaras Colony. We don’t seem to care that local fruit and vegetables are far superior to most imported items (often the result of GMO agriculture), yet high-end stores stock and sell imported produce at a premium. When I do my monthly shopping, the sheer volume of groceries most people buy surprises me. One or two carts loaded to the brim is normal, the price probably equally loaded to the brim.
It needs more than faith
We don’t yet see how consumerism is changing us, but its effects are deep and insidious. We already know it has a direct impact on the planet and the climate, as the production of these things drain the earth’s resources and damage what’s left of the ecosystem. But its effects stretch further than that.
What does it mean to own more things? The perception is always that the ability to buy things translates to being better than others. Consumerism affects our education, governance, even justice. It is the root cause of almost all wars. It provides us no path save one: down.
It’s a myth that our religiosity will save us from this descent. As I pointed out in the beginning, our understanding of the tenets of Islam are skewed. We are not thinking Muslims. Financial crimes, the judicial and equitable management of public money, the small corruptions of our institutions, are all overlooked. Many religious leaders are deeply entrenched in financial corruption themselves and can and will bury any discussion of ethics and money.
It all falls on the educated middle class to recognise the dangers of consumerism, and to, hopefully, take steps to reverse the course we’re on. I am relying on thinking individuals in the country, religious or secular, to recognise how badly we need a new ideology or an existing set of values brought back to life. Is there anyone like that out there?
Sabahat Quadri is a freelance writer and artist
All facts and information are the sole responsibility of the author