Pakistan: beyond bipolar disorder

Vision of Jinnah's August 11 speech should be made a cornerstone for an inclusive Pakistani identity.

While imagining Pakistan as a bipolar patient, M Bilal Lakhani, in his article “Pakistan’s bipolar disorder” (September 28) cites two hypothetical groups symbolising the ‘highs’ and ‘lows’ of Pakistan’s psyche: “On the one hand, you have Pakistanis who believe that Pakistan is inherently a great nation and simply needs a saviour to rescue it from foreign powers and a self-serving elite class. At the same time, you have Pakistanis who are convinced that their country is corrupt beyond repair and cannot be saved.” Mr Lakhani’s is the latest among a series of articles using a psychological lens for understanding a society driven to the brink by its own contradictions. In a widely quoted article last year, columnist Ayaz Amir argued that “religion has made Pakistan a schizophrenic society” trapped in conspiracy theories and paranoid delusions. Then British-Pakistani journalist George Fulton — who bid farewell to Pakistan after nine years — compared Pakistan with a “self-destructive, irrational and grossly irresponsible” beloved, displaying “megalomania and paranoia” typical of a schizophrenic. (“George ka Khuda Hafez”, The Express Tribune, March 1 and 2, 2011). Therefore, rather than bipolar disorder, our collective malaise is more in the nature of cultural schizophrenia: a state marked by paranoid delusions and false beliefs blurring the boundaries between fantasy and reality.

Daryush Shayegan argues in Cultural Schizophrenia: Islamic societies confronting the West (1992) that the encounter of two incompatible worlds — an inner world of past Muslim glory and an external reality of Western modernity — has led to a distortion, “not only in how the Muslim world sees the West, but more importantly, in how it sees itself”. Consequently, fundamentalism and extremist violence have become compensatory channels for masking failures of Muslim societies stuck in multiple crises. This sense of failure in the Pakistani psyche might have triggered the violence on September 21, 2012: the government-declared national holiday for people to show their love for the Holy Prophet (pbuh) and condemn the anti-Islam video a convicted swindler made in America. While Muslims around the world protested against the film, it was perhaps, in Pakistan alone where protesters murdered fellow citizens and burnt public and private property in the name of love for the Holy Prophet (pbuh). September 21 not only blurred the boundaries between love and hate but showed that religious violence has become a defining feature of Pakistani culture, and by extension, Pakistani identity.

If Pakistanis believe that “our success or failure as a nation is determined by our identity”, as Lakhani notes, then an identity tagged with religious violence is not just at war with humanity, it is at war with a pluralistic Pakistan envisioned by Mohammad Ali Jinnah in his historic speech on August 11, 1947. The speech makes it clear that “a prosperous and happy Pakistan” could be built only “if” everyone struggled for the “well-being of the people … forgetting the past … burying the hatchet and chang(ing) the past”. These “ifs” are the ethical touchstone of a new consciousness and national identity underpinning the egalitarian society Jinnah envisioned:

“If you change your past and work together in a spirit that everyone of you, no matter to what community he belongs, no matter what relations he had with you in the past, no matter what is his colour, caste or creed, is first, second and last a citizen of this state with equal rights, privileges, and obligations, there will be no end to the progress you will make.” Jinnah’s speech reflects the ethics of a pacifist and pluralistic Pakistan. It also resonates the ideals of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan’s educational New Light movement that drew Muslims into the mainstream of a modernising world.

It is vital to exorcise the demons of hatred and intolerance factored into our identity that are “now turning Pakistanis against themselves”, as Jameel Jalibi has argued (The Oxford Companion to Pakistani History, 2012). Such exorcism should start with a reclamation of the spirit of Jinnah’s August 11 speech. The vision of this speech should be made a cornerstone for an inclusive Pakistani identity along with educating people to recreate a Pakistan in synch with rest of the world.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 27^th, 2012.