Pakistan - News and Discussion 6

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<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Our rejection of culture as entertainment </b>
Khaled Ahmed’s : A n a l y s i s 
It is shocking how most of our culture is linked to entertainment, and we are not sure whether entertainment is permitted by our ideology. Most of what passes for culture-as-entertainment is contingent and may not seem sustainable. Most of it will go if the clerical alliance the MMA comes to power in Islamabad. Even a rudimentary discussion among them in the cabinet room will have the effect of destroying whatever culture there remains in Pakistan. The four JUI MPAs removed in Peshawar after the 2006 Senate elections have attributing their rebellion to the MMA government not sticking to its ideological pledges of social change. (Vows of social change are always directed at culture as ‘fahashi’). When the clergy thinks of collective piety it usually focuses on a cultural purge a la Taliban in Afghanistan.

The world has not found a proper definition of culture. It is accepted in all scholarly quarters that there is no acceptable definition of culture. One very broad one is offered by some authors with disclaimers, as this one: ‘Culture is the system of shared beliefs, values, customs, behaviours, and artefacts that the members of society use to cope with their world and with one another, and that are transmitted from generation to generation through learning’. A UNESCO effort in 2002 yielded this: ‘Culture is the set of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features of society or a social group, and that it encompasses, in addition to art and literature, lifestyles, ways of living together, value systems, traditions and beliefs.’

<b>Culture as revolt against Islam:</b> Writing in Jang (26 March 2006) Ataul Haq Qasimi referred to a statement made by singer Abrarul Haq on the question of music as a source of peace of mind. A lady had asked if namaz was not the only source of this tranquillity. The columnist stated that the ulema were not united on the concept of entertainment in Pakistani culture. Were music, photography, singing, painting, poetry and cinema allowed as entertainment or not? It all boils down to entertainment in the case of Pakistan. If you don’t have consensus on the items listed by Qasimi, then you have only calligraphy to fall back on. The folk tradition has to be rejected because it is intertwined with entertainment. <b>It appears that the mass of the people express their culture only when they want to be entertained. When the state becomes harshly anti-entertainment, the people rely on what is termed as ‘liminality’, a kind of reaching out to neighbouring cultures.</b>

This is what happened when the state under General Zia began to judge entertainment as fahashi (obscenity). The people, closed off from entertainment, reached out to India. Under Zia, Islamisation drove the urban populations to watching video cassettes of Indian films and buying satellite TV dishes. Interestingly, the dishes were bought only after Indian programmes became available on them. This means that American ‘culture’ was not acceptable to them. Quite understandably the state of Pakistan is more upset about the ‘cultural invasion’ from India than with the American one that comes in through globalisation. <b>Yet, the fact is that Indian culture – and not Afghan or Iranian culture – is acceptable in Pakistan because of a cultural interface. </b>This takes us to the phenomenon of liminality, of people trying to live together when the states won’t.

<b>Living on cultural borders</b>: In the book Lived Islam in South Asia: Adaptation, Accommodation & Conflict (2004) the phenomenon is discussed by a number of scholars. As hardline orthodox religion makes it comeback in South Asia, the tradition of social accommodation and integration between faiths that had gone on for centuries is threatened. Clergies are busy stiffening their theologies to drive out and mop up communities that had learned to coexist on the border (lime) of formal, potentially hostile religions. These ‘liminal’ communities are today stigmatised as ‘marginal’ heresies that deserve to be stamped out to create a pure state. Will the ‘pure’ state last after having destroyed the ‘lived’ pluralism of these communities? Needless to say, the process of ‘exclusion’ so favoured in South Asia’s new politics doesn’t bode well for the survival of the state.

Muslims were always worried about ‘liminalism’ under Muslim rule. Hinduism which had a more pronounced inclination to ‘liminality’ in the past is now in the process of pushing the state towards an imitative ‘purification’ and ‘exclusion’. Both Hindu and Muslim communities are selectively pushing each other away. The majority community isolates and excludes while the minority community particularises and withdraws from the integrative chemistry of ‘limination’. Ideology is articulated by intellectuals and the religious elite; and the culture which consists of local and popular interpretations of a religious tradition is attacked.

<b>Communities trying to survive through culture:</b> It is interesting that the Pushtun were ‘liminised’ in Afghanistan in the same manner as the Tamil-speaking Muslims of Sri Lanka who set up the tomb of Sheikh Abdul Qadir Jilani near Adam’s Peak. Just as Sheikh Jilani appeared in dreams, Hazrat Ali the Fourth Caliph of Islam was the inspiration behind building a shrine for him in Mazar-e-Sharif. Mullah Umar first took the robe of Prophet Muhammad out of a shrine in Kandahar and wore it in front of a large crowd before falling on Mazar-e-Sharif in the North. <b>The Meos of India aroused the puritanism of Deoband because of their hybridisation with Hinduism and it was the Meo immigrant community of Raiwind near Lahore who donated the land to site the headquarters of Pakistan’s most virulent theological Deobandi movement, now spread to Bangladesh too: the Tablighi Jamaat.</b> Before the Taliban, the Shia of Central Afghanistan coexisted with the Sunnis and with the Buddhist statues of Bamyan because of the overlap of ‘popular religion’.

The reform against traditional culture has not only gradually become the basis of state ideology in Pakistan but also among the Muslim communities of India under pressure now from the ‘purification’ politics of Hindutva. How tradition was invaded is explained by the Rishi Tradition in Kashmir which was invaded by Deobandi and Wahhabi warriors from the north and by a ‘responding’ tightening of Hindu theology from the BJP-supporting south. But what was happening in the Kashmiri ‘heresy’ was a historical ‘cultural cross-pollination’.<b> Gujarat in India was the other ‘liminal’ experience where two religions have now begun to clash. Gujarat gave its Parsis, Ismailis, Bohras, Memons and Hindus to Bombay and Karachi. Indian scholar Asghar Ali Engineer is of the view that Bohra-Ismaili community decided to call itself Bohra in gratitude for the acceptance shown them by the Vohra Hindus of Gujrat.</b> These remain the most ‘liminal’ communities in the region.

<b>Mysticism and culture and the state:</b> Mysticism dominates the culture of Pakistan with strong linkages in India. In both countries the tradition of mystical poetry or bhagti came as a revolt against religious orthodoxy. It began in the Indian South as a revolt against the Brahmin religious elite and spread to the north and northwest as a revolt against Muslim orthodoxy. For Pakistan, the most significant expression of ‘bhagti’ came from Guru Nanak in the 15th century. It was in Guru Granth, the holy book of the Sikhs, that the Muslims of Punjab discovered their first ‘sufi’ poet Baba Farid, a predecessor of Nanak whom he revered. Baba Farid was followed in the times of Akbar by Shah Hussain of Lahore who loved a Hindu boy and sang wahadat-ul-wujud of Ibn Arabi and advaita (unity) of the Hindu Upanishads. <b>Orthodox Mughal king Aurangzeb’s brother Dara Shikoh was converted to mysticism and wrote Sakinat-ul-Aulia, a biography of Mian Mir, a saint of Lahore, whom Guru Arjun took to Amritsar to lay the foundation of the Golden Temple.</b>

In the NWFP, the cultural tradition was mystical and nationalist. Rehman <b>Baba and Khushal Khan Khattak wrote and sang during the Mughal period. Khushal Khan was a soldier-poet in the tradition of the Pakhtun King Ahmed Shah Abdali and fought the armies of Mughal King Akbar. So deep is the Pakhtun devotion to Rehman Baba and his Islamic sufi message that the Pakhtuns often say that had there been no revealed text, they would have elevated his poetry to the divinity of the Holy Quran. He represents the pride of the tribal code in the NWFP.</b> In Punjab and Sindh, two poets have arisen like Khushal Khan to represent a sub-national identity: Ghulam Farid of Punjabi-Seraiki and Shah Abdul Latif of Sindhi. Sometimes they lend themselves to feelings of revolt against the federal establishment. <b>The Baloch tradition springs from the province’s pastoral tradition and is still in the phase of ballad-singing, serving as the vehicle of Baloch cultural expression.</b>

<b>Ideology versus culture:</b> General Zia after 1980 started a debate about the tashakhus (identity) of Pakistan in which only the orthodox clergy could participate because of its expertise in the knowledge of the Holy Quran and the fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence). Pakistani cinema, an offshoot of the Bombay film industry, was put under strict moral censor. <b>State-run television became dominated by orthodox preaching which reinterpreted culture as an Indian accretion. The abolition of uriani (obscenity) became politicised; even the secular parties attacked the television station, protesting obscenity to put the government on the defensive. Films on the foreign TV channels were heavily censored; even animal-life movies on the Discovery Channel were censored for ‘nudity’. The ‘cultural’ response of the urban population came in the shape of the satellite ‘dish’ on which most Pakistani middle class watched Indian channels considered hostile by state authorities.</b>

The wars in Afghanistan and Kashmir have affected cultural attitudes in Pakistan within a very narrow time-frame. The religious seminaries General Zia had funded with the money he received from Saudi Arabia have spread a more puritanical Islam among a people who have always considered religion a significant part of their culture. <b>The more libertarian version of Islam, called ‘Barelvi’, is on the retreat, while the more stringent version called ‘Deobandi’ is on the rise together with the ‘Wahhabi’ version imported from Saudi Arabia</b>. Authoritarian Iran inaugurated its own era of puritanism and prepared the hapless Shias of Pakistan for confrontation with the Deobandi and Ahle Hadith seminaries.

Culture is on the retreat. More and more people who throng the mosques have started calling in question the heritage their ancestors accepted as culture. Religious literalism has invaded the judiciary, and most civil servants who embrace the faith find themselves threatened by the sectarian divide. Tourism in Pakistan has declined as much on account of terrorism and kidnapping as the changing attitude of the common man towards culture. <b>The arbiter of culture therefore is not the Pakistani intellectual but the cleric whose charisma is that of the warrior-priest fighting for Islam. Pakistan’s culture is at risk because the constitution upholds a process of religious ‘purification’, striking at the root of the traditional ways of entertainment for the masses.</b>  <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->