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The secular priesthood Americans don’t care about intellectuals, which is no surprise. When this was put to Noam Chomsky, he said that was a healthy reaction. Working with one’s mind and being an intellectual were two different things, he said. Most scholarly work was just clerical work. It was not more challenging mentally than fixing an automobile engine. But if by intellectual one meant that special class who were in the business of imposing thoughts and framing ideas for people in power, and telling everyone what they should believe, then the Americans were right in ignoring that secular priesthood, he explained. He did not clarify because he was not asked what would have been his reaction if the intellectuals in question were people whose thoughts and ideas were anathema to the centres of power, like Gore Vidal for instance, or he himself, for that matter. Elaborating, Chomsky drew an interesting comparison with the intellectual culture in Europe, particularly in France, which he called farcical like Hollywood’s. The intellectuals there kept sitting before TV cameras pontificating, coming up with novel ideas to remain in the limelight. A lot of crazy stuff thus got into circulation. We are also familiar with this kind of thing but it does not get too farcical here as our intellectuals who take their breakfast and dinner at the TV station canteens have few new ideas to expound. So the same crazy stuff keeps circulating. One reason limiting fresh thought is our habit of discretion and playing safe and the other, more physical and organic and complementary to this proclivity to caution, is the cerebral shrinkage caused by long disuse which has its own uses. Our mostly illiterate and semi literate people have learnt to be averse to the rosy postulations of the secular priesthood. This helps show them in a better light than the highly educated and democratic people of America who lap up official propaganda and believe whatever they are told. So, what Chomsky said about Americans in actual fact fits the Pakistani public more closely who, by far may be one of the most cynical of homosapiens one can expect to find in any place with comparable literacy levels. This is one good thing the secular priesthood and the ideologues of the establishment have done to the populace. Excepting a countable minority of recluses the greater body of our intellectuals have had a vicissitudinous fortune and offer delectable likenesses and contrasts to what Chomsky says about USA and the Continent. The most effervescent period of our intelligent life was of course that of the median decade, 1965-75, when the ideologues led by the Jamaat were pitted against the so-called Socialists. One remembers the late A.K. Sumar who was the business magnates’ ideological guru. He filled pages of his mouthpiece with tortuous polemical texts. At huge public rallies, that no leader now can gather with all the buses and trucks he or she can commandeer, cries of ‘surround and burn’ —- gherao jalao, shook the earth beneath the strong chairs. The serene Maulana Maudoodi lost his cool and threatened to pull out any tongue that dared utter the forbidden word. In that ferment the ‘decade of development’ and a half of awami raj had come to an end. A vignette of the times: One day NPT czar Aziz Ahmad came to visit the offices of the Pakistan Times at Westridge. He settled into the high chair with a contemptuous scowl on his face. Then he turned it at a 45 degree angle so that we, the vermin, saw him only in profile with much of his back facing us. He spoke a few stern words, pursed his lips and peered at the wall waiting for someone to say something. Senior-sub Salim Asmi got up in his almond coloured corduroys and with his irritating poise made a small speech about press advice and hinted at the unprofessional attitude of information officers. Aziz Ahmad was in pale shock. He swung his chair to face us, which he could not have done without lifting it off the ground as it was a four-legged antique (circa late Raj). Glowering with uncontainable rage he hissed: You dare question the authority and competence of OUR officers! In his hauteur one could divine a factor of Mr Bhutto’s fall who made him his party’s secretary-general. The intellectual scene was gelling intangibly but the public was alert, responsive and clear in its mind. It had rejected the media evangelists on official payroll. In comparison, the literary people, the intellectuals that is to say, were in a kind of jam. But, one could see they were ceasing to drift. The Left seemed to have revived from the drubbing it got during the long Ayub years. But their coming into their own was a short lived affair. First their own mentor jilted them. From Zulfi to Zia the handing over ceremony of the crest-fallen revolutionaries was a pretty awkward sight. The most embarrassing scene and the lowest point of their morale was witnessed when one to the last, from the reddest to the greenest, the intellectuals came dutifully marching to Islamabad to eat the General’s irresistible pulao at a so-called writers moot. That was the beginning and the end. The secular priesthood which had performed until then its chameleon act with success had no option now but to come out in the open and show its true colours. It was a mass conversion such as we see at collective wedding congregations in Korea. Their clever intellects now roundly contained in white skull caps, the ideologues formed a hymnal choir that sang long and loud enough to deafen the people for the rest of their lives and drain them of whatever little faith in their masters they had been left with. This single salutary effect of that era persists and gathers ground daily. The people have matured beyond the acutest imagination of the robed and derobed priesthood. The intellectuals and the writers and the poets now walk a desolate road: Is tarah to hota hey is tarah ke kamon mein! Please Visit our Sponsor (Ads open in separate window)
