Dawn recently printed an article by Huma Yusuf titled ‘Beyond the Culture War’. The article was a brave and imaginative discussion of various issues concerning the possible uses of the arts in Pakistani culture. I should like to debate some points made in the article and others omitted.

Ms. Yusuf quotes the poet Fehmida Riaz as saying there is no place for poetry in Pakistan because most Pakistanis are illiterate and because the literate with power have no respect for poetry. Ms. Riaz did not, I am sure, intend her remarks to be taken too literally, but meant them as an expression of her despair, which, in many ways, I share. So the following remarks are not an attack upon her.

Contrary to Ms. Riaz’s predictions, I should like to say that in my 36-year acquaintance with Pakistan, I have observed a great love of poetry and music among the illiterate poor. Sadly, it is now rarer than it was before General Zia-ul-Haq unleashed a major assault on Pakistani culture. Indeed, the history of Pakistan carries a cautionary tale about the arts and people. We may, therefore, find it helpful to illustrate the uses of art in a country by observing what happens when they are attacked and go missing.

Since today’s Pakistan bears little resemblance to the wonderful country to which I came in 1972, I shall not mention the locations of what I shall describe. We live in times where the truly sacred is now threatened by barbarians masquerading as devout people and by profiteering philistines. What follows is an account of art in its purest form, now threatened or gone.

Somewhere in Pakistan, years ago, every Thursday night, I used to attend qawalis during which people were utterly entranced by some of the most beautiful music and poetry I have ever heard. Qawali is poetry of the highest order set to music of equal quality. At the sacred place where these enchanting meetings took place, the women were congregated around a balcony on the first floor of a hall and looked down on the lower floor filled with men. Leaning over the balcony, the women would loosen their long black hair and wave those black cascading tresses rhythmically with the music.

Down on the ground floor of the hall, men were engaged in a different ritual. They were giving offerings of money to the singers and players, whose utter dedication to their music suggested they were in another world. Every now and then, groups of young men would approach the musicians with offerings of modest sums of money. Often different numbers, of up to six people, holding a single rupee note (a lot of money for them, so they shared the honour) made their way, like supplicants, to the musicians and placed the money reverently at their feet.

The musicians seemed not to notice these offerings. They were apparently transported by their own music and were on a mission to bring divine ecstasy to the people. It brought tears to my eyes and to those of my wife, who stood with me, in jeans, unmolested among the courteous young men around us.

In that setting, we heard great performers such as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and we listened to these miraculously talented people free of charge in the company of people who seemed to be indescribably happy. Commerce played no part in the sung prayers (true prayers, not tedious words uttered by rote) that were being loosed from powerful bows of feeling by the singers, flung like arrows straight up to heart of God as well as into all of our hearts.

Never have I known a purer form of art, nor felt such shared, unquestioned love. This was sacredness in its ancient, original form. And I doubt that anyone in the congregation, other than my wife and I, could read and write. On these occasions, I knew a degree of civility – human fineness would be more accurate – rare in this world and becoming ever rarer. The sweet innocents around me were unaware of their own nobility, but I would not have swapped their company for that of kings.

On another occasion in a very different part of the country, a Pakistani friend and I attended an annual two-day celebration of one of the greatest thirteenth-century scholars of this region. Think of that! Illiterate people, with reverence not envy, paying their deepest respects to a scholar for his literacy and wisdom. Where else in the world is such an event to be found?

The celebration takes place in one of the most beautiful shrines in all of Islam and is attended by village, country, and nomadic people from hundreds of miles around. They come dressed in their finery and, though poor, they looked magnificent.

Men and women gathered together under one great lofty dome below which, at the centre, lay a sarcophagus covered in crimson velvet. Around this central tomb, where the great scholar lay, people circulated slowly, while a single young man, unaccompanied by musical instruments, sang naat, and that too with such beauty that I stood transfixed and light-headed for two hours. I was lost to time in ecstasy.

On this occasion, unlike my usual custom in Pakistan, I was dressed in European clothes, but never, not by a single glance, did anyone in that great domed hall of people ever give me the slightest impression that I might be a stranger or that I did not belong there. I felt as if, after wandering the world pointlessly for most of my life, I had come home at last. The circulating men pressed little white sweets into the palm of my hands as they passed me by, not looking at me nor expecting a response, I was simply one of them. I belonged there.

When I was eventually urged out of the mazaar by my friend, just outside the main gates we came upon a group of musicians playing what I recognised immediately to be the original music from which Spanish flamenco derives. In my youth, I spent years in Granada, Spain, home to arguably the finest architecture and garden in all of Islam, the Alhambra. Above that palace, in the mountain caves, live gypsy singers, all of whom migrated to Spain from the Indus Valley hundreds of years ago. Las cuevas (the caves) of Granada, along with Seville and Cordoba, comprise the traditional centres of gypsy culture in Spain. The gypsies of Spain (the word derives from the legend that they came to Spain across North Africa through Egypt) flourished during the golden age of Islam in Spain (711-1492), when Islam was the only light in a dark Europe.

As I stood outside the gates of the mazaar, I found myself among people with whose distant relatives I had spent many happy years in Spain. And now these Pakistani ‘gypsies’ were playing the original form of the flamenco I knew so well and thought I would never again hear live. In the 1950s, when I was there, the most poetic form of gypsy music was called cante jondo (deep song). Once again, I had to come to Pakistan to find my way back to a world destroyed by commerce elsewhere; to rediscover something sacred that is now on the verge of destruction in Pakistan too – destruction by neglect, ignorance, the indifference of money grubbers, the blindness of upstart gundas turned politicians, and by the violent arrogance of pseudo-religious thugs. So, yes, Fehmida, I know what you mean.

So, may I conclude by saying to Ms. Yusuf, thank you for your imaginative and passionate article, but, alas no, art cannot humanise us. Rather, it is a sign that we are already human (in a sense almost forgotten). Archaeologists date the arrival of homo sapiens in the world by the traces of art they left behind. Art was then a celebration of life, an act of worshipping a beautiful world, which is now being destroyed by ‘progress.’ These ancient remnants of art show the earliest expression among people of their sense of what is sacred. We need art because when we lose that sense of the sacred, we destroy the world to which we truly belong, and replace it with savage doctrines and wastelands. No poet, to my knowledge, ever expressed the attack by modern civilisation on culture better than W.H. Auden, in his poem The Shield of Achilles. Read it and weep.

You might ask how can we push back the barbarians who are out to destroy what is truly sacred? I have no idea, but we can at least try by being kind to all living creatures that are not unkind to us. We should try to remember the greatest words ever uttered: Peace be upon you.

Charles Ferndale is a freelance journalist, with a special interest in nature conservation, art, and alleviating poverty in Pakistan.

The views expressed by this writer and in the following reader comments do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Dawn Media Group.