SMOKERS’ CORNER: BEING PAKISTANI
In 2010, an acquaintance of mine (an anthropologist) conducted a survey to find out how Pakistanis described themselves in nationalistic terms. He was piloting a research for a book. Knowing that he had collected a lot of data in this respect, I met him last month in New York.
He and his team of assistants had approached over 200 Pakistanis and asked them a simple question: how do you explain yourself: a) Pakistani first; b) Muslim first; or c) If you are a non-Muslim, then explain how you see yourself in this context.
According to his findings, almost 70 percent of the Muslim respondents ticked the ‘Muslim first’ option; whereas over 90 percent non-Muslim respondents ticked the ‘Pakistani first’ box.
Do we identify with a state or religious ideology when we call ourselves Pakistani?
During one interaction with a 19-year-old college student in Lahore, he asked the student an additional question: “If you consider yourself Muslim first, does that mean you are a Pakistani second?”
The student first looked surprised by the enquiry but instinctively replied, “Muslims do not have boundaries.” The anthropologist then asked him, “In that case, do you think that you, a Muslim, can enter any other Muslim country without a passport and visa and automatically become a citizen there just because you are Muslim?” The student did not answer.
According to the more extensive May 4, 2011 Gallup poll, 59 percent Pakistanis chose to identify themselves as Muslims first. Twenty two percent described themselves as Pakistanis first.
Last year, when government officials were going door-to-door to gather data for the 2018 census, I jokingly groused when one of them asked me what my religion was. I smiled: “It’s obvious that I am a Muslim just as over 95 percent Pakistanis are.”
To this, the official responded in Urdu: “Sir jee, you don’t know what we have to go through. When we ask people about their faith, many say Muslim but then ask us to also add the sect [or sub-sect] that they belong to.”
Today, many young Pakistanis are not quite sure what it means to be a Pakistani. Does it mean being a resident of a Muslim-majority country which came into being in 1947 but has a cultural connect with the region’s 5,000-year-old history? Or does it mean being a citizen of an imminent universal religious utopia for which Pakistan was to become a launching-pad?
I believe such confusion was fortified by the deterioration of the original idea of Pakistani nationalism, and the consequent surge of a rather ambitious concept of a divergent narrative that replaced it.
The Pakistani state now seems to have accepted the fact that much of the sectarian and religious strife of the past many decades has been nurtured by a rather complicated version of Pakistan’s nationalist narrative which began to develop from the mid-1970s onward.
The idea of having a Muslim-majority country in South Asia was conceived by political leaders largely galvanised by the thoughts of scholars and ideologues called ‘Jadeed Mussalman’, or modernist Muslims.
Pakistan was thus a project of Muslim Modernism. To modernists such as Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, Muhammad Iqbal and Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, a progressive mindset was inherent in ‘the spirit of Islam’ and so was the allowance to exercise pragmatism so that Islam itself could be adjusted to the changing times and not become stagnant.
Had Pakistan been a theological project, its founders would never have been criticised and even demonised the way they were by many ulema.