The ads were in the magazine section of Pakistan News – an Urdu weekly for diaspora desis in NY, Chicago etc. In breathless prose they invited broken hearts and spirits to have their problem solved within “two and half minutes”. One promised a reward if not successful, another lauded his experience of 55 years. In tone, or in content, these ads were apace with any psychic, Dionne Warwick-style salespitch that you may encounter elsewhere. Except for one garish detail – all three ads were explicitly selling services of Kala Jadoo, black magic.

Lost in the noise of “wahhabisation” of the Pakistani publics, are some really interesting changes which accompanied the seasonal migration of Pakistan’s labor force to the Gulf since the 1970s. Broadly understood, “wahhabisation” denotes the growth of parties/philosophies in Pakistan who share the stringently narrow-minded Sunni sectarianism from Saudi Arabia, along with some attendant thoughts on anti-imperialism of a local or global kind. Often, the calls for a resurgent Caliphate, or destruction of Israel become à la carte additions.

But one particularly pernicious long term side-effect of this seasonal migration has been the disruption of the varied local traditions of charismatic and spiritual leadership in Pakistan – specifically the heterogenous sufic traditions. The explicitly “local” site – whether a shrine, a seat or a house of a Sufi – where the community would go for counsel, help, adjudication and spiritual growth was rapidly overwhelmed by a new generation of preachers. This new breed was freely entrepreneurial – tying the remittances to moral panics in the domestic sphere. How do you know if your wife was faithful to you?. The cash-for-salvation business has many, many facets. Clerics like Hafiz Saeed, etc., have done wonders within this ‘emerging market’.

The “Black Magic” industry is another, less-frequently mentioned, outpost of this wild capitalism. It operates through a network of intermediaries in the foreign city (be that Doha, Qatar or New York, USA) who identify the marks and get them hooked through a nominal fee. A local payment, in dinars or dollars, gets the troubled soul a special phone number to call. On the other end, is another intermediary who will solicit all your sordid details. The client is usually strung along for months, doing mind-numbing spells and sacrifices and paying small amounts. Eventually, desire and despair forces the client to ask for the ultimate – a direct audience with the ‘Amil (Knowledge Bearer). It is perhaps needless to point out that this ultimate round of communications has its own price bracket.

The practitioners use specialized constructions to lure in their clients. They situate themselves, explicitly within the Islamic cosmology, as “outsiders” and mimic a parallel genealogy of filth, as sufis have a genealogy of pure. Alistar Crowley would easily understand. Note that the ads above name the practitioners as either “Massih” or “Bengali” – that is, Christian or Bengal (it has a long history of being associated w/ the darker arts in certain traditions). Additionally, they explicitly name “demonic” beings – some are standard (Kali, Churail, Nag,جیسے ہنومان ،کھیترپال ،بھیرو، ناگ دیوتا ، لوناچماڑی، چڑیل، لکشمی دیوی ، کالا کلوا ، پاروتی دیوی ، کلوسادھن، پیچھل پیری ،ڈائن ،ہر بھنگ آکھپا etc.), and some rather inexplicable (Hanuman!). Graveyards, become the counterpoint to the sufi shrine. Lest we think that this is merely defrauding money from suckers, there are constant reports in the media of child abductions and mutilated corpses being used in such rituals.

What to make, then, of these ads which tout their particular other-ness with such aplomb? How do we fit this utilitarian embrace of the Christian and the Hindoo within the same fold as the shrine-hating “wahhabisation”? Theoretically speaking, we have to conceive of a landscapes that accommodates spirituality post modernity. Second, we have to discard the notion of a uniform process of “wahabbisation” (I am tired of putting in the quotes).

Things are way more, um, diabolical.

Below the fold, the actual ads.

Additional Reading: A fascinating report by Muhammad Haroon Abbas on Black Magic as well as a report from Dubai where police arrested an “Asian” who was fleecing hundreds of immigrants by promising them riches through black magic.

PS. Do note that I have translated bits of the ads on the Flickr site. Just move your mouse over the image to reveal the notes.

Friends in NYC, please attend. Friends elsewhere, please link/spread the word of this.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: progpak@gmail.com / 917.922.9836

Pakistanis Hold Vigil for Mumbai Victims
Call Upon India and Pakistan to Work Towards Peace

When: Saturday, December 13th, 4:00 pm
Where: Union Square NORTH (16th Street) – across the street from Barnes and Noble

(New York, December 8, 2008) – Action for a Progressive Pakistan (APP) condemns the violence of Nov 26th which claimed the lives of over 180 people in Mumbai, and expresses solidarity with the people of India. The group calls upon the democratically elected governments of India and Pakistan to work together in bringing the perpetrators of this heinous act to justice.

APP will hold a vigil this Saturday, December 13th at 4pm in Union Square to express sorrow at the loss of innocent life and call for peace and stability in the region. It demands that measured and deliberate steps be taken to ensure the safety and security of all the citizens of India and Pakistan, who remain the true targets of these extreme agendas. The group also calls upon the governments of India and Pakistan to work for a peaceful resolution of the current crisis, and asks that the world community support the two countries in this endeavor.

“The people of Pakistan stand in solidarity with their brothers and sisters in India because we also bear deeply the scars of terrorism,” said Assistant Professor of Sociology Saadia Toor who’s also a founding member of APP. In 2007 alone, 1500 people were killed in terror attacks in Pakistan. This year, forty people were killed and as many as 350 injured including school children when bombs destroyed a federal government building in the heart of Lahore on March 11th. Another fifty were killed by a terror attack on the Islamabad Marriott hotel in September. These acts of violence, whether in India or Pakistan, are a backlash to the global War on Terror by non-state forces seeking to destabilize the region and derail long-overdue peace initiatives being pursued by the two countries.

The only defense against terrorism is a prosperous democracy. Pakistan has just elected its first civilian government in over a decade after a protracted struggle against the military dictatorship of Pervez Musharraf. The civilian government has already taken several key steps towards de-militarizing the domestic political sphere, and has made overtures towards trying to solve the issue of Kashmir. The civilian regime has managed to impose some limitations on the military but it must do more. To ensure peace and security in the region, the world community must support Pakistan’s democratic institutions. This support must include development assistance geared towards addressing the needs of Pakistan’s poor. APP calls for an immediate end to US airstrikes inside Pakistan’s borders, as they are contributing greatly to the destabilization of the region and causing hardships for innocent civilians.

Action for a Progressive Pakistan stands with the people of South Asia in their struggle for peace in the region. The group, comprised of concerned Pakistani professionals and academics, is committed to ensuring peace, democracy and development in South Asia.

I am a proud member of the group.

Dipesh Chakrabarty has a lucid look at some of the key realities facing Indian democracy in the aftermath of the attacks in his Reflections on the future of Indian democracy:

The growth of this politics of identity has made elections into the mainstay of Indian democracy. It has distanced politics from issues of governance, and has gone hand in hand with a deepening degree of corruption, financial and otherwise, on the part of politicians and officials. A large number of the elected members of parliament have criminal cases pending against them, and media reports suggest an elephantine, unaccountable, inefficient bureaucracy mired in the self-indulgent use of resources (corruption and inefficiency often going together). There was, as last week’s events made clear, no effective coast guard force on the Indian seas, in spite of the government having been warned of possible terror attacks on Mumbai from the sea. When the Taj Hotel caught fire, it took the first lot of firefighters three hours to respond. The commando force had to be dispatched from Delhi and it took about nine hours to mobilize them, as they are usually kept busy providing “security” to politicians, many of whom see such security as a matter of status and prestige. It also turns out that the majority a very large grant recently given to the Bombay police for its modernization was spent on buying luxury cars and other expensive items for the use of senior officers and their ministers! Creating a security system that will effectively protect the population from terrorist attacks will not be easy. Corruption follows public money in India, as it does, unfortunately, in many countries, and undermines performance. Additionally, the effective functioning of any institution in India in a non-partisan manner would require that institution to be insulated from political interference. The second condition is not easily met in India. The required reforms thus call for a certain kind of political will that the political class in India has not quite shown in recent times.

Ahmed Rashid, Are Mumbai attacks a chance for peace?:

If India and Pakistan can understand that they are both victims of a strategic diversion by al-Qaeda and if international mediation can help deepen that understanding, then there is perhaps a greater opportunity for the two countries to address the conflicts that have bedevilled their relationship for 60 years – Kashmir and other lesser issues.

It will certainly be difficult for the two countries to walk away from the brink. India has a weak government whose counter-terrorism policies have been a failure and which faces an election in the next six months. The Indian public and media are demanding revenge – not co-operation with Islamabad.

Pakistan also has a weak government that is still trying to set parameters of co-operation with an army which dominates foreign and strategic policy and controls the ISI, the most powerful political entity in the country.

Pakistan’s other problems could well overwhelm the government – a troops mobilisation is the last thing it needs.

To turn the possibility of war into the possibility of peace, the leadership of both countries need to show statesmanship, determination and authority even if they have to defy the public mood in their respective countries to do so.

Aryn Baker, in one of the most egregious example of bad reporting/analysis/pull-it-outta-your-ass-telology, quotes some “mild-mannered scholar” who yearns for the return of the Mughal Empire. What the fuck is Institute of Policy Studies, Islamabad? How do you even find these numskulls? More importantly what is this Deobandi v Aligarh match that has been going on for the last 130 years – defying all other histories? Then there was someone named Reena Ninan waxing eloquently about “our 9/11″ on FOX News. Which, to the anchor, meant only that India must now act like US did (given the usual suspects, so far):

1. Bomb Pakistan
2. Bomb Dubai
3. Bomb Somalia
4. Bomb England

Here is Dalrymple chiding the Indian government for “continu[ing] to make matters worse by its ill-treatment of the people of Kashmir, which has handed to the jihadis an entire generation of educated, angry middle-class Muslims.” Is that really so? Let’s assume that these perpetrators are angry about Kashmir. Lots are. Hundreds. Thousands. Hundreds of thousands, even. Maybe, they are all Muslims as well. Maybe, devout, even. And yet, the injustice of Kashmir over the last 60 years seems to have not turned the lot into kamikaze fire-spewing terrorists. Why is that? Are Indian Muslims willing to kill all other citizens of their own land, Muslims included, because of 60 year old grievance? And they chose now why? More consequently, how is the manufacturing of this particular dissent made possible in Pakistan? Dalrymple plays up the ISI but nary a word on the role which the conflict of Kashmir has played in the self-construction of the state of Pakistan? Is that impolitic? Will we be embarrassed to learn of the deeds of Zia ul-Haq and Pervez Musharraf? Why is ISI some monolithic mind-controlling entity that has “imposed” Kashmir as an Issue? On Kashmir, he states blithely that “the state should logically have gone to Pakistan”. And what logic would that be? The logic of Partition?

Or you may prefer the Fareed Zakaria model, where Indian Muslims are waiting patiently to be infected by this virus which is the enemy of “modernity and democracy.” Are you kidding me?

Even the more benign defense against profiling Indian Muslims seems to irk me. Is the analogue between state-sponsored terrorism? Or a face-off of atrocities? What exactly is the goal, here? Justification?

Biju Mathew, at the very least, makes sense when he calls into question this well-rehearsed charade that we have been playing since 2001:

The official story that has already begun to emerge is one that may have some facts embedded in it. But we must remember that between every two facts is a lot of conjecture. The conjectures that unite the few facts (16 gunmen, AK47s, grenades, passports of multiple nationalities, boats on which at least some of them arrived, a dead Anti-Terror Squad (ATS) chief, Hemant Karkare, who was heading the investigation against the Hindu Right wings’ terror campaign, the gunmen trying to identify British and American citizens) makes the story. The story then is as much a product of the conjecture as it is of the facts. And there are certain stories that we are already oriented towards. The conjectures that create that story – the story we are already prepared for – is the one the State will dole out for our consumption. Already the conjectures that will serve the State, are out there in great profusion.

I remember December 2001 and the armies which stationed themselves along borders. In everything I have read, and heard, over the last few days, nothing gives me hope that we are not hurtling towards a repeat. And here we have distinguished commentary that refuses to abandon the script.

I keep seeing Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. [see.]

Rohit points to this absurd “Roots of Indian Muslim Rage” piece (Jets v Sharks!). Suketu Mehta has the “here is why they hate our freedoms” piece.

I am waiting to hear from our enlightened commentators about the Versace connection between Cunanan and the Bombay raiders. What is in that brand that drives young men to madness? Well?

I will put up something more helpful in the next few days – maybe a reading list on the “indian muslim thing”.

Things will be ok. I have to believe that. I have to hope. Now more than ever.

The attack is over. And suddenly everything must now be questioned, say the punditry. CNN is trawling with idiotic “experts”. We are awash in insipid commentary, as well. The nearly two hundred dead, though, demand of us harsher questioning of the status quo.

Some more reading:

Saikat Datta in Outlook India:

By the middle of November, as Indian intelligence continued to check out further inputs, the pieces of an intricate jigsaw puzzle began to fall into place. Sources say they learnt that the attack would come from the sea and that the Taj Hotel would be a major target. However, it was not known whether this attack would be carried out by planting bombs in the hotel or by terrorists carrying small arms. Indian intelligence assessments were tilting towards bombs being planted and security at the hotel was beefed up accordingly to prevent terrorists from planting bombs inside the premises.

At AlterNet, Yoichi Shimatsu wonders if Ibrahim Dawood did it:

The eerie silence that accompanied the blasts are the very signature of Ibrahim Dawood, now a multi-millionaire owner of a construction company in Karachi, Pakistan. His is hardly a household name around the world like Osama bin Laden. Across South Asia, however, Dawood is held in awe and, in a twist on morals, admired for his belated conversion from crime boss to self-styled avenger.

Mohsin Hamid:

The alternative is to acknowledge that – like rivers, languages, and history – terrorism ties India and Pakistan together. India cannot prosper while Pakistan festers. Pakistan cannot progress while standing in the way of India’s ascent. Only by cooperating can both countries hope to achieve security and make dreams of prosperity come true for more than a small minority.

Sandip Roy:

Three days after the start of this awful siege, which has killed more than 150 and injured more than 300 people, I remember one of the first faces to emerge out of the horrifying scenes of burning hotels, sprawled bodies and uniformed police in Mumbai. “Is he one of the victims?” asked my roommate as we looked at the fuzzy image of a young man in a dark t-shirt, the word VERSACE written across it in white. My roommate obviously hadn’t noticed the assault rifle he was holding.

Washington Post:

Islamist extremists and their backers inside Pakistan do not want that; the attacks in Mumbai may well have been calculated to set off a new Indo-Pakistani crisis. India’s foreign minister said as much, pointing a finger of blame at Pakistan and telling its foreign minister, who was visiting New Delhi at the time of the attacks, that there could be no “leap” in relations unless Islamabad cracked down on the people responsible for the attacks. Pakistan responded constructively, agreeing to an Indian request that its military intelligence chief go to India to share what Islamabad knows about the origins of the attacks.

And finally, Rohit expresses many of my own misgivings on the response from the Left:

Ali parrots a well-worn Marxist line in his article. Aside from any number of grounds on which the vulgar Marxist reasoning that permeates the article (and any number of such articles on Counterpunch) can be questioned– such as simplistic assumptions about economic base and cultural superstructure— there is one major problem with this argument: it completely fails to explain why other disenfranchised groups or communities in India or elsewhere are not compelled by environmental or structural causes to act in the same way as those who committed the Bombay blasts.

Timeline to date.

From BBC:

The fidayeen technique – a rudimentary form of “shock and awe” warfare – was introduced into Kashmir by Pakistani radical organisations that entered the Kashmir insurgency from the mid-1990s onwards.

From Guardian:

Six young men with large bags came ashore, after which the two who remained in the boat started the outboard motor again and sped off,” said one witness. “They were fair, chikna [well-off] and looked around 20, 22, 25 years old. They said they were students. When we tried to find out what they were doing, they spoke very aggressively, and I got scared.”

From Guardian:

Other guests also praised the conduct of the hotel staff, one telling Reuters that kitchen workers even managed to continue preparing food for the first few hours of the siege.

“Only when the kitchens became out of bounds did they express regret for not being able to serve us food,” said a guest, who asked not to be named.

Amit Chaudhuri:

The politics of Bombay itself became intolerant in the past 25 years, but the city, discovering its true metier with liberalisation, became more heterogeneous and variegated than I can remember, partly because its old centres of wealth had to disperse and scatter from within, as property prices rose unthinkably and offices moved to the less salubrious suburbs. Similarly, the uncontainable, swelling traffic enforced the creation of new routes, flyovers through previously unvisited (for the middle class) areas, and random, swift, and intriguingly uneven, gentrification.

Maria Misra:

But despite the multi-religious and multi-ethnic origins of terrorist violence the Indian authorities have, until recently, tended to treat only Muslims as terrorists. So while Muslim “terrorists” have been subject to extraordinary laws of detention and trial in special courts, Hindu nationalist “rioters” have been tried in regular courts, or, more usually, not been punished at all.

One of the principal complaints of Indian Muslim groups is the failure to bring to trial any of the Hindu ringleaders responsible for pogroms in Bombay in 1993 and Gujarat in 2002 in which more than 4,000 Muslims died.

From Telegraph:

The men looked beyond the instant updates of the Indian media to find worldwide reaction to the events in Mumbai.

Their analysis of at least five BlackBerry mobile phones recovered suggested the terrorists had links to England.

“There was a lot of content from the English media, not just in London but the Urdu and Arabic sites that are very strong in the north of England,” the Commando leader said near the site of the city’s third siege at Nariman House. “We have some analysis started on this and we will pass it on to Scotland Yard, no doubt.”

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The aftermath of the horrific attack seems to be overlapping the attack itself – it is not over. However, information is starting to trickle out in the usual manner. Pakistan, Pakistani-based, ISI, Kashmir-based, “home-grown” are some of the usual suspects before us. I heard/read Somali pirates somewhere which did give me some hope that our script is not as hackneyed as any old Bollywood issue. But no.

These following links are worth your read. Neha at Global Voices is really the place to follow the media coverage. If folks know of other sources, kindly add them in the comments. I will update this, as we go along.

My thoughts and prayers go to the victims.

Who are the Deccan Mujahideen? by Blake Hounshell.

Militant complains of India army abuses in Kashmir – note the reference to “Urdu with a Kashmiri accent”.

Sophisticated Attacks, but by Whom? has Chris Fair using some strong language:

“There are a lot of very, very angry Muslims in India,” Ms. Fair said. “The economic disparities are startling and India has been very slow to publicly embrace its rising Muslim problem. You cannot put lipstick on this pig. This is a major domestic political challenge for India.

“The public political face of India says, ‘Our Muslims have not been radicalized,’ she said. “But the Indian intelligence apparatus knows that’s not true. India’s Muslim communities are being sucked into the global landscape of Islamist jihad.”

“Indians will have a strong incentive to link this to Al Qaeda,” she said. “But this is a domestic issue. This is not India’s 9/11.”

Tariq Ali’s The Assault on Mumbai also points a finger towards India’s internal dichotomy.

“In the crowded suburban trains, you can run up to the packed compartments and find many hands stretching out to grab you on board, unfolding outwards from the train like petals … And at the moment of contact, they do not know if the hand that is reaching for theirs belongs to a Hindu or Muslim or Christian or Brahmin or untouchable, or whether you were born in this city or arrived only this morning. All they know is that you’re trying to get to the city of gold, and that’s enough. Come on board, they say. We’ll adjust.” – Suketu Mehta, Maximum City [via Salil Tripathi's Bombay Can Take It]

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ماے ني! ميں کيهنوں اکهاں، درد وچهوڑ دا حال
O mother! who can I ask? about the pain of this separation?

The weight of exile rests heavy, some days. I don’t have the words to express, nor can I. So, here is Madho Lal Hussain (1539-94), the Sufi saint of Punjab, who wrote this Kafi (a short poetic/musical form from Punjab) about a particular form of exile.

This is Hamid Ali Bela’s rendition:

and here is a vid w/ Iqbal Bahoo:

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Pakistan’s nuclear godfather has suddenly emerged from seclusion (involuntary) and penned a risible column for the Daily Jang. It is notable, this column, for his self-aggrandizing, self-importance, and self-service. Keeping to the tradition, he sprinkles the column with bits of Urdu poetry (though not the tired old morsels), and frames himself as a “just a worker”. And then he launches into a tirade against Musharraf, as well as a glorification of the Bhutto family. I thought that the greater English-speaking world would want a peek into the mind of A. Q. Khan, so I translated it. Enjoy:

‘Til The Dawn
- Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan

Why ask me the cause of my silence?
There must be some reason why I remain quiet

In 1961, I was about to embark, for higher education, to the most acclaimed technical university in Berlin. I thought that I should inform the Pakistani public, especially the students, about the conditions in Germany. In those days, the office of the Daily Jang was on Karachi Business Road. During college (D. J. Sindh Goverment Science College), I would routinely walk by the office. So I went in to meet Mir Khalil al-Rahman Sahib and seek his advice. At that time, Taki Sahib was the Editor and he immediately arranged for me to meet Mir Sahib. I had heard of him, and now I knew him in person. Mir Sahib was a handsome, tall man with a commanding personality and his intelligence was reflected in his broad forehead. He met me with great affection. He was very keen on my idea and told me to certainly keep the readers of Jang informed from Berlin. And thus, I left for Germany. Berlin, in those days, was the playing field for the political conflict between East and West. Only ten days earlier, East Berlin (i.e. the Eastern Communist Germany) had erected the Wall. Innumerable Germans were running from the Communists towards West Berlin and many were dying from the bullets of VOPOS, ie the East Berlin militia. In the skies, the Russian Mig fighters were daily breaking the sound barriers over the city. My hostel was roughly fifteen minutes away from the Brandenburg Gate, and near the Victory Column.

From there, I began to send reports to Daily Jang under the heading “Letters from Berlin” – which were regularly published. This continued for two years. In the pages of Jang I predicted that the mayor of Berlin, Willy Brandt, would one day become the Chcancellor of Germany. And indeed, in a few years, he did. In late 1963, I shifted from Berlin to the famous technical university in Holland and stopped writing “Letters from Berlin”.

Due to current affairs, I though, why not indulge my disposition, and write once again on the important matters of the country. I have always held a fondness for writing, and if there is anything important, I do write. The habit is …
I cannot break this pagan habit…

Which is not to say that the public remains unaware of my thoughts and my emotions:
I sit quietly, but it appears
as if the whole world is telling my story

No doubt, whenever someone begins to write for the newspapers, the public tries to decipher the intent or the cause:
You may or may not be suspicious, but we
Just gain comfort from telling our painful story

We all know that Good and Evil will always battle in this world. Almighty Allah has warned us of this repeatedly in the Qur’an and declared, “Allah, protect me from the evil of the evil doers and the oppressors”. Some selfish and oppressive people, purely for the sake of their self-interest, trample the rights of the people under their feet. Drunk with power, they even, God forbid, deny the existence of God and his Might. The example of Musharraf is in front of you:
In every age, humans have done evil
In every age, humans have tried to become gods

But, God forbid, the haughtiness of being a god does not make one a god. Even if such people forget entirely about God:
The oppressors now think
As if there is no god left in the world

Our bureaucracy and sycophants play a large role in making these false gods into God. Musharraf is F.A. pass (high-school equivalent), a qualification which we use to employ attendants. By a mistaken promotion, he became our commander-in-chief. It nauseated us to see such a dim-wit lecture the highly educated and the experts on economics, education, foreign policy, commerce and industry. And they would bow in front of him and wag their heads and exclaim at his intelligence. The way of an intelligent ruler (or Dictator) is that he doesn’t choose his companions on the basis of their flattery but on the basis of their expertise and their knowledge; he listens to their advice; and gives them all the help for the completion of important projects. There was this rumor going around about Musharraf that he complains to his Army friends, “I am saddened to see that if uneducated people cannot understand my arguments, it is ok, but even educated people cannot follow me.” The reason is obvious. The ability to pull the trigger of a gun and the ability to make an intelligent statement are clearly different.

Selfish and opportunist people mix heaven and earth in false praise of such rulers, and make them into Plato. These are the people, who because of such actions, weaken the foundations of the country. These people operate like Hitler and his minister of propoganda, and say so many falsehoods that the ruler begins to believe them to be true and begins to consider himself intelligent. The results appear in the destruction of the country. Such was a lie spoken by Mujib ur-Rahman that the money derived from Jute sales, West Pakistan is paving streets with gold in Karachi. It was such a big lie, it was immediately accepted.

I returned to Pakistan in the fourth week of December. This is in 1975, i.e. nearly 33 years ago. I had returned at the request of Bhutto Sahib. Along with my wife and two daughters (aged 7 and 51/2 years), I had intended to return on January 15th. At the sincere request of Bhutto, and for the benefit of the country, I did not hesitate for even a moment: I left the best career, big income, and excellent facilities and stayed behind. I did not receive first salary, 3,000 ruppees monthly, until six months later. And no other compensation from the state:
Strange is God’s grant to the exalted ones
Strange are these people, who bear sorrows but keep their hearts alive

Some of the most prominent expert scientists of the country spread falsehoods in the ears of Bhutto Sahib and Ghulam Ishaq Sahib that this young ruffian is here to make a fool out of you. He will enjoy himself for a few days and them take his leave. They explained the intricacies of the technology and the difficulties and that only three developed countries of the world, ie Holland, Germany and England, have the necessary expertise – an expertise they gained after 20 years of hard work and after the expenditure of nearly 2 billion dollars. Bhutto Sahib and Ghlam Ishaq Khan Sahib possessed the power to see the hidden truths. They had no doubts over my capacity for the truth and knew that I had not said a false word to them. Even though some people told me to declare that we will have an atomic bomb in two or three years.

I refused to tell a lie. They may have used this lie as a basis of their foreign policy and been defeated, as a result. And then some famous scientists decided that they could put some two or three thousand tons of explosive materials in some cave and then explode it and Bhutto Sahib will be satisfied and his obsession will be over. Listen. If politicians tell lies, than it is their profession and they can, without any shame, practice their profession in front of the general simple-minded public. But it is incumbent on us scientists and engineers to always keep our profession and our conscious in mind, and speak only the truth. I have always operated on this principle and never told a lie:
Truthful I am, in my word, O Ghalib God is my witness
I tell the truth when I say, I don’t lie

The jist is that with the help of my colleagues, I made the impossible, possible. In only eight short years, and for a minuscule cost, made this depressed nation into a nuclear power. Bhutto Sahib, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, and General Zia ul-Haq helped without fear and without regret. Any task undertaken with good intentions and with true hard work, is rewarded by Allah. With the help of Honorable Benazir Bhutto, this country became a missile power. At my request, she granted me permission to seek missile technology from China and North Korea and install it here. In this General Mirza Aslam Beg and General Abdul Wahid Kakar played key roles. It is worth thinking that even as countless selfish, bribery-prone, traitors were busy tearing the country apart like hungry wolves, there remained some honest, pious, and skilled people who sacrificed their lives to keep this country on the slow path of progress. With the help of such people, by God’s Will, we will make our country into a developed, welfare-based Islamic state.

I have spend the majority of my life, nearly all of my life. When I look back at my life, it is with peace and contentment, that I did my utmost to serve my dear country. I did not do any favors for my country. Instead, it is this nation that granted me all these favors, which I tried to pay back – piece by piece. I gained higher education and technical excellence in Europe for 15 years and I wanted to use that to serve the country in important matters. In 1999, I proposed that we launch a satellite but this high-school pass dictator did not approve my request. Still, I am proud of my service to my country. In addition to providing it with nuclear, and missile, power, I founded countless educational and welfare organizations. From Khyber to Gawadar, the love that exists in people’s hearts is my greatest prize. One despicable, traitorous foreign agent donned the costume of Presidency and tried to harm me, but he failed in his dirty deed. Instead he, himself, was evicted from the Presidential house in disgrace. And now this self-styled Commando cannot even set a foot in the street of this country. The public will tear him into little pieces and feed him to the eagles. My relationship is with the 170 million people, and it will always remain. No one can stop me from serving this country. We have, in our front, the golden examples of the sacrifices of Honorable Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and Benazir Bhutto. They gave their lives but did not sell their country and became living legends. This is the reason that in “‘Til the Dawn”, I will reveal my thoughts, now and then:
The flame burns in every light, ’til the dawn

My thanks to Naim Sahib for bringing the column to my attention. And my apologies to him, if I messed up the translation…

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I don’t know why the war is deemed “forgotten” by TIME, but these are powerful and horrific images of a great tragedy. Also see Ishaan Tharoor’s accompanying essay, Keeping Dhaka’s Ghosts Alive. via DI.

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The rooftop, chath, is the hub of Chand Raat (Night of the Moon). The point being to go up, and gaze at the sky – hoping to catch a glimpse of that peculiarly slight new moon. A sight which will mark the end of Ramadan. In my short moon-gazing life, I think I have only seen this miracle once or twice. Usually, some bearded fellow in a skyscraper in Karachi “saw” it for all of us and the televisions and radio stations blared out the news: EID TOMORROW!!! (That’s about the right emphasis.)

Going to the rooftops, then, was largely a quixotic enterprise if one’s objective was to sight the new moon. But as the poet says, there are moons other than the one above. Such as the ones on the neighbor’s roof, and since she brought all of her friends to “find” the moon, you better have your posse with you too. What’s this? A machine that replicates joyous sounds and lyrical poetry? Might as well turn this on. Hey you, string some lights, grab a few candles, let’s everyone look adorable! On the rooftops, there is a different city.

Once there is a moon sighting, we urgently need new bangles, new henna, new everything. Cram into the bazaar, overwhelm the streets. Everyone except for me.

My mother would always have a list of dupataas that I needed to go pick up from the colorists and dresses I needed to pick up from the tailor.

Happy Eid.

Updated with pic goodness of bearded moon-spotters:

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All images via AP & AFP.

At Least 40 Killed in Huge Explosion at Pakistan Hotel.

The attack, at 7:55 p.m., was at Marriott. A video. The hotel is destroyed. This is, by initial reporting, the biggest suicide attack in the history of this country – dwarfing the Lahore attack from March of this year. The expected death toll is expected to rise.

You can follow news at Metblog Islamabad and at PK Politics (with video feeds).

I am calling friends and family in Islamabad.

update: Catch the hotel as it was.

update 2: NYT Slideshow.

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A few more images from today’s Daily Waqt:

“In Swat, the masked members of Tehrik-e Taliban-e Pakistan (Movement of Pakistani Taliban) hold a ‘criminal’ while their companion delivers a public punishment. Maulana Fazlullah has started a campaign to forcibly install Shari’ah laws in the region, after which the tensions have mounted.”

“In Lahore, the President of Supreme Court Bar Association, Aitzaz Ahsan, leading a rally of other lawyers.”

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Christopher Hitchens, of much ill-repute, tries his hand at Pakistan:

The very name “Pakistan” inscribes the nature of the problem. It is not a real country or nation but an acronym devised in the 1930s by a Muslim propagandist for partition named Chaudhary Rahmat Ali. It stands for Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, and Indus-Sind. The stan suffix merely means “land.” In the Urdu language, the resulting acronym means “land of the pure.” It can be easily seen that this very name expresses expansionist tendencies and also conceals discriminatory ones. Kashmir, for example, is part of India. The Afghans are Muslim but not part of Pakistan. Most of Punjab is also in India. Interestingly, too, there is no B in this cobbled-together name, despite the fact that the country originally included the eastern part of Bengal (now Bangladesh, after fighting a war of independence against genocidal Pakistani repression) and still includes Baluchistan, a restive and neglected province that has been fighting a low-level secessionist struggle for decades. The P comes first only because Pakistan is essentially the property of the Punjabi military caste (which hated Benazir Bhutto, for example, because she came from Sind). As I once wrote, the country’s name “might as easily be rendered as ‘Akpistan’ or ‘Kapistan,’ depending on whether the battle to take over Afghanistan or Kashmir is to the fore.”

Oh, so the word alone is enough! Who cares a whit about history, politics, culture, yadayada. Let’s divine like oracles from Hafiz! Oh and quoting yourself? Priceless.

If I was a Professor, and this was a freshman paper (about the level of analysis at display), I would have taken the paper to Jimmy’s, invited all my friends and read it loud – karaoke style.
[HT, tsk.]

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ALL 2008 CHAPALS MUST GO!

So, the caption on this is funnier than any snark from me: “Unemployed youth protest …”

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Pakistan, gentle readers, is imploding.

Zordari has been sworn in as President at the back of deals made with MQM and other nefarious organizations (here’s lookin at you, Zalmay!)

US/NATO air and ground troops are conducting operations inside Pakistan – with requisite civilian casualties and widespread public discontent in Pakistan.

But, these two recent stories break my heart:

The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) has received information from a remote area of Balochistan province, that five women were buried alive, allegedly by the younger brother of Mr. Sadiq Umrani, the provincial minister and a prominent leader of the Pakistan People’s Party, the ruling party. However, police have still not arrested the perpetrators after one month of the incident.

and

The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) has received information that an anchor person working for a prominent television channel has incited Muslims in Pakistan to kill – to devastating effect. The targets are followers of the Muslim Ahmadi sect, a group which has been declared non-Islamic under the constitution of Pakistan. The first killing happened within 24 hours of the broadcast, and just under two days later a district chief of the Ahmadi was murdered. Followers of the religion are understandably frightened, and many have left their homes and are taking shelter at their central mosque, the Rabwa.

These are not simply heinous crimes – these are markers of severe damage appearing in a society that is cracked and fissured.

It goes without saying that I expect all of you to click to AHRC site and send a petition to responsible parties. It’s the least we can do.

ps. Here, in a more innocent time, I introduced you to “Dr.” Aamir Liaquat Hussain – a murderer.

pps. Yes, I do believe that “Dr.” Aamir Liaquat Hussain should be prosecuted, as a murderer, for the deaths.

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Also, pay attention to the masthead.

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