You probably thought from reading the title that I was going to talk about some BDSM. I want to start by saying that I am very sorry that didn’t happen.
I just saw, with that sinking sensation that in Pakistan accompanies one’s simultaneous vindication and disgust, that a PTI rally poster from a constituency in Karachi had a picture of a smiling Mumtaz Qadri. You know, the one who shot dead a sitting governor and is on death row. I knew this would happen, that one day the most violently extremist cohorts that the PTI keep courting/protecting would eventually show their true colors. The PTI PR people obviously scrambled to make it known that they wished to “disassociate” themselves from the poster (I would have “consciously uncoupled”) and reiterated that the poster was put up by a Jamaat-e-Islami candidate standing in the election, and does not represent the views of the PTI itself.
I don’t think anyone here believes that Imran Khan or any of his party leaders saw and approved of the photo before it went up, and election posters are hardly a regulated field of advertising. But that doesn’t absolve them of a brand new responsibility: the PTI must explain why it has decided to ally with the odious Jamaat-e-Islami. The JI media secretary, making no effort to undo the damage, released a statement saying that all candidates have exclusive control on what is printed on their campaign posters but that it wasn’t that so anyway because “the pictures are of people who have given their lives for the Islamic ideology, not of the Taliban”.
Hate speech against Muslims has become increasingly common in the US
To be clear, Qadri didn’t give his life. Qadri took a life.
When people like me are accused of being “liberal fascists” who want nothing but the worst for the country because we have the brains to question what the PTI’s motives are, this is precisely the kind of thing that comes to my mind. How can people not see how dangerous this is? How can anyone remain unconvinced that the PTI will and does pander to the worst sections of our society, as a matter of routine? I use the term deliberately because anyone who believes that it is alright to kill unarmed leaders in broad daylight because of offense caused on behalf of a deity is deranged.
But like Dengue or the popularity of jeggings, crazy is not confined by geography. My past few weeks of reading American newspapers have left me with the distant feeling that I, a Muslim, am the bogeyman of contemporary politics. A Nightmare before Christmas, if you will. I am like a Jew from the 30s and a black man from the 60s rolled into one, except I am armed like a Russian in the 80s. We are, without a doubt, painted as the enemy of enemies. The Republican Party here is responsible in large part for that, having decided to equate being anti-Muslim with pro-American. The candidates have said, variously and in public, that they want to register all Muslims, that a Muslim could never be President, that Islam is incompatible with the constitution, that thousands of Muslims cheered when the towers fell down on 9/11, referred to Syrian refugees as “rabid dogs” and intimated that, given a choice, the US should allow Christian Syrians in but not Muslims.
I am like a Jew from the 30s and a black man from the 60s, except I am also armed like a Russian in the 80s
These are not the views of some nut job on the outskirts of visibility; these are the views of the many men making a bid to become the next President of the US. Yes, they may be pandering to a shrinking segment of bigots in America and yes, most Americans do not feel this way, but you know things are bad when newspapers are printing articles by Muslims fondly recalling the tolerance of the Bush era.
Many people have asked me about the rise of anti-Muslim sentiments and whether or not I’ve directly been on the receiving end of it. The answer is “no”, but that is mostly because I don’t know many people who would articulate that to me, at least to my face. There have been some disturbing incidents, however. An old friend argued with me the other day about Seymour Hersh’s account of the Osama bin Laden raid. He couldn’t understand why anyone would believe it, and I couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t. He ended what became a fairly heated discussion with “Governments don’t lie to their people!” and I felt, momentarily, like I was in the twilight zone. I didn’t know if it was stranger that he actually believes what he said, or that I know it not to be true. He suddenly seemed so alien to me, and then I reminded myself that not everyone is, like all Pakistanis, congenitally predisposed to mistrusting the government.
But sometimes, even we get confused. The other day, I was having lunch with a family friend who lives in Paris for a part of the year and was there during the recent attacks. While we were chatting about Paris, she leaned over and whispered to me, “You know, everyone went crazy. Even…even me.”
I always perk up when there is a salacious story to be heard and so I egged her on. She said she was catching a flight a few days after the attacks and was sitting in the airport lounge when she saw a Pakistani man sitting in the corner taking notes. He was listening to a sermon in Urdu. She immediately recoiled from what she imagined was its rabid “hate speech”, went up to the airline staff and reported the man to them, saying she felt uncomfortable flying with him on the plane.
My jaw dropped.
“But, you’re Pakistani!” I said.
“I know,” she nodded, and I was relieved that she at least looked contrite. “I don’t know what came over me. I felt so bad when I saw his seat empty when the flight took off.”
Poor man, I thought, god knows what they did to him. I don’t know what he was listening to, and my impulse is to defend his right to listen to whatever he wants.
But then I see this campaign poster with Mumtaz Qadri on it, and I’m sure it can’t be – and shouldn’t be - defended. Is this any worse than the things the Republicans say? (It probably is worse, come to think of it...) Hate speech, no matter where it’s coming from, has now replaced dialogue in modern political discourse and because of its ubiquity there are so many grey areas of freedom of speech and public debate that it’s not always easy to call it out for what it is. The cynic in me (Russian accent, black polo neck) says that it’s always been like this. Does that mean it always has to?
