Author: Khaled Ahmed
Publication: Friday Times (Pakistani
Newspaper)
Date: November 16, 2001
One may at times feel that the general
attitude of the expatriate Pakistani tends to be more extreme than Pakistan's
domestic opinion. He may look at the American press as a massive Jewish
conspiracy. He may believe that Ramzi Yusuf was blameless for the 1992
attack on the World Trade Center and that that attack was actually carried
out by the Jews. (The author was nearly beaten up at an airport when an
elderly New York gentleman grew angry at him for saying that Ramzi Yusuf
had actually been responsible.) A British Pakistani recently wrote to the
author and accused him of being a coward and a slave of the white man for
not writing against the Western civilisation as an enemy of Islam.
Some of the web-sites run by the
author's friends in the UK are shocking in their conspiratorial content.
The abuse hurled by these websites at the Western enemy is hair-raising.
The host-hating expatriate Pakistani despises Pakistan for not being anti-West
enough, while you may perceive the real crisis in Pakistan in the fact
that a collective suicide is being committed on the basis of impotent anger.
The ARY TV channel, which broadcasts from London, recently showed white
'scholars' claiming that the World Trade Center attack was actually carried
out by the Jews or by the right-wing extremist Americans themselves.
The common Muslim cause: There are
three million Pakistanis living outside Pakistan whose thinking about Pakistan
tends to be different from the desi Pakistani. This is nothing like the
thinking of other expatriate communities. It contains elements of alienation
which are unlike the alienation felt by others. It is definitely somewhat
like the thinking of other Muslim expatriates because of the common Muslim
cause. As a community living abroad, the Pakistanis are far less integrated
into the host society than other expat communities. This is because of
double alienation. The anger against the home country redoubled by anger
against the hosts.
Difficulties of adjustment of Pakistanis
abroad were intensified towards the end of the 20th century after the rise
of Islamic fundamentalism in the Muslim world. The middle classes came
under pressure from an aggressive clergy when it posited that life should
be moulded in light of the principles of Islam. Among these principles,
the most important was the refusal to live under an order that violated
the spirit of Islam. The concept was that of amr and nahi, the one that
ex-prime minister of Pakistan Nawaz Sharif tried to incorporate in his
15th Amendment in order to rule without being hampered by the judiciary.
In the United Kingdom, a British Pakistani, Kalim Siddiqi, had set up a
Muslim parliament of his own in the 1970s in defiance of the Godless (secular)
system the British had imposed on the population.
Alienated abroad: The normal alienation
of the expatriate begins at the home that he decides to leave. Pakistanis
leave home because they cannot cope with its corruption and the savagery
of its political system. Many flee political persecution while a majority
leave for economic reasons. While leaving Pakistan, they express no real
alienation from the country they are leaving even though lack of opportunity
and corruption could become the basis of it. Of course, if an embassy interviews
them for the grant of residency on the basis of asylum, the Pakistani will
claim political persecution, lack of freedom of expression and religious
repression. The truth of the matter is that most agree with religious stringency
and have no conscience about the persecution of Pakistan's minuscule religious
minorities. It has been observed that after settling abroad, most of them
will pursue sectarian politics and rely on religious leaders to indoctrinate
them further in the ideology they are supposed to have left behind in Pakistan.
In an earlier article about British
Pakistanis, I had recorded: 'Expatriate Muslims integrate less well with
host societies than other expatriate communities. This started happening
towards the end of the 20th century as Muslims all over the world sought
their identity increasingly in religion. As a result, communities that
had lived in peace in diaspora started feeling ill at ease and often found
themselves in conflict with the host societies. Most expatriate Muslims
don't only feel alienated from the their new home, they also have reason
to feel alienated from their old home. The problem of adaptation and acceptance
abroad is compounded by an intense realisation that back home too the ruling
elites are either anti-Islamic or subservient to Western dominance. The
preoccupation with politics back home prevents integration in the new home.
'Talking in Lahore on 2 April 2001
about the Pakistani expatriate community living in the United Kingdom,
Professor Muhammad Anwar of the University of Warwick, revealed significant
research findings. The Pakistanis living in the UK are 700,000, the third
largest minority community. (There are a million Indians in the UK.) The
majority of these British Pakistanis are Kashmiris, including those displaced
by Mangla Dam in Azad Kashmir. They are concentrated in four regions: 30
percent in and around London, 22 percent (100,000) in Birmingham, 20 percent
(65,000) in Bradford, 20,000 in Manchester and 15,000 in Glasgow. The figure
of 700,000 has grown from 5000 in 1951. Today, because of high birth-rate,
fully 47 percent of them are under the age of 16, as compared to 17 percent
for whites. They have the highest unemployment rate, five times more than
the British average; and crime rate is higher among them than in any other
community. Fully 2 percent of the prisoners rotting in British jails are
Pakistanis, the highest for any one community.'
Alienated in the United States:
In the United States, the Pakistanis are not as thickly concentrated in
localities as in the much smaller United Kingdom. But there could be concentrations
of them in Housten and Chicago, and there could be a sprinkling of them
in New York and Washington. The American way of life can be quite isolating
because of the concept of equal-but-separate rights, allowing individuals
and whole communities to live in their separate identity bubbles. In Washington,
most lower ranking officers in the Pakistan embassy don't come back home
upon transfer. Hence there is a large number of office staff who have 'stayed
back', living in a collective bubble. They are aggressive textbook Pakistanis,
steeped in the new fundamentalist Islam and anti-Indian rhetoric. The two
issues that fire them most against the United States and India are Palestine
and Kashmir. Blame for the issue of the Palestinian liberation from Israel
is laid squarely at the door of the United States which is run by strong
Jewish lobbies. Kashmir of course directs his ire at India but this too
finally comes to roost with the United States because most Pakistanis have
now come to see Washington becoming friendly to India.
More than in the United Kingdom,
the Americans encourage the cult of self-criticism. It is fashionable to
sit in the evening and criticise American policies around the world. There
are Pakistani amateur academics who actually make money lecturing Pakistanis
about the perfidy of the United States and its unjust hostility towards
the Muslims of the world. The two sources for this kind of polarity arise
from the academe of the United States itself: the almost millennial scholarship
of Huntington in his book on the clash of civilisations; and the almost
inexhaustible mine of anti-Americanism in the high-quality writings of
Noam Chomsky and Edward Said. This literature affects Pakistanis more than
it does Indians. It has virtually no effect on the expatriate communities
of Russia and Eastern Europe. These communities are usually alienated from
their homelands and look at the United States as a kind host which has
given them shelter and economic opportunity. The American Arabs take longer
to absorb this influence because of their lack of familiarity with the
language, but some of this literature may be available to them in translation.
In a way, the Arab alienation in the United States goes much deeper than
a Pakistani's because of this linguistic gulf. The Arab simply cannot not
communicate his anger like the Pakistani.
Islam as culture: The Pakistani
state has no cultural image. It has no entertainment industry to speak
of because of the rise of state fundamentalism. The Pakistani expatriate
too seeks culture from religion. In 1991, the Pakistani mosque in Washington
was closed down because of the rise of Shia-Sunni differences. Some of
the neutral-looking clerics of Lahore actually deliver sectarian sermons
for a thousand dollars in private meetings hosted by well-to-do Pakistanis.
In 1997, a popular show arranged by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan in Belgium was
disrupted by Maulana Shah Ahmad Noorani who insisted on addressing the
Belgian audience before the singing could begin. Most Belgians quietly
walked out of the audience. In France, similarly dominated by Barelvis,
Lahore's Allama Tahirul Qadiri sways the Pakistani mind and compels the
community to shell out large amounts of money to him. On one occasion,
he addressed a massive rally in Lahore on telephone from Cannes!
Where the Deobandis have neglected
to go there the Barelvis are in the ascendant. But both Deobandis and Barelvis
are scrappy and eager to give battle to the Christian civilisation. The
UK has been ruined by the puritanism of the Deobandis. It has been found
that even in predominantly Barelvi areas of Birmingham most of the mosques
are being controlled by rabid Deobandis. The result is that the Muslim
Congress of England tends to blindly follow the Deobandi-Wahabi lead when
it comes to taking a collective decision. Shah Ahmad Noorani, the big leader
of the Barelvis in Pakistan, shifted his venue to continental Europe after
picking up a fight with the wahabi clerics of London. The UK is the stronghold
of the hardline clergy which goes from Pakistan under a visa policy that
the British embassies have yet to sort out. The British government is also
to blame for nurturing semi-terrorist organisations like the Hizb al-Tahreer
and al-Muhajirun which it exported to Pakistan last year. Both organisations
have called for the overthrow of the Pakistani government and are spreading
their tentacles rapidly because of the funds that are sent in from London.