In a day's time

 In a day's time
(inspired by a similar poem of Pablo Neruda called "What happens in a day")

The world changes in a day's time.

In mere twenty-four hours
People give and receive flowers
The world is turned upside down
The smile, the laugh turns into a frown
A child is born, as another dies
A war starts and decimates many lives
Some laugh out loud, some suffer and cry
In the midst of a calamity
Some give up, others struggle and try.

The world changes in a day's time.

In a span of few hours
Some gain, some lose power
Old lovers part ways
She leaves, he stays
Friends become enemies, enemies friends
Passions grow cold, loyalties descend
All crack and crumble, nothing to share
No love, no warmth and no such thing as care
Feelings, trust, hope and all the beliefs
Fall and fade away like dead autumn leaves.

The world changes in a day's time.

In a day, our dreams come true
Our fears realized, and doubts renewed
Bringing mirth and joy for you and for me
Horror and grief, that's also for you and for me
Yesterday, it was all bright and sunny
But today, it's all grey and gloomy
Oh, the terrible power, the unsettling content
Of an uncertain, unpredictable moment!

So many things change in a day's time.

The old man in his ancient rocking chair
Tracing all with his tired, sunken eyes
Sits in his porch, the sun in his shriveled hair
As if defying time
He sits and he sits, looking firm, looking wise
Then one day, he's gone, no longer there
And you hear the news of his sudden demise.

On a sad November day
Lost in thoughts all the way
You walk home from work
As you turn the familiar corner
In a dull, almost mechanical manner
A sudden void, a colorless emptiness
Hits your eyes, shattering the sameness
Trying to make sense, you freeze and you heave
Gone is the giant tree, the treasure of the town
The storehouse of memories, the king with a crown
Gone! Gone with all its gamboge autumn leaves

The world changes in a day's time.

Life, Oh, life!
It has its own crazy, tragicomic ways
Disrupting plans, condemning and redeeming
Affirming and denying, all the games that it plays
What's it all about you wonder, what's the meaning
Of all the paradoxes, the contradictions
That happen in such a short time, in a day's time
You wonder, but its neither truth nor fiction
Oh, how the world changes in such a short time---in a day's time.

For more, click: The Revolution, The Force of Habit

Pakistan: The Revolution Will Not be Televised, will not be TikToked

 

The "revolution" in Pakistan (2023)

"The revolution will not be televised, brother."   

                                                                         Gil Scott-Heron (1971)
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The revolution will not be televised
It will not be on X or Facebook
Nor on Instagram, YouTube or Tiktok
It will not be brought to you
By the smug hordes of Youthiya, or
The ugly swarms of Patwari Bootiya
Nor by the secular keyboard warriors, or
The farting, jihadi maskharas--Sunni or Shia.

The revolution will not be televised brother
It will not be brought to you
By the depraved, navel-gazing narcissists
Role models of corruption, vile opportunists
The stars, celebrities and the influencers
The fashionistas, Coke Studio and PSL scum
Irredeemably conceited and comfortably numb.

The revolution will not be televised at all.

Listen! Listen you bamboozled clowns!
You can't have your cake and eat it, too
You cannot have your change a la "tsunami"

As you lust after haram naan qeema, dog meat biryani

And no honor, no respect, no dignity and dreams

For the addicted with Internet porn and TikTok memes

The revolution will never be televised brothers

As long as the television remains
The tool of choice of the Shudra khaki oppressors
There will be no pictures of Pindi pigs 

No pictures of them shooting the innocent
Of kidnappings and disappearings

Of torturing and murdering.

And there will be no Sharmeen Obaid docudramas, either
Those despicable spectacles of self-loathing nativists
Exclusively made for the liberal gaze, to soothe

The guilty conscience of the crypto-racists
To comfort and to please

The genocidal Universal White Imperialists.

The revolution will not be televised brother
It will not be televised
It will not be Tiktoked
It won't be Facebooked, nor YouTubed.

 

Short, short: The mighty indomitable force of habit

St. Simeon Stylites (ca. 390-459)

The mighty indomitable force of habit

 “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act but a habit.”  Aristotle

habit, (n). An established custom. A thing that you do often and almost without thinking, especially something that is hard to stop doing.

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St. Simeon Stylites (ca.390-459), the first of the stylites (or pillar ascetics), was born on the Syrian border of Cilicia. After spending many years in practicing severe mortifications first as a monk at a monastery and then as a hermit on the Mount Teleanissae near Antioch, where the fame of his sanctity began to attract huge crowds, he erected and mounted a pillar to escape them and remained until his death in the greatest austerity on the top of it, which was gradually increased up to a height of sixty feet. Greatly venerated as a holy man, he by preaching and personal intercourse exercised considerable influence upon the world of his time, converted many, and was listened to and consulted by all, from emperors and prelates to commoners, not only from the Middle and Near East but even from far countries in France and Spain.

The Indian traditionalist writer A.K. Saran in one his books (Takamori Lectures: The Crisis of Mankind) mentions him and his piety and then proceeds to add his own commentary in the form of an "episodic fiction" as follows:

Once when a country west far from Antioch was facing a terrible famine, the priest there prayed and got an oracular message to the effect that if St. Simeon comes down from his pillar to their city, it will end the famine. A number of high ranking emissaries were sent to the Saint by the king to persuade him to condescend to come down to the city for saving the country. He, however, went on refusing and remained adamant to their entreaties. The king then was advised to look for and engage the most charming lady in and around the country and ask her to lure the Saint to the city.

The lady with this grave mission approached the Saint and did everything to captivate him. The Saint, having endured this severest trial to the extreme point, at last gave way to the temptation and admitted that he got fascinated by her beauty and fell in love with her. When the lady, exalted and overjoyed at her success, accordingly, requested him to leave the pillar and go away with her, the Saint, however, ruled it out. And on this last point alone she could never induce him to accept. The beautiful charmer returned to the country crestfallen to report to the king the unexpected failure of the mission.

All this time, the Devil was active behind in bringing about the Saint's fall. Just when the Devil triumphantly thought the Saint had fallen, to his utter surprise the "No" of the Saint resounded in his ears. The Devil thus finally himself appeared before the Saint to confess his devilish designs and apologize---the Saint forgave him. The Devil then begged the Saint to answer one question as his last favor: how did he avert the seemingly inevitable fall at the last moment?

"By the mighty indomitable force of habit", came the reply.

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habit, (n.).

h-a-b-i-t. Remove the "h" and you still have "a bit". Remove the "h" and "a" and you are left with "bit" of it. Remove the "h", "a", and "b" and you still have "it".

Man is a creature of habit, but which can take him on either of the paths: one leading to heaven, and the other straight to hell. The choice is always ours.

Short, Short: Relationships

"The world scatters us, and the ego compresses us; God gathers us together and dilates us; He appeases us and delivers us."     

                                                                                    Frithjof Schuon

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Relationships: The great mystic Meister Eckhardt once said, “They speak of God as if He were a cow!”

The way human relationships have changed is nothing but a reflection of the way we relate to our Creator nowadays. In other words, our horizontal relationships in the created world are always dependent on our vertical relationship with God. Man, Pontifical man, stands at the intersection of the horizontal and the vertical axes of existence. He has a hierarchy within and without, in the microcosm and the macrocosm, respectively. Vertically, man has states of being, each lower state less real than the one above. Each higher state on this inner chain or “ladder” contains all that is in the lower level(s). Each lower level is the effect, and the higher one the cause of this effect. To climb up this great chain, this vertical ladder, (that is the very purpose of the gift of life, after all) traditional man always employed the science of symbols in which he was well versed. This is because all manifestations, both within and without, are in the form of symbols (ayat). But since the profaned (modern) man, the Promethean man, cannot decipher symbols, he remains blind and oblivious to the levels of being (even when he does not violently, naively and ultimately irrationally, rejects all hierarchy). Then there is the horizontal plane, or the “modes” of being. This is the plane on which we relate to the world, to creation, to all manifestations of the Principle. This is the plane of quality, of all we think and do, a plane where everything is equally “real” but only to the extent that the level is real on the vertical axis. This quality, therefore, is totally dependent on our state of being defined by its vertical level. These are just some hints on which the intelligent reader is invited to reflect and by doing so, he/she will be able to see, one hopes, where we stand now in these latter days of the corrupting cycle of time.

In short, because of these axes at the intersection of which he stands, traditional man is both king and slave, both lord and servant, or both Khalifa 'Allah and Abd 'Allah. He has been given the vicegerency of this world but is also required to be in total submission to his Creator. And it is this that is missing in the totally uprooted and profaned modern man who wants to be king but not slave and the most visible outcome of that arrogance---that sheer stupidity--- can be seen, among other manifestations, in the ecological crisis, a total collapse of life as such, that is now not a question of if but when.

Charles le Gai Eaton wrote in his last work before departing from this world: "Islam is pre-eminently the religion of relationship. When the Qur'an denounces 'breaking ties of relationship' as a sin likely to lead us to damnation it indicates quite clearly that establishing and maintaining such ties is a primary duty for God's 'viceroy on earth (khalifa). Here we we are---you and me and the rest of us---little units, pebbles on the beach. It is by our relationship with other people, with the animals and with the natural world, all of which, ultimately, point back towards the Creator of heavens and the earth." (Reflections, 2012, p.118) 

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 Duniya/The world: This duniya is like a silken shroud in which we are all wrapped. It is soft, comfortable to our body (nafs). All love it, but it is especially adored by the spiritually dormant. (from Schuon’s “Primordial meditations”).

Reason/Intellect: Reason is like the minor stars, or like the moon, that shine at night. Intellect is like the sun. Reason is like a lamp that we need as long as we are in the dark of the night, to help us, to guide us, to show us the way. With the rise of the sun, which is the intellect, the stars and the moon fade away and lose their efficacy in the brightness of day. The lamp becomes useless. Only a fool would insist on using it while the sun shines brightly overhead.  

Existence of God:  To deny God is to see the wave and deny the existence of the ocean; to deny God is to see a speck of dust and deny space. To insist on asking for the “proofs” of the existence of God is to be like that little fish that asks its mother for the proof of the existence of water.

 

For more, click: The Post-real world as hell

The System: The Puppets

The System: The Puppets

The System: The System of the khaki Shudra "elite", that inverted evil juggernaut that has been lorded over by mediocrity of the worst kind---by obnoxious duffers, by little men who have no scruples or qualms of any kind whatsoever--- for decades, is a system of manipulation par excellence. It is an ugly puppet show, where the puppet masters always pull the strings from behind and present the half-wits, the doofuses and the dullards as the real "leaders" and rulers of the narcotized, bamboozled awam. These sorry civilian punchinellos, who are nothing but the cover, the tragi-comic masks that hide the criminal Pindi-Lahore mafia are more like contraceptives that are pulled over the puppet masters' weapon of mass rape with which the awam are regularly ravished and violated as they are coaxed and cajoled to lay back and enjoy it, all in the name of national security, patriotism, faith, unity and discipline. This crude, abhorrent jugglery is marketed and sold to the TikTok, Coke Studio, PSL and TV morning show (not to say anything of Internet porn) addicted awam as the real thing mostly through the army of shameless, despicable media con artists, from owners to anchors and "senior ANAL-ysts", all of whom are always eagerly ready to do what the the highest bidders desire them to do. Seventy-six years since the "independence" of Pakistan, and the obscene, puppet show continues!

For more, please click: Quettawali (4 parts)

Illuminations #7 (Urdu), The Post-real World, 

The System: The Guardians

What is Quettawali? (Part 4: Conclusion)

 What is Quettawali? Part 4: Conclusion

(Part 1, Part 2 , Part 3 )

“A man of understanding has lost nothing if he has himself….The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.”

                                                                          Michel de Montaigne

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest achievement.” 

                                                                           Ralph Waldo Emerson

“There is more required nowadays to make a single wise man than formerly to make seven sages, and more is needed nowadays to deal with a single person than required with a whole people in former times.” 

                                                                                   Gracian Baltasar
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Modernity, whenever and wherever it arrives, it does so at enormous costs. It is a world shattering, or rather, a worldview-shattering phenomenon. Like a powerful earthquake, it jolts everything: it disrupts the old, disturbs continuities, fragments totalities and dilutes authenticities; it profanes the sacred everywhere, especially within the experiencing and knowing subject, to speak philosophically. Modernity, after all, is by default both a state of mind and a state of being that elevates the worldly and the secular and declares triumphantly “God is dead!” in its Nietzschean manifestation, and “If there is no God, I am god and everything is permissible!” in its Dostoyevskian interpretation. That is why the modern worldview is defined, above all, by an absence of the sense of the sacred. The non-modern or traditional universe, on the contrary, is infused with the sacred, with the symbolic. It is qualitative in nature, since symbols always connect what is lower and mundane (matter, quantity) to the higher, the spiritual and the transcendental, connecting the contingent visible to the Eternal Invisible.

Modernity, because it is so thoroughly worldly and because it has the utmost disregard for the sacred, eventually turns whatever is symbolic into the diabolic (the opposite of symbolic being diabolic). It inverts values and reprioritizes the elements of a culture’s value system. It attacks the foundational structures of a traditional, non-modern society, not so much to completely destroy it but to retool, re-evaluate and re-prioritize its organizing principles. It succeeds by turning the essentials of a traditional society into accidentals and, conversely, its accidentals into essentials. Modernity succeeds not so much by destroying, but by making irrelevant. While rejection still retains the power of, or at least the potential for, revival and alternative uses---if only because in some ways it is still relevant and equal, is a virile rival, even if temporarily sidelined----irrelevancy is not only uselessness, but also nonsense and meaninglessness; it is impotency. A scholar of perennial wisdom or hikma which is a form of knowledge and being that is the hallmark of all authentic religious traditions has even gone so far as to say that “Modernity is essentially evil, but only accidentally good; Tradition is essentially good, but only accidentally evil.” (Seyyed Hossein Nasr in Knowledge and the Sacred).

In the previous three parts on Quettawali (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3), I talked about identity and community. In this final part of the series I will look at some more related issues, especially the profound changes that have taken place in Quetta over the past few decades and conclude with some speculations about the future of the place and its code of life, Quettawali.

Sociologists have long argued that a most visible sign of ever-expanding modern metropolitan spaces is the phenomenon of uprooting. As a sociological concept, this word can mean "moving people forcibly from their homelands into new and foreign lands" or even destroying them, like uprooting a plant, a tree. Not that they are two very different things; often they are similar, even identical in meaning. There is always an element of destruction in uprooting, especially if the plant is mature and productive, to keep with our metaphor of the tree. This destruction is complete where the plant is not re-rooted or replanted elsewhere, in a different soil and clime. It is important to take note of the adverb “forcibly” in the definition. In the case of human beings, this uprooting takes on a totally new and complex meaning since we are more than a mere biological life form: there is history and identity, sociality, culture and so on. Whatever else it may or may not be, uprooting is tragedy; it is pain, suffering, and trauma.

The accelerated, unplanned and unchecked urbanization of Quetta has not only put tremendous stress on the natural resources and public amenities of the valley, but, more importantly, it has also affected the old ways of doing, knowing and being. With this anarchic urbanization has come uprooting and fragmentation of communities and, since nature abhors vacuum, the arrival of a new global, mass culture of crass individualism. In the process, while some were uprooted and forced to leave, the uprooted from elsewhere have been pouring in. At the same time, the arrival of the over-arching forces of rupture in the form of modernization and its attendant, secularization, has meant the dissolution of real communities into floating agglomerations of atomized individuals and expediently defined artificial groups. Many of these people increasingly go online in search of meaning in the so-called “social networks” where all relations are mediated by gadgets, applications, software and hardware. Most of these cyber/online communities are sorry parodies of the real communities from which these "netizens" have been displaced, or which they have willingly abandoned in a new rat race to keep up with the “times”----the online zeitgeist. There is certain angst, an existential fear, among the extreme cases of these networked but otherwise shrunken, unmoored souls. It is an anxiety condition now commonly known as FOMO, or Fear of Missing Out. To many of these de-centered, floating yahoos it never occurs that sometimes it is actually best to miss out on certain things in life!

One of the effects of these changes is that often real people---duty-conscious and responsible citizens, rooted social beings----become hustlers with imported ethos, the most elevated, meaning-giving translation of which is seen in the thoroughly conditioned activities of buying-selling and accumulation. This new hustling culture can be observed in action in the multi-storied shopping malls that are popping up in Quetta like wild, toxic mushrooms. These glitzy monstrosities of concrete, metal and glass are not only eye sores to anyone who still remembers and values the traditional aesthetics of the built landscape of the city----low-rise residential and commercial buildings that blended well with their natural surroundings and that did not block views of the snow-peaked, majestic mountains that surround Quetta valley----but more importantly, they are also the screaming symbols of a cheap, gaudy culture of cold human exchange and immoderate (materialistic) acquisition.


Once upon a time, there were only general stores and provision stores in Quetta. Community-centered, owned and run by hard working people, these small businesses, along with the street hawkers of fruits and vegetables----the rehri walla, including that mobile recycling center that worked through a rather sophisticated new-for-old and old-for-new bartering system, the aanday baanday walla!----not only served their neighborhoods by selling daily essentials, but also, through their small scale activities, maintained social trust and ecological balance throughout the whole process of exchange, from the initial producer to the final buyer and consumer of a product. Because the vendors themselves were part of their local communities, buying and selling were very personal and the relationships were long term, all of which meant that everyone involved in the transactions had to shoulder the burden of trust and responsibility. The entire process was infused with ethics, in short. People would buy on credit and it was normal for families to maintain credit ledgers with their local general/provision stores, vegetable vendors and bread sellers (tandoor walla or naan bayee). With these huge shopping malls and shopping plazas and their impersonal, profit-only modes of exchange, this whole organic system of human transaction and relationship is replaced, or rather, displaced and discarded. Modern malls are, after all, places where one often visits not so much to get the daily necessities of life as to have an “experience” of shopping, or just to “hang out” at. And most of what passes for necessities these days are manufactured needs, anyway. These false necessities---objects of greed rather than of real needs----are created through the 24/7 capitalist consumerist propaganda, called advertisements, on TV and the Internet. Like everything else we so readily and happily thank the cult of convenience for, this choice of what we really need and don't need, this crucial act of critical judgment or discrimination, is made for us by Google, Instagram and Facebook algorithms and Netflix/Hollywood nowadays. Modern shopping malls are by their very nature---because they are so heavily resource and energy dependent---wasteful and, therefore, anti-ecological. More importantly, they are destructive of perennial human virtues like thrift, contentment (ridha), humility and simplicity, all of which are the foundational virtues upon which stood the old Quettawali.

I think it was Jane Jacobs, the great chronicler of urban decay and revival and the legendary activist author of “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, who once viewed life in villages and small towns to be similar to living in a kind of social prison where everyone knows everyone else, where there are "taboos" and "myths", and because of which one has to observe decorum and even engage in self and social censorship of all kinds in order to belong responsibly to, and remain respectfully part of, one’s community. In big cities, where anonymity often means freedom, such rituals are considered redundant since everyone is like a stranger, a traveler, someone who is merely passing through. There is a certain charm and attraction in the latter, if only because it affords people freedom from the constraining taboos of small towns. But that freedom comes at a cost to both the individual and his/her community. The American sociologist Robert Putnam has brilliantly articulated some of these costs of community breakdown and social isolation in his books Bowling Alone, Better Together, Our Kids and The Upswing. The self, after all, becomes truly free when it is enmeshed with the “other” in all its complexity: “For one to be (truly) free there must be at least two” says Zygmunt Bauman, the incisive chronicler of "Modernity as Holocaust". It is also the first step in moving from self to Self, to use the language of Hindu metaphysics.

For example, what the modern mind often disparagingly calls “taboo” once had a positive social role and ethical function, both in the private and especially in the public realm. So did the many myths, which are also now seen negatively, something that is false, fictional and opposed to modern instrumental reason, or as the relic of “under-developed” savages or “primitive” cultures. Certainly not always an unmitigated blessing, taboos usually functioned as informal codes of law and order. As age-old established ideas and practices, they often regulated behavior effectively and kept transgressions from the norm at a minimum. In traditional societies whose members know better, a myth, as Ananda Coomaraswamy has so aptly said, “ …is the penultimate truth…myth embodies the nearest approach to absolute truth that can be stated in words.” In short, myths are higher truths that escape complete human articulation and expression through the usual human faculties like the Weberian bureaucratic rationality. But the irony is that modernity----and now its logical offspring, postmodernity---in its hasty and half-baked efforts to debunk and “deconstruct” traditional myths, has reinstated its own violent myths and ugly taboos, thus proving the truism that the opposite of one type of taboo and myth is not some absolutely objective anti-myth rationality---an omniscient, godly view from nowhere----but another type of taboo and myth! One is tempted to recall Shakespeare and claim that modern man "commits the oldest sins in the newest kind of ways." Says Frithjof Schuon: "Those who reproach our ancestors with having been stupidly credulous forget in the first place that one can also be stupidly incredulous, and in the second place that the self-styled destroyers of illusion live on illusions that exemplify a credulity second to none; for a simple credulity can be replaced by a complicated one, adorned with the arabesque of a studied doubt that forms part of the style, but it is still credulity: complication does not make error less false, nor stupidity less stupid." (Light on the Ancient Worlds, 2006: 83)

In the end, there are only our deep metaphysical presuppositions or beliefs that we need to choose from. The point here is that the choice for us---and yes, it is a choice in a sense----is between submitting to something higher to us---the transcendent, the higher Reality, Truth, Haqq----and genuflecting to the man-made idols of this world. It is a choice, either to be Imago Dei or profane man, to be a pontifical being or a promethean one. (see On Belief)

To get back to the issues of uprooting and urbanization with which I started this piece, starting in the late 1970s, Quetta underwent some profound changes at all levels and in all domains, socio-political, economic and so on. The most visible of these, and the most important in my view, was the arrival of Afghan refugees from neighboring Afghanistan, as a result of the Afghan war waged by jihadi fanatics against the Soviets and their installed vassals in that country. The story of that devastating war---the Dollar Jihad, or Petrodollar Jihad, as it is known---has been well told by many others and I have also discussed it in some of my blogposts so I will not dwell too much on it here. In short, in the two or three decades after the war started in the late 1970s, Pakistan became a frontline state from where the brutal war was planned, sponsored or financed by the imperialist Americans and their neo-Wahhabi Saudi and Gulf clients. While that war completely destroyed Afghanistan----it is still destroying in one form or another---and as it turned many hustlers, crooks and criminals in the forked-tongued, Janus-faced Pakistani establishment into billionaires----both of the khaki/boots variety and otherwise---the delicate natural and cultural ecology of border towns like Quetta, and to some extent Peshawar, suffered irreparable damage.

The displaced people of the war-ravaged Afghanistan who poured into Quetta and surrounding areas in droves, often with different histories and sets of values, were psychologically damaged and badly traumatized. This would have implications for the local communities among whom they would eventually settle. Obviously, survival was top priority for the displaced. Their host country which, after having helped Western imperialists and hypocritical Gulf potentates destroy their country and their lives in the name of some misguided, if not outright stupid, geopolitical notion of “strategic depth” to be achieved with the aid of an expedient and instrumental understanding of “jihad”, neither had the capability nor the will to accommodate them in a decent and humane manner as is required by international norms and laws. That criminal apathy of the Pindi-Lahore ruling criminal mafia towards the displaced and the brutalized of Afghanistan was also because they were pouring into that internally colonized and plundered province of Balochistan and not into Islamabad or Lahore. Any large scale human catastrophe is also an opportunity for criminal elements to flourish. War is a racket, after all, and not just for those who start it, feed it, and who keep it going. And that is what happened during the Afghanistan war as well, a war that has yet to come to an end. Soon after the arrival of the refugees, the guns, drugs and other evils followed. For example, the AK-47 Kalashnikov sub-machine gun which was the weapon of choice for the dollar-funded jihadis fighting in Afghanistan and the lethally addictive drug heroin made from the poppy grown in that country became easily and cheaply available commodities in the bazaars of Quetta, just like matchboxes and onions or potatoes. Illicit capital swamped the local markets and, as a result, property prices soared exponentially.

But these were just some of the nuisances. The arrival of a pathologically literalist and violently politicized version of Islam---Petro Islamism from the Gulf---is another big factor that one cannot ignore in any honest and meaningful accounting of the changes that have taken place over the past few decades in Quetta in particular and in the country in general. These rigid, narrow, and imported modern-literalist interpretations----one might say the standard, globalized, post-modern model of religion that manifests itself in such places as India, Myanmar, USA, Nigeria, Sri Lanka----are open attacks on the local, rooted and integral understandings of the faith which are always infused with the traditional, spiritual or the esoteric dimension of faith. These pre-jihadi understandings and practices of the faith were not blinded by the extremely literalist and exclusivist interpretations that insist on seeing and understanding religion with one eye only and which are, historically speaking, recent phenomena anyway. They were mindful of the inner mysteries of the faith, the spirit, complexity and the hikma that have always been part and parcel of traditional Islam, of Sunnah and of Tasawwuf in particular, a wisdom reflected in such Hadith e Qudsi, where Allah says: “My mercy prevails over My wrath”. But given the atrocious power differentials in this kind of encounter of interpretations, the fickleness of the passionate or lower self, the dominance of greed, the lust for pelf and power, unrestrained worldliness, amoral Machiavellian political expediency, these integral and holistic local understandings of faith are being overwhelmed by the generic, imported interpretations and their crude, totalistic epistemologies. The political psychologist, Ashis Nandy, has a point when he says:

“…once you believe in a generic form of religion or faith, you are closer to more powerful but narrower forms of history, political culture, and even shared prejudices about how the experience of the past can be interpreted. Your prejudices and stereotypes are no longer small-scale or local. So what was previously the extremism of a particular sect of fundamentalists belonging to, say, Sunni Islam, now becomes the traits of Muslims and Islam in general. What was previously a perceived shortcoming or intolerance of a particular Western Indian peasant caste becomes a feature of Hindus as a whole. As you begin to use generic categories identified with Hindus and Muslims, you lose touch with specific communities. You are gradually pushed towards standardized forms of history…and the emphasis shifts to historical eras in which one faith oppressed, ruled over, or humiliated another.” (Ashis Nandy in Talking India, p.99).

Before the ugly rise of systematic ethno-sectarian bigotry and violence partly as a result of this reduction of faith to a crass political ideology, it was simply unthinkable to witness the pastoral, mountain dwelling Baloch and their somewhat urbanized cousins, the Brahvis, indulge in murderous orgies of the sort that happened in places such as Mastung and Khuzdar some years ago when Shia pilgrims travelling on buses----particularly Hazara Shias but also some non-Hazaras---- were separated from non-Shias and gunned down brutally in broad daylight. In old Quetta, there were no fire spitting, hatred spewing, opportunist charlatans named “Mengal” or “Barech”. Then, violent fanaticism in matters of faith were the last things to be the identity markers of these two native peoples of the province. These were people who had always had a spiritually sensitive, and, therefore, a more nuanced understanding of their faith. These were people who had hosted many Hindus, Sikhs and people of different sects and religious traditions for centuries amongst them, in their own communities. Many of them still do: witness the presence of some of the country's oldest Hindu communities in places like Dera Bugti and Sibi. These communities were pluralists or “multiculturalists” long, very long, before the overlords of humanity in the modern-secular West---and their brown and black satraps in the non-Western metropolises----started theorizing about it and preaching its virtues both within and outside the modern West!

The Dictator: The mustachioed Jhallandari EVIL!

Now, it is no secret that some of the members of these old communities of the province, the Baloch and the Brahvi, were propagandized and transformed---into strategic "assets"---- again mostly with the help of Gulf petro dollars, in order to neutralize and counter the more secular-leaning nationalist elements who have long struggled for their rights in what they see as the oppressive, predatory federation, the Pindi-Lahore cabal. After all, these fanatical and murderous “assets” of the Center, the powers-that-be that (mis)-rule from Islamabad/Rawalpindi, are cost effective and efficient when it comes to the deployment of the diabolical colonial ruse of distract-delude-divide-destroy-and-rule in the peripheries. Or, fittna, to use the vernacular. These ugly sectarian ideologies of blood and gore, these merciless death cults that have no relation to any of the authentically revealed religions, except for their ridiculous names and vacuous slogans, and that in fact borrow profusely from modern totalitarian and genocidal worldviews like Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism, and Fascism, were imported into the city and the province for that purpose from interior Punjab and also from neighboring Afghanistan where they were first incubated and actively nurtured and promoted, by the same actors, for the Dollar Jihad of the 1980s.

The tragic consequences of these exclusivist and highly ideologized/politicized understandings and the profane and utilitarian abuses of religion----what Chalmers Johnson in another context once called “blowback”----are there for all to see: suicide bombings, target killings, sectarian slayings, the spread of a pathological culture of bigotry and intolerance across the country. Those who have poisoned the well are now forced to drink from it, as an old saying reminds us. All of these toxic developments have turned Quetta into a war zone with military and paramilitary check-posts and armored cars everywhere in the city. A big chunk of its population is permanently traumatized and many of them carry deep psychological scars within, the inner injuries that will take years if not decades to heal.

The future: In these four pieces on Quettawali, I have tried to identify some features of the way of life in old Quetta. I talked about the notions of identity, community and also some of the values (iqdaar) that I believe one can identify as essential ingredients of that code of life. In these posts and in some of my other blogposts I have argued that Quetta has now become a very different place. The changes are mostly destructive of the natural and social-cultural ecologies of the place and what has not changed has become corrupted from within even if the appearance or the form remains. The readers may find my assessment of these changes mostly negative. If that is the case, they are correct, and I am not going to apologize for any of it. That lament is exactly what these articles are trying to convey. For example, in Quetta of today, the new definitions and boundaries of the self and the other (identity), apart from or because of being totally instrumental and one dimensional, are built not on the earlier awareness and appreciation of similarities and distinctions, but on their ruins. There is a discernible air of strangeness, of disconnect, of anomie and apathy, and a growing culture of hustling everywhere one goes: “What’s in it for me?”, a culture of nafsa nafsi, as they say locally. The cult of quantity, or commodity fetishism, is fast replacing the old ethos of quality and symbolism. Perhaps Quetta will become another soulless metropolis with lonely people living together. Perhaps the new and future residents of Quetta will shape the city and everything in it in their own image and with the passage of time the old Quettawali will be no more, or it will be looked upon as something quaint at best and absurd at worst. To quote the critic Theodore Dalrymple, they, the future residents of the old Shalkot, would then giggle helplessly at the absurdity and say: “Such naiveté is not for us in our enlightened state, however, and we prove our sophistication by finding it ridiculous!”

What is Quettawali? (Part 3: Identity)

 What is Quettawali ? Part 3: Identity

( Part 1, Part 2 )

“The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.”                                                            Michel de Montaigne

“Only religion allows people to be magnificent without egotism.”

                                                                 Sheikh Abdal Hakim Murad
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In this part 3 of my ruminations on Quettawali, I want to take up the issue of identity which I think is of critical importance if we want to understand how things have changed, or devolved, over the years in Quetta. To recap, we have already seen the importance of community and what happens when communities break down and anomie and alienation take over. Communal breakdown is a universal phenomenon, a malaise of late modernity that afflicts societies the world over. Sociologists have for long grappled with this issue, from Durkheim, Marx (when he was in his sociologist mode), Weber, Veblen, C. Wright Mills, to Anthony Giddens, Christopher Lasch and Zygmunt Bauman, to name some of the well-known figures in the discipline. One of the more recent books on this societal malaise is the brilliant socio-cultural survey of America by the sociologist Robert D. Putnam, a book aptly titled as Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Communities. Communities are, of course, made up of individuals who hold on to notions of the self and the other, or have identities, that define the collectives they form. The communities will be healthy and effective to the extent that the identities of the individuals are healthy and whole.

In the community where we grew up, the elders were elders first and then anything else. Children respected---and often feared---those elders as children first than as anything or anybody else. Age, belonging, a strong sense of community and familiarity transcended all ethnic, linguistic, religious and sectarian appellations. My father, a Quettawaal Hazara, never tires of telling me stories about the days when a Pashtun or a Punjabi elder, who knew my grandfather and the family (everybody knew everybody else in those days!), would reprimand him in public because he had been caught red-handed, say, loitering at the cinemas (called bi-scope in those days) during school hours. The elder from the other community would often grab him, or one of his equally mischievous friends, by the ear and would only let go when he was finally at the door of the house lecturing my father in front of his parents who, in turn, would quickly join the elder in those acts of rebuke. The same would happen the other way round. In addition to their many immediate ethno-linguistic and religio-sectarian identities, the Awans of Tel Gudam, the Fateh Khans of Nichari, the Marri Balochis and the Kasis of Khudaidad Road and the nearby mohallas (from Lodi Maidan, to Nichari and all the way up to the foot of Koh e Murdar) were also all part of the same bigger, inclusive community of Quetta where we all lived. Many of their mischievous youth used to receive similar rebukes from my elders. That is how things were then.

There was mutual respect, there was trust and communal belonging, fraternity, sharing and caring, all of which were informed by the traditional understandings of the self and the other. In that worldview, the “I” was not indiscriminately exclusive---like it often is nowadays where it is defined by artificial ideological constructions--- just as the “other” was not completely a stranger, or a dreaded and feared alien. Then, the identities were multi-layered and complex even if there were no sociologists to theorize them as such and then publish papers and books on them. People were many things at the same time, and equally true to each level of their identities. People did not understand themselves in utterly negative terms, in the sense of “I am what I am because I am not what you are” or “I am what I am because I am not you”. Identity was not "aridly singular" but was "a nested series which spiraled out" as Shiv Visvanathan has said. The self was not rigidly understood and the other was not vilified and violently demonized as a threat, as the totally other that must be sidelined, even destroyed. In other words, there was an ethic of accommodation and a generosity of spirit, all religiously informed. Entertaining difference was part of the ethos of all communities. The Quettawali ethos knew how to entertain the “otherness” of the other, while at the same time cherish similarities.

The Great Chain of Being: hierarchy within and without

There was a certain kind of fluidity, or open-endedness to identities, not of the amoral post-modern type (“anything goes!”), but one imbued with traditional virtues of empathy, concern for truth, goodness and beauty, for love and caring. Difference and separateness were there, for sure, but the frontiers that defined them were comfortably porous. What was said and done always had an other-worldly dimension to it and was not exhausted by the dictates of instrumental cost-benefit reasoning that is the hallmark of the modern “entrepreneurial” mindset which starts and ends with “What’s in it for me (or for my group)?”. Modernity and its materialist-worldly cult of hustling, after all, is nothing if not a narrowing of the horizons of consciousness. It is a shrinking of the horizon of thought and the coarsening of the faculty of feeling, “a way of drowning into nothingness” as a sage has said. "Hell is other people!" says one character in a famous work No Exit by the quintessentially modern existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre. While its proponents make so much noise about human rights and human equality, its actual nineteenth and twentieth century record is abysmal on many fronts. From racist colonialism, ethnocidal nationalisms to ecocidal capitalist imperialism, everywhere we look the “other” of the dominant modern-western-white “self” is the enemy that must be controlled, dominated, opposed, marginalized, ghettoized and annihilated.

One could even say that, in the olden days in Quetta, there was a certain charm in the way people understood themselves and others. Or, it was an “authentic innocence”: an innocent charm, yet full of wisdom. It was what we see in an innocent child where the duality of self and the other has not yet manifested itself, not because of the child’s immaturity but because of the child’s pure consciousness which has yet to be sullied by the ways of the world. It is the same consciousness that becomes whole and united again at the other end of life’s spectrum, in spiritual union, when one becomes old and gets ready for departure to where one has come from, as Seyyed Hossein Nasr has so beautifully explained in one of his important writings on the self and other. The time I am recalling was a time when not everything had become secularized and profane yet. There was symbolism and an understanding of the qualitative aspects of things in addition to their quantitative sides. Above all, the sense of the sacred in everything, of something bigger than our trivial selves, still pervaded the cultural landscape of the city. There was more authentic religion, both understood and especially practiced and lived, and less pretentious, toxic religiosity. The values have been reversed now; an inversion has taken place.

Based on such notions of identity and community, Quetta was a sane society then. One’s identity was not merely an extension of one’s ego yearning for worldly gains, an ego ceaselessly engaged in the cost benefit analysis of the crassest type, but it was a notion of self that was embedded within a system of concentric circles each of which was a rich layer of identity. There was an awareness and respect for the perennial Golden Rules such as, what we do to others we cannot but invite the same upon ourselves; or, what we do to our own, we cannot but invite others to do the same to us; and, do unto others what you want done to you by others. These were all the constituent principles of the code of life shared by all the communities of old Quetta, something which I have been calling Quattawali in these articles.

In this age of Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and especially TikTok (the newest and the deepest of the chambers of cyber/digital hell!) things have radically changed. People now still have fluid and complicated identities, but of a totally different type. These identities that many wear like masks and badges nowadays are the readily available avatars on the Internet. These are the plug and play, the use and discard type of identities available for download and upload on the innumerable digital platforms. In the wake of collapse of real communities of real people, and in the absence of nuanced and historically informed notions of identity, these one dimensional, disoriented, atomized individuals who populate the cyber “communities” and social media networks with their ever changing disposable identity labels, are like floating weeds. They can be easily pushed and pulled in any direction by the manipulative entrepreneurs, the psychopathic merchants of the new attention economy, and the captains of the “perception management” industries. These zero-empathy, psychopathic gurus of the capitalist corporate world are people who subtly and invisibly “govern us, control and mold our minds, form our tastes and suggest our ideas” without our knowledge as the father of modern propaganda, Edward Barnays, wrote a century ago.

In short, in old Quetta, people were often contented and secure in their skins. Time moved slowly and humanely without making everybody its prisoner; thought and speech had quality and gravity, and when there was no speech, the silences were rich, meaningful and pregnant with the sublime; the old zeitgeist valued self-effacement and humility, not vulgar exhibitionism and toxic narcissism; feelings were profound yet subdued and often sincere; relationships had depth, were cultivated and rooted in communal soil and nurtured carefully with age-old virtues. One’s identity and self-respect were not dependent on the demonization of the other as “kaffir” or “traitor”, or on the number of “likes” or “followers” on the anti-social digital wastelands euphemistically called "social media", but on the ineffable, on perennial iqdaar (values), some of which I have listed in these articles on Quettawali.

Continued... (see Part 4)

What is Quettawali? (Patrt 2: Community)

What is Quettawali? Part 2: Community

( Part 1)

"I do not create; I only tell of the past."                                           Confucius
"If you don't know where you are, you don't know who you are." 

                                                                                       Wendell Berry
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My friend Aamir, another Quettawaal who is also exiled like yours truly but in a different corner of the world, tells me stories of his dada, his grandfather. Just like his grandson two generations later, the dada was also born and raised in Quetta and was an employee of the government revenue services department. In the final years of his service, he was posted in Lahore, Punjab, against his wish. But as soon as he got his retirement---in 1960----he promptly returned to Quetta complaining that he could not live in a place where upon leaving the house one was not met and greeted by friends and acquaintances on a daily basis. That was then. Now, in today’s Quetta, one is not sure if one will return alive or not, let alone met and greeted by friends and acquaintances. This is the case for a big chunk of the city’s unfortunate residents, if not for all. I will return to this little anecdote and to our discussion of Quettawali with which I ended the first part of this essay later. For now, let me digress a bit.

In January this year I visited Quetta. To get a voltage converter for my mother’s food processor, I went to the old Suraj Ganj Bazaar (now also called Suraj Ganj Road by some) where all the electrical appliance and hardware stores are located. I was advised by everybody, especially by family and friends, to take a rickshaw but I took the bicycle that I had borrowed from my cousin for the duration of my stay there. I love bicycles, especially mountain bikes. The call for extra caution was because of the now decade old ethno-sectarian violence, the indiscriminate butchering and target killing of Shias, especially Hazaras----- a cancer, a murderous blight, that has become part of daily life for many of the residents of Quetta. I took the risk anyway because I wanted to observe things up close and what is the best way to do that if not on a bicycle, given the nasty traffic congestion in the city especially during rush hours, which, in fact, means all day long. With all the bike-riding skills that I have accumulated over the years riding bicycles in five different countries on four continents, it still took me about an hour to get to my destination. Total distance covered: not more than 4 kms!

Riding past one of the oldest hardware merchants of the city, K.M. Khan Hardware Store, I was happy to see the old watch repair shop next to it: The Accurate Watch Co. Still sitting there by that giant hardware store and with its mostly rusted and sun-beaten sign board faintly showing the painted letters that made up the barely legible name of the store under an equally faded picture of a Rolex (??) wrist watch, this kiosk-like store has a special meaning for me. Upon entering eighth grade in school, my grandfather gifted me with my first wrist watch, a classic ocean blue-dialed Favre-Leuba. It was a beautiful Swiss watch and I fell in love with it right away. Very soon, however, I had to pay my first visit to this iconic watch repair shop in Quetta City. The reason for that visit was that while playing outside with my friends, I accidentally broke the glass dial cover of the watch. I neither told my grandfather, nor my father about what had happened. Instead, I showed the broken watch to our beloved, sage-like home tutor, Mr. P.K. Ali who was also a watch lover and the proud owner of an Omega, or maybe it was a Rado. He strictly forbade me from taking the watch to any other place for repair. His recommendation was the one that was the most trusted in the city: The Accurate Watch Co. in Suraj Ganj Bazaar. We went to the store together where he introduced me to the owner who was not only one of the finest watch experts in Quetta City then but also one of her most honest citizens.

Anyway, I was looking for an old store, for something from the old days, for a name that would strike me as familiar. I soon found one: Modern Electric(al) Store, right across from the newly renovated Saif and Co. It was ten or fifteen stores down the street on the right hand side, going in the direction of Jinnah Road. No sooner had I entered it than a pair of old eyes affixed themselves on me, following me as I moved down the long aisle of the store scanning the marked boxes with voltage and wattage numbers and other similar information. From a dimly lit section of the place a middle aged man came rushing towards me and started looking at me with inquiring eyes. I told him what I was looking for. He nodded and disappeared again in that relatively darker corner of the store from where he had emerged. I turned around to face the old eyes which were still looking my way. An old man, probably in his mid-seventies or early-eighties, and most probably the father of the middle aged guy, was sitting on an old wooden nylon-knit rattan chair next to the cash register. He was wearing a white shalwar kameez and a greyish Qaraquli cap. A few quiet seconds passed, and with eyes still focused on me, he spoke: “Returned to Quetta after a long time?” “Yes”, I said. A few more seconds passed and then pointing to the chaotic mess of people, rickshaws, bicycles, cars, vans, donkey and man pulled carts and all the other moving beings and objects on the street, he said again, “So, how does it feel to be back?” I told him that a lot had changed and also that nothing had changed. It seemed that he ignored the second part of my answer and, whisperingly as if not talking to anyone in particular, confirmed the first part by saying “Yes, indeed. A lot has changed. A lot.” No other words were exchanged after that vague, elliptical comment. The middle-aged guy returned with my voltage regulator and after powering it up to make sure it was good, he made me a receipt. I paid the sum of Rs. 1500 and said my thank, salam and left. But as I was leaving, my eyes met again with the eyes of the old man with the faded Qaraquli. I smiled at him and without showing any expressions on his face but with the same sad firmness of gaze in his old eyes that had obviously witnessed a lot over the years, he said in a somber voice, “Bachay, apna khayal rakhna” (son, take care/be careful).

To return to our discussion of Quettawali----what it was (or still is), what iqdaar (values) underpinned it and how it used to get expressed through the day-to-day conduct or lifestyles of the different communities of Quetta----let me focus on some key words in this second installment. In part 1 of this essay, I mentioned some terms such as, values, virtues, code of life, worldview and especially community. I want to take up and say something about that last term first. So, let us begin with the question: what is a community? This word, or this concept, is nowadays many things to many people. It is, like many other words, much abused. It is like one of those “glittering generalities” that all kinds of vested interests abuse for their own worldly ends. Wikipedia defines a “glittering generality” in this way: “It is an emotionally appealing phrase so closely associated with highly valued concepts and beliefs that it carries conviction without supporting information or reason. Such highly valued concepts attract general approval and acclaim. Their appeal is to emotions such as love of [religion], country and home, and desire for peace, freedom, glory, and honor. They ask for approval without examination of the reason. They are typically used by politicians and propagandists.” Suspect words and phrases include: democracy, liberty, development, sustainable, human rights, humanitarian, science, progress, civilization, freedom, tolerance, well-being, wellness, care, hope (remember that mendacious Uncle Tom, Barack Obama and his fraudulent rhetoric of "hope" and “care”?), fundamentalist, terrorist, social and recently the most pernicious of them all, “entrepreneur”. Community is one such word, too.

A staple word, a stock-in-trade of the neo-colonial secular missionaries of the 1980s, 1990s and the noughties----the NGO cabals, those exploitative tentacles of the Universal White Imperialism operating in the “Third World”, or in the “least developed” regions of the country such as Balochistan and interior Sindh-----the use and abuse of this word “community” is now carried out by a much larger and diverse range of actors and interests, and is spread over much larger areas, both physical and mental, that is. It is no longer limited to the world of mendacious NGO operators with their fancy expressions like “sustainable community”, “grassroots community”, “community development”, “community support”, “community empowerment”, “community help” and so on, but has been, for example, lovingly and wholeheartedly embraced by the makers, promoters and users of digital technologies in their cyber spaces on the Internet and especially on the anti-social platforms euphemistically called “social media”. As critical scholars have long argued, Chris Hedges being one of the most prominent among them, those who want to control, exploit and dominate us first seek to corrupt and dominate our speech: “They seek to obscure meaning; they declare war on language” first, says Chris. Or, before the daisy cutters and carpet bombs are dropped on “evil” brown, yellow and black people in far-away lands, the target population is demonized 24/7 by the full-spectrum propaganda machinery of the corporate state, consent is manufactured in the insouciant home public’s consciousness through the manipulative and toxic use of language. The result is that war is rendered as peace, ignorance as strength, slavery as freedom, human wrongs as humanitarianism and human rights (remember R2P ?), to recall the work and words of George Orwell.

But to have a better understanding of this word “community” in the context of Quettawali we will have to work with a different, if not older, definition and understanding of such terms----understandings and meanings that now seem to be lost to those addicted to “tricknologies of mass deception”: this “trance generation” with its masturbatory approach to life includes people who tirelessly seek constant titillation and instant gratification and who, according to the political-psychologist John F. Schumacher, have “an insatiable appetite for any technology that can downsize awareness and blunt the emotions.”

One such understanding of community, as distinct from its postmodern incarnations hinted at above, is nicely articulated by the British philosopher and writer John Gray. Says Gray:

“We are who we are because of the places in which we grow up, the accents and friends we acquire by chance, the burdens we have not chosen but somehow learn to cope with. Real communities are always local-places in which people have put down roots and are willing to put up with the burdens of living together. The fantasy of virtual community is that we can enjoy the benefits of community without its burdens, without the daily effort to keep delicate human connections intact. Real communities can bear these burdens because they are embedded in particular places and evoke enduring loyalties. In cyberspace, however, there is nowhere that a sense of place can grow, and no way in which the solidarities that sustain human beings through difficult times can be forged.” (John Gray, ‘The sad side of cyberspace’, The Guardian, 10 April 1995.) 

Places, roots, accents, friends, loyalties and above all, burdens or responsibilities. More words! Quettawali, as I wrote earlier, is not narrowly exclusive, not ethnocentric or ethnically defined, but a place oriented or community-centered normative code of life. It is a kind of worldview, or a weltanschauung in other words. “Normative” because it is underpinned by norms (values or iqdaar, or religious values in this case as I have argued in part 1). Worldview (weltanschauung in original German from where this word has entered the English language) means a total way of seeing and doing things, a whole perspective on things. For example, on a much grander level a civilization, and also above that a religion itself can be called a worldview because it has a total perspective on all life, from its origin to its end including its ends, or a nizam e zindagi, a mukammal zabta e hayat in Urdu. A parallel concept is paradigm coined by Thomas Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolution, 1962). This is what the ‘wali’ in Quettawali can be understood to mean: worldview, life code, paradigm.

An authentic and organically formed community is held together by a set of principles, or values, just like a built structure is supported by a firm foundation, by brick and mortar, stone and concrete, by sets of columns and beams etc. In the case of the physical structure, remove the supports and the structure will come tumbling down, collapsing under its own weight into a pile of rubble. The same is true of communities which are also like structures, built with effort and care over long spans of time and held in place by the firm supports of human values and the glue of human relationships. A worldview is fundamentally defined by at least one idea, or some essential ideas, often called its “presiding idea(s)”. Like the central support of a tent, its mainstay, or the main beam of a building roof, the “presiding idea” is the core belief, the central idea, or the fundamental value upon which the structure rests more than anything else. Again, on a grander scale of things, think of “Tawhid” (Unity/One/Oneness) in the worldview of monotheistic Islam and you will get the idea of what a “presiding idea” is. What is left behind, if anything, if one removes this central plank (the first Shahadah or affirmation) from the weltanschauung of Islam? What will happen to the wider community of the adherents of the faith, the Ummah?

Now let’s return to the rather more mundane and local world of Quetta City and its communities. What then is the presiding idea, or the main ideas of Quettawali? Is there any one presiding idea, or more than one? In keeping with our metaphor, if Quettawali is a code of life for a mega-community made up of different communities and which draws both its tangible and intangible ingredients from a diverse pool of values of those different communities, then the question remains as to what those ingredients are, and how are they reconciled or synthesized, through what mechanism, dialectical or otherwise? The second question is more important since we have already differentiated Quettawali from lifestyles or codes of life that are ethno-linguistically centered, such as Pustunwali. These sociological and philosophical detours that I am taking are important to arrive to a better understanding of the concepts and terminologies involved in this essay on Quettawali. I realize that I have still not clearly identified all the ingredients of Quettawali, the mortar and brick of the structure. In the following parts I will try to do exactly that. Here, I have mainly focused on one of the ingredients, community, which is more like brick than mortar, more stone than cement----albeit, an important brick.

Before concluding, I want to return to the two anecdotes with which I started this piece, the one about my friend Aamir’s dada and the other about the old man in that electrical store in Suranj Ganj Bazaar. Both have something to say to us about the main topic here: community. In the complaint of the man in the first story, we can clearly see the importance of community into which one is born and raised: the significance of place, people, friends, loyalties, roots and burdens---all the essential ingredients of a real community as we read in the John Gray quote above. In the rather critical observation and advice of the old man in the second story we again see the importance of community but perhaps in a different way. The old man’s observation about the big changes in the city and especially his advice uttered in a solemn, nay, grim tone of voice can be understood not so much as a complaint but as a lament on the corruption, decay, even the demise or destruction of a real community.

To be continued… (see Part 3)

What is Quettawali? (Part 1)

What is Quettawali ?  (Part 1)

"By adhering to the Tao of the past

You will master the existence of the present."                Tao te-Ching

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I often use Google, especially Google Images, to search topics related to Quetta-----people, places, cuisine, history, famous events and so on for my blog posts and my YouTube channel videos. And every time I do that, a deep sadness engulfs me, grief always tinged with anger. It is because of the results the search engine returns to my queries. For example, a typical search string consisting of merely two neutral-sounding, innocent words like “Quetta people” will bring up gruesome images of buildings, shops and entire streets destroyed by bomb blasts, of burnt and mutilated police vehicles, of screaming and shock-stricken faces of people of all ages from the very old to the very young. I see pictures of urban landscapes devastated by fire and consumed by grey and black smoke, of wailing women hugging one another, beating their heads and pulling their hair, of people digging mass graves, of blood on asphalt, blood on metal, blood on the faces of children and bearded men---blood everywhere. There are, in these Google images, streets littered with metal, plastic, body parts and clothing items: a charred shoe here among blown up debris, a singed baseball cap there in a puddle of blood mixed with car engine oil. “Here, this is Quetta and its people!”. “This is today’s Quetta!, this is your Quetta!”, the omnipresent, omniscient, god-like Google seems to be screaming back at me graphically. But, why? How? Why did this happen? How did this happen? How could this happen? Who did this to Quetta? I ask myself, again and again.

These questions come to me, and I am sure to many others who have either lived in or known Quetta long enough to care about it, because this beautiful valley town in the largest province of Pakistan was not always like this. It was a totally different place only a little while ago, in terms of historical time that is. The gory and horrendous images that now define the city as nothing but an open slaughterhouse on the largest Internet search engine are the last things that anybody would identify Quetta with only a generation or two ago. Quetta and its people meant anything but violence, bigotry, apathy, and all the other synonyms for intolerance, brutality and ugliness that one can think of for peoples and places. So, the shock is natural and completely justified, at least for those of us who still have the memory of what the place was like a few decades ago. 

I have briefly explored some of the causes of this tragic devolution or degeneration of the social, political, cultural-religious landscape of the city in my previous posts on this blog site. While I may recall some of those as well, in the following series of posts I want to focus on some other aspects of the topic under scrutiny. More precisely, I want to shed some light on what exactly is it that the city and its people have lost in a mere span of one or two generations and because of the loss of which this old sleepy town once known as Shalkot, the “Tin Town” loved equally by the colonial overlords of the sub-continent and its post-independence rulers and the ruled equally, has suffered so much that one is now forced to call the damage irreparable. 

To begin with, let it be recalled that what essentially defines both an individual and the collective to which that individual belongs----a family, a group, a tribe, a nation, a society and even a civilization----is a set of abstract values, or what we call in the many indigenous languages of the region as “iqdaar”. This value system must be, first and foremost, spiritual in nature or have a spiritual quality or flavor to it in order to influence effectively all the other domains of human existence: the cultural, the social, the economic and the political. It must be a criterion that is not limited to the temporal but have something of the sacred, the eternal, or have a mythical quality. It is so because what we immediately see, experience and understand in the imperfect world of contingency, the visible world of time and space, are forms and any form, in order to be a form, must have some kind of ‘essence”, or ideal, or archetype behind it, or above it, as a Platonist would say. The human being himself/herself is a form, a microcosmic entity which reflects the macrocosm (and carries it within), or a being made in the “image” or “form” of the Divine Itself. As imago dei, man or insaan in Islam, for example, is Ashraf al Makhluqaat, a being who has been blessed with the potentiality to transcend the world of forms. "The universe is a great man, and man is a little universe" as the Sufi sages of Islam have said. It is often the authentically revealed religions which are the sources of such spiritual criteria that infuse and inform, regulate, evaluate, invigorate, rejuvenate and revive the value systems of healthy and whole societies. It short, any authentic culture and civilization must have spiritual roots---like a tree whose roots remain invisible but without which the tree cannot exist---- in order to qualify as culture or civilization. This symbolism of tree to define an individual and his or her culture and civilization, so frequently used in the Islamic intellectual and spiritual traditions, is not without meaning.

The value system, the schema of iqdaar, is, therefore, built on foundational spiritual virtues, or first principles, that make up and inform the ethics, morality, politics, economics and every other domain of human activity and relationship in a society. There are no exceptions to that. Often, these virtues that make up the code of life of a community are not explicitly spelled out but can be discerned in the day-to-day conduct of its members. This is especially true of traditional, non-modern societies where, unlike modern societies, formal literacy is not the definer of everything but where knowing, doing and being are always seen to be dependent on one another, to be inter-related.

The iqdaar become so ingrained in the life of a community that they are instinctively or automatically deemed as common sense, or as tacit knowledge, a way of life taken for granted by everybody and the trespassing of any element of which is frowned upon by all the others. This is also the way taboos used to be, and still are, established in many communities the world over. True, the taboos in the past had their social downsides----as all taboos do, including the modern ones----but they were organically formed, sophisticated sets of codes to regulate communities and societies for the common good, including that of the non-human forms of life. Then, taboos meant limitations, for sure, and therein they lacked the totalistic arrogance of the modern mindset that is obsessed with domination, control and prediction. In a sense, the ecological crisis that now threatens the entire planet and its millions of ecosystems is nothing if not the manifestation of this kind of hubris. The old restrictions---the taboos--- on the unlimited desires of earthly man were often less barbaric than the modern myths and taboos, many of which are genocidal to the core and which often give rise to imaginary and grotesque constructions of the “self” almost always soaked with the blood of “others’ as the previous century---the 20th “century of terror”---has shown.

So what set of abstract values, or code of life, defined and regulated the society that was the Quetta of old? What is, or was, it called? I am not going to invent a new name for what I think was a distinct way of life that identified with---and which in turn defined---the city, something that could be easily discerned by any outsider visiting Quetta, say in the early 1970s or even up to mid-1980s. I shall use the old label for that way of life: Quetta-Wali or Quettawali. It is true that many people still use this label, Quettawali, most often flippantly than in a thoughtful and informed manner. When asked, and I have asked many of these people, as to what they mean by it, their answers never go beyond the simple bumper-sticker like one-liners: “It means that I am from Quetta.” But I think there is more to it.

The “wali” in Quettawali is somewhat similar to what Pashtuns use for Pashtunwali which is a normative code of life for the traditional Pashtuns. I say “somewhat” similar and not exactly similar because whereas traditional Pashtunwali is an age-old code or way of life or a set of principles for living, formulated by and applicable to a particular ethnic or national group, Quettawali, I want to argue, is not exclusively defined in terms of an ethnicity, language, sect or religion, race or nationality. It may be defined by elements in ALL of those things, however: yes, it is that complex, multi-layered, even fluid to a certain extent. It is, as the name says clearly, place or community-centered. The even more interesting thing is that the denoted place in the label is not some country or nation-state, but a city, in fact a town-like small city with a historically diverse population speaking different languages, sometimes wearing different clothes, eating different foods, often celebrating different festivals and, until recently, worshiping in different places of worship. So many differences and yet it was a way of life---a way of seeing, doing and being, a worldview-----that was claimed by all to be equally theirs, the Quettawali of old. This is perhaps difficult for many people to understand, especially for the young generation of Quettawaal, but therein, in that very complexity, rests the charm of the concept.     

 To be continued... (see Part 2)