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.”
“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.”
“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!
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!”
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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!
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.
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.
“…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!
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| The Dictator: The mustachioed Jhallandari EVIL! |
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.
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