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)