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| India-Pakistan |
| Is entertainment ‘haram’? |
| 2006-05-28 |
| The Punjab governor, Lieutenant-General (r) Khalid Maqbool, was addressing a psychologists’ conference in Lahore when he touched on the problem of entertainment in society, which is just as well because many of our psychological ills spring from our ideological stringencies banning entertainment in the name of religion. He urged more entertainment in the form of music and drama for the relaxation of society, which, he said “suffered from psychological pressures”. He linked “optimism” to it, saying, “We need a message of hope, play more music and more drama to provide relaxation to the people”. Thereafter he said that “Islam also urges people to adopt a balanced and relaxed life” and that Pakistani society needed to review itself — implying that the clergy had no monopoly on interpreting Islam. What the good governor has raised is a cultural question, and what he has challenged is the trend so far to let entire cities slide into a wasteland of culture, some 90 percent of which comprises entertainment. He must recall the phenomenon of the Talibanisation of Gujranwala and Gujrat where popular theatre has been attacked by the clergy in tandem with the police for years. It has got particularly bad following the election from Gujranwala of a Pakhtun MNA in the 2002 election — we recall the assault of the Taliban-like seminarians of the same leader on a government-sponsored “marathon”. Thus there are many cities in the Punjab that have become a culture-less wasteland of our clerical imagination much before the outbreak of the disease in North Waziristan. Hence the mental disease and the phenomena of “Imam Mehdis” emerging periodically from our benighted cities to confront the “dajjal” of entertainment. (That the disease is universal and essentially Muslim was proved by the fact that the last “Imam Mehdi” we arrested from Toba Tek Singh came from London!) The most difficult and controversial subject in Pakistan today is culture. As it is, culture is difficult to define. Is it the way people live? Is it the way people “want” to live? Is it something that can be equated with religion? Does it coexist with religion? Does it subvert religion? Is it entertainment? Is it something to be saved? Or is it something to be rooted out as an “accretion”? Can we censor culture, applying to it the Islamic principle of exclusion? Or is there a cultural norm in Islam that must be enforced? At different times we say different things about culture. There are times when we think our culture was much defaced by “Hindu culture”. We also give the impression that after 1947 the Hindu accretion should have been eliminated to make space for a “pure” culture known to us in Islam. Since the proxy war fought by Pakistan in Afghanistan and Kashmir was spearheaded by the clergy, “Islamisation” was also a kind of threat to the old culture of accretion. The warrior priest was not only exemplary; he could threaten too. If one applies a little bit of coercion with propaganda the indoctrination spreads more quickly. But it has also a opposite effect. People develop a passive resistance to it. That is the moment when the India factor becomes important as a source of culture. Under General Zia ul Haq, a furtive dependence on Indian TV and Indian movies became crucial to the survival of the people in Pakistan. As the Jamaat destroyed paintings of Lahore’s artists (remember the assault on Colin David’s house?) people watched Indian dances on the VCR. The police tried to catch people watching Indian movies on hired VCRs but was finally ineffective. The application of “Islam” in Pakistan became more and more prescriptive and hard with the onset of jihad in Afghanistan and Kashmir. It began to be termed Talibanisation in the late 1990s. The state was affected by it; as were the big cities. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif thought he could benefit from the new wave through the proposed 15th Amendment. But while he aspired to the purity of “Islam”, Pakistan went under a new wave of cable TV, most of it illegal, as young people, deprived of livelihood by the nuclear-induced economic plunge of 1998, started up their neighbourhood operations. Cable TV was nothing but Indian film and drama. It was an unspoken reliance on culture (or fahashi?) to offset the hardness of a more stringent and intrusive Islam. The cultural scene was becoming clearer in Pakistan. The culture war was fought by Pakistanis “with the help of India”, but it was unspoken. Religion was on the “right” side and culture was on the “wrong” side of the state. “Islam” was what the state aspired to; culture was what undermined the state by accepting “accretions” from India. What in fact was going on was Talibanisation versus Indianisation. In this war the mainstream political parties unwittingly became antagonists of the army waging the two jihads. Out of the two parties, the Muslim League interfaced readily with the warrior-priest clergy for a compromise with Talibanisation; the PPP was less able to do this. But both parties tried to normalise relations with India to lessen the supremacy of the military in Pakistan. In both cases, efforts to normalise were thwarted by the military establishment. Had the political parties succeeded, culture would have been strengthened as a force against hard religion “with the help of India”. How ironic that Pakistanis have been forced to look to Indian culture as a means of entertainment because they were denied their own forms and means. The Punjab governor has linked mental disease to lack of culture. This is what all honest psychologists will tell you unless they have grown beards like some medical doctors ready to host Al Qaeda terrorists in their clinics. He must however stand firm on the right of the people to be entertained. Where entire cities in Punjab have been lost to clerical despotism, the government must fight for their liberation. The present moment of governance under Chief Minister Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi and Governor Lieutenant-General (r) Khalid Mehmood is the right moment to do it. * |
| Posted by:john |