What place the tavern in Naya Pakistan?

Islamabad diary
Will the mighty edifice of hypocrisy, one of our biggest cottage industries, be restructured in the New Pakistan which our local variety of revolutionists is trying to build, or will it be business as usual, outward piety and inward sham?
When Pakistan was born no one saw a threat in the tavern, the bar and the saloon? In our better-appointed towns maikhanas abounded and no one’s faith was compromised. The Objectives Resolution was passed – when the Constituent Assembly would have more profitably spent its time framing a constitution – and when muftis and clerics celebrated its passage, proclaiming it as a victory of the faith, the doors of no tavern were closed.
Nightclubs in Karachi continued to host bombshells from the Orient and the west. In Lahore floorshows at the Faletti’s, the leading hotel, were regularly advertised on page three in the Pakistan Times. Gentlemen procurers plied their timeless trade in American limos – the Japanese still finding their way amidst the ruins of their bombed-out cities. There used to be a line of these limos outside Faletti’s.
In line with Ghalib’s stated wish that ‘masjid ke zer-i-saya kharabat chahiye’ – in the shadow of the mosque let there be the sound of revelry – right next to the Badhshahi Mosque thrived Lahore’s famed Heera Mandi. The muezzin sounded the call to prayer. As night fell the bazaar crackled with the sound of singing and laughter. It was all very civilised, the singing and dancing discreet, carried on behind closed doors. Whether Mahmud and Ayaz stood on a footing of equality in places of worship, there was relative equality in the bazaar, both high and low to be found there – tailoring their desires of course to the necessities of their pockets.
Amongst our various inequalities none is more glaring than the hierarchy of pleasure. To have ‘a good time’ today you have to spend a bomb. Not only good education and reasonable healthcare but escapism of the kind once readily available is now beyond the reach of all but the well-heeled, the phrase Black Label a badge of this inequality.
When the Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace in Petrograd in November 1917, the Tsar’s cellars were broken into and the revolutionists drank themselves silly on some of the finest wines in Europe. What if the Reverend Qadri’s followers had actually seized the Prime Minister’s House this August when they tried storming its gates? What cellars would they have broken into?
The world of Islam was not always like this. Why isn’t the real history of Islam taught in our schools? The Golden Age of Islam, the glories of the Abbasid court, should be common knowledge rather than the preserve of specialist scholars. Let me name two books: The Court of the Caliphs, an account of the Abbasid dynasty, by Hugh Kennedy, and The Caliph’s Splendor by Benson Bobrick. There is so much to quote from them but self-censorship would come in the way. The number of concubines in a harem…not easy to write about such stuff in our climate. While into doing things we dare not speak their name…which is part of our general hypocrisy.
Here then is the problem with the world of Islam: it is throwing up caliphs and amir-ul-momineens – the likes of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and Mullah Omar, and Allah be praised for that – but it is producing precious few Omar Khayyams. The great Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs were known for other things…learning and enlightenment, the prowess of their arms, the spread of culture. It was truly a golden age. And look at what in the name of Islam is being done today: purveying the worst kind of narrow-mindedness and using barbarism as an instrument of policy, al-Baghdadi’s Islamic State virtually synonymous with throat-slitting…something at which our own Taliban have also excelled.
The New Pakistan if it is to mean anything has to be a repudiation of all the detritus and obsolescence accumulated in the name of the faith. Whatever happened in the past is over and done with. Ziaul Haq was no more in 1988. It is no longer enough to make him an alibi or an excuse for our failings. If his legacy was bad, and it was, we’ve had time enough time to dismantle it. But Pakistan’s democrats who have been around for a long time were afraid, blowing hot and cold on such bright abstractions as the continuity of democracy but getting cold feet when confronted with bigotry and intolerance.
Accuse Qadri of anything…of sophistry and dissimulation. But for the first time in years someone on a public stage is talking of the rights of women and of minorities, and is not afraid of sharing the stage with leaders of the Shia school of thought. In Pakistan’s particular milieu, with obscurantism not just on the march but on the rampage, isn’t this a good thing? Where Qadri indulges in doublespeak, and sometimes he does, lambast him for it. But where he touches the right chords, isn’t it only fair to give him his due?
Imran has done something better. He has done what the armchair liberati would not have been able to do in a hundred years: open wide the gates of political participation to womenfolk. Apart from Saudi Arabia there would be few places on earth more gender-segregated than Pakistan. Imran’s movement has changed this, the number of women and of young girls participating in his rallies, even in such a bastion of conservatism as Mianwali, enough to move the most cynical heart. This is liberalism not in theory but practice.
A relevant quote from Bobrick: “Although alcohol was prohibited by the Quran, a slightly fermented, pungent wine made from dried grapes, raisins, or dates was allowed (he is talking of Abbasid Baghdad). Muslim jurisprudence sometimes went to great lengths to determine how much fermentation was permitted, but stronger stuff was also widely enjoyed…At royal drinking bouts, rooms were rendered fragrant by incense; men perfumed their beards with civet or rose water; wore special, bright-coloured robes; and were entertained by singing girls…the delights of drink were celebrated in poetry and song.”
When the Most High sits on His judgment seat I doubt if Gen Musharraf will be asked too many questions about subverting the constitution or imposing emergency rule. If any Pakistani ruler was in a position to scrap Zia’s Hadood laws which make such a fuss about drinking it was Musharraf. To Pakistan’s enduring discomfort he missed the opportunity…or had not the nerve to make the most of it.
Some establishments in Islamabad permitted you to bring your own stuff when you came to dine. That was the extent of his liberalisation. A great leap forward was the opening of some Chinese massage parlours but they soon came under attack from the vigilantes of the Lal Masjid brigade. If in the Great Beyond Musharraf is questioned about anything it will be this squandering of opportunity.
Whence such an opportunity comes again we do not know. It is easy to advance piety or the sham version of it current here; much more difficult to undo what is done. A country which can’t make up its mind about YouTube, how do you expect it to look judiciously at other things?
My idea of Naya Pakistan, for what it’s worth: an end to the menace of the plastic shopper which is doing more to destroy Pakistan than Talibanisation; taxis in our bigger cites running on meters; and the opening of the odd tavern or two where homage can be paid to the memory of Ghalib. Can this happen in my lifetime. I don’t think so. But what harm in nursing one’s daydreams?
Email: winlust@yahoo.com