The conflict between Pakistan’s lived and imagined culture

[Solomon2]

The conflict between Pakistan’s lived and imagined culture

Mohammad A. Qadeer | 1 hour ago

One wonders what goes through the minds and conscience of millions of people in Pakistan who take bribes, cheat their customers, exploit servants, put the life and safety of others at risk, adulterate food and medicines, grab land and appropriate others’ properties?

Most Pakistanis would say that they, as well as other Muslims, are morally superior, unlike those Indians, Christian, Jews and Godless westerners. From these moral roots spring the daily crop of brutality, mayhem, corruption, and violence against minorities. Consider the sorry state of our morals where even the day designated to express our love for the Prophet turns into an occasion for looting, burning and killing.

There is a common thread in all these behaviours. Our notions of right and wrong have been scrambled. Our moral clock is set at a different time and long lost social order. We are in a state of confusion about values and ethics. A crack runs through Pakistan’s national and regional cultures, which requires us to review our unchallenged assumptions about culture and society.

Pakistan’s lagging non-material culture

Culture is imprinted in human psyche to guide individuals’ thoughts and actions. It is broadly divided into material and non-material traits. Material aspects of culture are its technology, instruments of economic production, consumption and household goods. Non-material are beliefs, values, norms, laws, symbols, religion, literature, arts and folklore, and morals. For example, a car is an item of material culture but it carries with it non-material norms of driving skills, traffic rules and ethics of road behaviour. Pakistan’s traffic chaos is a symptom of its lagging non-material culture.

Socially and culturally Pakistan is not the country that it was in 1947, 1960 or in the 1970s and 80s. It is no longer a predominantly agricultural country. Almost every rural household has one or more members working, studying, and living away in cities. Despite grinding poverty for about a third of the population, materially and economically Pakistanis are three times better off now in constant per capita income than they were in 1947.

More importantly, Pakistan has become an urban country. About 36 per cent of its population lives in cities, but by the UN threshold of urban density of 1000 persons per square mile, about 60 per cent of Pakistan’s population lives in urban conditions. Furthermore, Pakistan has taken to material modernisation readily. In May 2011, Pakistan boasted 118 million mobile phone subscribers. Even videos and the TV-smashing Taliban have no hesitation in using cell phones, western medicine, FM radio stations, dollars and rockets. Similarly, motorised vehicles have transformed even in the village life where agriculture has been largely commercialised.

Urban moral order

Urban living demands collective goods such as water supply and waste disposal, universal literacy, traffic control, police and fire services. The need for these services affects our behaviour. Their defining characteristic is that many of these needs cannot be provided for some without providing for all because their effects are indivisible. Urban life is based on a social contract, i.e. everybody’s well being is connected with the welfare of all.

The moral order of urban life is different from that of agrarian and tribal societies. Urban life necessitates intricate division of labour and coordination of activities. It brings everybody in daily encounters with strangers or at least with those unrelated by blood and marital ties. It creates pressures for impersonal dealings and requires rules and mutual trust. Ibn Khaldun in the 14th century observed that tribal mores are not transferable to cities, which breed their distinct society and culture.

In times of rapid cultural change, the balance between material and non-material aspects of cultures breaks down. In Pakistan, something more is happening. Its non-material culture is not only lagging but is actively moving towards orthodox Islamic mores. Here lies the dilemma: Pakistan’s material culture is modernising and non-material culture is Islamising. The result is that the values and norms that we espouse, offer little guidance for the behaviours necessitated by our material and urban ways of living. We are in a state of moral conflict.

Islamisation in Pakistan has been a process of inventing traditions. Islamisation cultivates notions of right and wrong based on women’s segregation, religious observances, sexuality, personalised evidence, retributory justice and demonstrable piety. Yet, urban living requires impersonal organisations, trust of others, women’s participation, freedom of expression, individual rights, empirical logic and transparency.

The divergence between our lived culture and imagined culture is turning into a gaping chasm. Islamisation of narratives has diverted the public discourse and channeled social energies into reinforcing the imagined culture. It diverts us to moral discourses that do not conform to the lived reality of our urban livelihoods.

Pakistanis urgently need alternative narratives that may compete dialogically with the orthodox Islamic thought. But it is not just the narratives that will bring the imagined culture in line with the lived culture. There has to be social movements for tolerance, rationality, freedom to think, cultural diversity, and gender equality. It is not an easy task. It will take the form of long drawn out arguments and political struggles in streets, schools, the media and homes for the Pakistani mind. It has to begin by wresting the self-assumed ‘Fatwa’ authority from the Mullahs.

Mohammad A. Qadeer is the author of the book, ‘Pakistan- social and cultural transformations of a Muslim nation’. He can be reached at mq35@hotmail.com

 

[474474]

This guys has no right to write all this, these pseudo-liberals who are to embarrassed of their mother toungue and feel superior writing in murrican are the scum of the earth.
I can tell from his age that he prolly started his career tyuping in urdu, so that's no excuse

 

[Wickerman]

This is the case with every religion, every culture and every country.

I mean in Israel you have one part of the society, which is the majority that is westernized, modern, educated and some of the most successful. And then you have the Haredi Jews and other groups who live in poverty, with all kinds of orthodox value systems that are more orthodox or sometimes as orthodox as orthodox Islam.

And in India you have the city dwelling contemporary Indian, with a mix of both western and Indian culture. And then you have the very traditional people in the villages.

You take the US, you have the liberals and conservatives. Some of the conservatives are SO conservative that they are no better than the orthodox Islamic groups this article talks about.

Bottomline, people are of all types. Some are conservative, religious and traditionalist. Some are liberal, non religious and modern.

And conservatives in any culture are the ones that are normally intolerant and most prone to be violent.

As for corruption, this has nothing to do with Islam. Infact India is corrupt too. China is equally corrupt. Even the United States is quite corrupt, compared to countries like Norway and Finland. Socialism, social inequality combined with the opportunity to exploit are causes for corruption. Its got nothing to do with religion, conservatism or morality in the first place.

So this article doesnt really present any new perspective nor is it that insightful.

 

[474474]

This is the case with every religion, every culture and every country.

I mean in Israel you have one part of the society, which is the majority that is westernized, modern, educated and some of the most successful. And then you have the Haredi Jews and other groups who live in poverty, with all kinds of orthodox value systems that are more orthodox or sometimes as orthodox as orthodox Islam.

And in India you have the city dwelling contemporary Indian, with a mix of both western and Indian culture. And then you have the very traditional people in the villages.

You take the US, you have the liberals and conservatives. Some of the conservatives are SO conservative that they are no better than the orthodox Islamic groups this article talks about.

Bottomline, people are of all types. Some are conservative, religious and traditionalist. Some are liberal, non religious and modern.

And conservatives in any culture are the ones that are normally intolerant and most prone to be violent.

As for corruption, this has nothing to do with Islam. Infact India is corrupt too. China is equally corrupt. Even the United States is quite corrupt, compared to countries like Norway and Finland. Socialism, social inequality combined with the opportunity to exploit are causes for corruption. Its got nothing to do with religion, conservatism or morality in the first place.

So this article doesnt really present any new perspective nor is it that insightful.

Amazing man, you must be the president of India

 

[FaujHistorian]

Good analysis.

Who in their right mind can deny what the author is saying.

However such analysis is not rare, and many Pakistanis in their homes and offices do share the feelings and opinion of this author.

Many Pakistanis including my own family are struggling to find a solution or at least we try to avoid the bribery, the corruption, and other ills listed in the essay.

Sadly though, few intellectuals from Pakistan or from the West go beyond the discussions like "we are so bad".

Some who do, immediately jump to simple but effective rhetoric like "Islam is the answer" to provide swift justice, and then every Pakistani will fall in line and we will become the land of milk and honey, filled with righteous and moral people.

However it doesn't work. The more Islam we discuss, the worst we become, and our society as a whole takes more turns down the spiral of abject poverty, desperation, and death, and destruction.

Before I suggest a way out of this deadly and downward spiral, let me give a quick example.

Pakistani highways and the highway police was at the bottom of its performance, with corrupt police officials looking the other way, and everyone ignored the rules, and the roads and cars and busses became death traps.


Then one fine morning, a simpleton in many ways, but sharp with experience in family run factory business, guy named Nawaz Sharif became Prime minister.

His family residence was in Lahore, and the capital in the twin cities of Pindi/Islamabad. Whenever his caravan drove between Lahore and Pindi, he too suffered the anxiety of being on the bad highway, even though he had a relatively luxury of police escort,

So what did next changed my perception of my own country.

He called up South Korean companies to build a 6 lane toll higway . At the same time he launched a brand new unit of highway police, with hand picked police chief, new uniform, a little bit better pay.

within 2 years, Pakistani drivers on the highway were following all the rules and traffic flowed wonderfully.

When I saw this, I told myself, us Pakistanis are not bad, we just need modern systems.

However leftists attacked prime minister's schemes as foolish, too westernized. Then in year and a half, the guy was kicked out with a no-confidence motion. New elections were held. the Leftist benazir bhutto took power and the first thing she did was to cancel the contracts with South Korean highway company and effectively killed further expansion of the system.

Still the highway police remains corruption free, and the even on smaller intercity roads, traffic is a bit better.


My point of this exmaple was that sometimes, we need to go ahead and do the mega projects, and ignore the intellectual coffee mug discussions in favor of or against Islam.

Such discussions are good only to waste time.


People in Pakistan get into these arguments because they have nothing else to do.

We do not realize that we are 200 million strong country. That means 3 times the size of Iran, 10 times the size of Saudi, and 40 times the size of typical Central Asian state (these ratios may have changed, but the fact remains that we are the biggest kid on the block if we look West as well, instead of worrying too much about East only).

Combine this size with 1 million man strong military, we do not need to live in fear, live like theives and rely on pathetic Talibaboons to do our dirty work in Kashmir or Afghanistan.

We need to use our big spine and take charge of things as a nation, and to become a nation that is a good global citizen, fully plugged into the global trade and commerce.

It is time for us to stop living in the Islamo-socialist la la land, that doesn't exist except in the deranged mind of the likes of Noam Chomsky. If we can ever do this, many of the ills listed in the essay will go away. Because people will be too busy working, instead of rehashing old $hite all the time.


peace

 

[Saleem]

ever heard of Fort William in Calcutta? the british empire chose urdu as the language to converse with the "mussalmans" and "mohammadan" (sic) of india....read about the viceroys to india....