Another Pebble In The Puddle

“How dare you steal from my shop?”

The shop-keeper yelled at the 7-year old boy, as he held him from the collar. The boy whimpered and struggled as more shop-keepers came to attack him and gave him the loudest slaps I had ever heard.

I was watching the entire episode from my car, that was parked deep into Islamabad’s ‘sabzi mandi’. As soon as I entered that market, I could tell with the blink of an eye that the area was dominated by local Pathans, but particularly refugees from Afghanistan who migrated to Pakistan considering it a safe haven when the Soviets attacked their homeland in Zia’s time. Zia- the savior who welcomed them with his ‘Colgate advertisement’ potential teeth. The pride and the conservatism was etched on the faces of these fair-skinned men thus I could easily identify them as pure Pakhtuns. This little boy, who had received their punches, was actually running off after stealing a strawberry from a fruit stall, or 'thaylaa' as it is called in local language. and it was this situation that he was being met with. Despite being a first-year law student myself, as I was back then, I felt uneasy with the way they were treating the minor.

“Oh it is a normal concept for them bibi jee.” My driver, himself a pakhtun from Abbottabad, tried explaining.

"This mandi has been dominated by Pashtuns and previously the government writ was nearly absent here. These men would often end up shooting many young children for stealing. In fact, they have been responsible for shooting officers on duty. Conflicts and deaths were an ordinary thing.”

Strangely, I was not upset at this story, sine chaos is the one thing you can undoubtedly expect from Pakistani presence, and that my friends, we all know is not an exaggeration.

Today, the one race most popular, amongst all Pakistanis is undoubtedly that of Pathans. Just like Sardar jokes are dominant in India, an average Pakistani with a cell phone usage of perhaps just a 100 Rupee card per month is bound to have at least 5 jokes on Pathans in his inbox. Pathans, or the Pashtuns- that refers to pathans who are well-versed in Pashto, are famously known as the ungovernable tribesmen from both sides of Afghanistan’s eastern border with Pakistan. These fair-skinned, usually colour-eyed Pashto speaking men are notorious particularly due to the famous ‘War on Terror’ that marks its impact on each one of our lives today. Ever since the air planes crashed into New York’s twin towers, and the horrible events of 9/11 took place, the world has been marred by chaos and anarchy. 9/11 came and went, but other than the wars it instigated, what it made popular were the pathans. There has got to be a reason behind it all..a reason why after 9/11, foreign embassies have a ‘special procedure’ for verification of anybody whose surname is ‘Khan’.

The movie ‘My name is Khan’ very clearly depicts this dilemma hence it was no surprise when at least 5 of my pathan peers had as their facebook status “My name is Khan and I’m NOT a terrorist”. :)

The Pashtuns have an ancient history of origin and tradition. Be it the Khans from Afghanistan or from our own homeland, they are all doubted for being that one thing…the one thing that our police, our intelligence, is searching for 24/7... Little does it surprise me to see from the lists of terror suspects, 90% of them surnamed ‘Khan’, most of them belonging to our authoritarian tribal areas. Nor am I surprised with the repugnant way citizens look at Pashtuns roaming around the outskirts of the twin cities. Ech one of us has a tendency to attach a Pathan to terrorism, and little can I argue against that assertion due to the pitiful facts I have mentioned above. When I talk of a ‘pakhtun’ hereby, I talk of the underprivileged amongst them, the poor, the destitute, that lad who saw his father sent off for training to Waziristan and never returning from there, that old woman who saw her young son getting imprisoned due to a sentence by the ATA court, just because a close friend of his went for Tehreek-e Taliban training.

Everyday, we listen to stories of how teenage Pathan boys from Swat, Bannu, or any other northern area were met by a mullah who convinced them to accompany him to Afghanistan, where the boys were trained to become terrorists – this most recently being illustrated by a weekly drama on PTV. Again, there has to be a reason why enemies of our peace have targeted the Pakhtuns for becoming terrorists. I often wonder, how it is possible to be brainwashed to the extent whereby a man cannot distinguish between humans and animals. Perhaps, the reason to that is that these Pashtuns tend to be an emotional, in fact over-emotional race. They have been that type since time indefinite and their deplorable lives make them vulnerable. A shrewd person can easily convince a Pathan using his clever tactics, and the best weapon to be used hereby is certainly emotion.

“o trust me and you are bound to get the ‘hoors’ in the Hereafter.”

“Aray ye kaam to buhat naiki ka hai. Parwardigar (God) khush hota hai. ”

Now imagine these words being said to that young boy who saw his father going to Waziristan and never returning. Still surprised when this boy blasts himself in a street full of government workers eh?

It is their passionate self due to which we hear of their frequent honor killings. So rigid are their systems that no outsider dares entering the premises of the tribal areas without permission. It was indeed fortunate for Alexander the Great of Greece that he entered the sub-continent via the Khyber Pass at a time when such was not the system of Pathans, but their conservatism and aggression today is another pebble in that already exploding Pakistani puddle.

However, there is a surprise to this image of the Pathans that leads a researcher to conclude that it might actually be a ‘mirror-image’. Perhaps these are just our tendencies due to which we perceive them to be this way. Since roughly the time that Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni, the warring Afghan, invaded the sub-continent in the eleventh century, the Pashtuns have been Muslim. But where Islamic law clashes with Pakhtunwali (the Pashtuns’ unwritten code of conduct) it is tradition, not religion, that prevails. Also, historians have often claimed that Pathans in ancient times were a race quite liberal in their thinking and adaptive of the broad-minded society. Take for example, the famous Afghan poet, Khushal Khan Khattak, who wrote of nothing but women and booze. In fact, it was he who said in one of his verses,

“I am a drinker of wine, why does the priest quarrel with me?”

Pathans loved Khushal as their hero and his liberalism was a threat to Emperor Aurangzeb’s orthodox styles, and eventually, Aurangzeb was responsible for his death by bribing one of Khushal’s sixty sons. Khushal, being one of those sensitive Pathans, could not take the disappointment and passed away. It is bizarre to know how the same race whose liberalism caused death can become so conservative today, and it is to the credit of the partition and the mullahs, that this change came. However, if I go into the detail of that, I could hurt sentiments of my Punjabi/Sindhi brothers and sisters, and perhaps even the saints amongst you.

Alas! The need of time is that there should be a way to control the antagonism being developed for Pathans. It has been ages since the War on Terror began, and its failure demonstrated that this war is no ordinary war, but that it is indefinite and indeterminate. Does Osama bin Laden’s death (or perhaps that fake death) put an end to it? No way ho-zay President Obama, only a fool would think so. Moreover, the ‘counter-productive’ element of this battle results in nothing but more aggression, and since Pashtuns have begun playing such a threatening role in this war, the solution to solve it all is providing their areas, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and beyond, with “equal opportunities”. This implies seeing to their education and raising it at least to a sufficient standard to match the educational standard of government schools in Sindh and Punjab. I certainly do not mean the education that they get right now, of how to shoot regularly, and how to plant bombs. Neither do I mean westernized course books. What I am pointing towards is that they need moral education so that they can differentiate between the right and wrong. Likewise, lets put an end to discriminating them time and again, and give them the number of opportunities that they deserve as fellow Pakistanis. Open that door, just open it for once, and give their frightened senses the willingness to think appropriately and logically. Truly, they have been brain-washed and their brain needs washing, but it is positive washing that it needs, and not some evil detergent to do the job. We must accept that Pathans from Northern Areas are our brothers and a part of our country rich in heritage, language, and culture. We must stop hating them and inculcate in us a desire to do something for their betterment. Perhaps that would be a skirmish we citizens would initiate to weaken the might of the ‘real’ forces responsible for brain-washing our fellow underprivileged Pathans and destroying them, thereby destroying us as a nation, all falsely in the name of “naara-e takbeer, Allah-u Akbar!”

Zia and his million dollar smile.

and then we have some like our beloved captain!

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