September 4, 2010 | 2:30 pm

How do you pick up the pieces if it was broken anyway?

Posted by Mahim Maher

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I get really angry that many of the people I studied with at school and college are now living in America. They are doctors and bankers, engineers and teachers. It’s a sweet sweet life, isn’t it? Even I’d like to have a small coffee shop around the corner, a secondhand bookstore that carries Agha Shahid Ali, a department store that sells proper underwear. What makes me angrier is that I live in Pakistan. And I’m not sure if it was a choice I made or one that never was.

I’m angry that all those Pakistanis, the rich 1% of privileged people, whose parents could afford to send them to college, aren’t back here to help rebuild our utterly devastated country. I’m angry with the brain drain. I’m furious it makes me angry.

For the most part, after all the briefings and personal tour of Sukkur and its surroundings, I have to say that it seems that the government did what it could given that land the size of England was inundated. Today, Sept 4, my state said that its losses in the flooding come to about Rs466 billion (which if I am not wrong is about $5.4b). While people are still evacuating flooded areas, the government is slowly rolling up its sleeves for rehabilitation. It’s going to cover all expenses of the people living in the camps for the next four months and then when people return home, it’s going to help them for a month after. Part of this plan includes providing them seeds and fertilizer so they can get back to work.

There are a few cities in Pakistan that are proper cities; the rest is mostly rural and underdeveloped. We never really had enough schools or hospitals in the countryside and after the flooding it is safe to say that the ones that did exist have probably crumbled.

The villages of Pakistan have been at the mercy of fat landlords for centuries in a feudal system that held them in its vice-like grip. It worked to their advantage to keep the farmers and their children illiterate so they wouldn’t leave the land. The small towns did not fare much better simply because the inefficient, unqualified bureaucracy was corrupt to the teeth. None of the young men and women I went to school with have, for example, joined the Karachi police force or government. This is not entirely their fault. No one wants to work in government because the rot extends all the way up. The educated young people mostly work in the private sector. As a result, we simply don’t have educated people running the show.

(As with most cases, I should add, that there are exceptions to the rule. I do know of a few talented bureaucrats and wise politicians who have PhDs, years of experience and are honest. But they are far and few between.)

I’m glad, however, that at least on the surface, the government is trying to ensure a measure of transparency in the management of the aid it has received. In Sindh, according to a member of the ruling PPP, Taj Haider, they have registered 90% of the people who flooded the camps. There are about 3,000 relief camps across the province. The authority that issues our equivalent of the social security card, has been at work. These cards are going to help ensure that the displaced families get the aid promised by the government. For now, Sindh has said that it will give each registered family Rs25,000 ($290). It’s having a problem with unregistered people who fled to their relatives, but the solution is to make a Rs5,000 payment and the rest upon their return to their village. This money won’t help them rebuild their houses but hopefully it will tide them over.

My question is how will the government rebuild our infrastructure network? It was abysmal to begin with. In fact in Karachi, I get irritated each day when I drive to work because my old car can’t take the potholes and uneven surfaces. There is so much corruption that for a one-million-rupee road, usually only Rs300,000 is spent – the rest disappears under the table. If this has been the case for years, it is highly unlikely that money allocated for roads and other infrastructure will be properly used.

I visited Shikarpur city when I was in upper Sindh to cover the flooding two weeks ago. This city used to be on the diamond route to Kabul. The Hindus built beautiful houses with lattice-work balconies, many of which are on their last leg but still standing. A friend told me that they once found a pot full of Tsarist notes (I think he meant Roubles) in the bottom of their back yard. This was a city where the roads were washed down once a day. But today, it’s a train wreck. There wasn’t a single proper road. We just bumped along ruts in the ground. Garbage wasn’t collected. Opens sewers ran by the street. What the hell was its mayor doing for the last five years? When I asked why he hadn’t fixed the city, my friend laughed. “He just drives around in his Lexus in Karachi,” he said. “These landlords don’t invest in their hometowns, they just live it up in Karachi.”
 
 

August 23, 2010 | 4:16 am

Pakistan will need aid at least until March

Posted by Mahim Maher

My cousin Musheer picks me up from the Sukkur airport. On the drive home we pass a tent camp under the moonlight. These days I cannot hear or think the word ‘camp’ without simultaneous echoes of ‘concentration’, ‘ghetto’, ‘misery’, ‘disease’ and ‘death’ in my head. The triangle tops, painted with dollops of white from the moon, remind me of WWII movies.

Sukkur is a very old city in upper Sindh province and because it is the largest in the region, most of the villagers who fled the waters headed here. My aunt closes the door to my room, saying that the flies will come in if I’m not careful. Indeed, as I discover while going around to several settlements the next day, flies are everywhere. In my state, only Karachi city has received attention over the years, the other cities have been left, like orphans to slowly sink into a decades-drawn out decline. There are no garbage collectors at work, raw sewage, the colour of disease, slops its way down pencil-sized open drains outside houses.

It is this criminal neglect of the poorer, rural parts of the province that has meant these cities and their government machinery have been unable to cope with the disaster. I understand if for a city like Karachi with 20 million people, you cannot completely manage civic services. But for Sukkur, a smaller place, what the hell have they been doing all this time? I find out a distant relative, Arib Mahar, was the mayor of Shikarpur, a city next door. When I visit it with a local landlord, I am stunned at the state of the God-forsaken place. There isn’t a single road, everything is ramshackle, storefronts are peeling off, the entire city is slowly crumbling. Everything is brown. No other colour exists in this part of the world.

There are about three ways the displaced people manage now. Some of them have headed to the homes of relatives in the city. These people are not being registered for aid. Others have taken up in relief camps where government officials and NGOs are active and hence able to map and assess needs slightly better. Then there are the people who have set up along the roadsides. In a way, they are the worst off.

Across Pakistan you will encounter the charpoy, a wooden frame with legs that becomes a bed when you string a thatch of rope across. In the villages they don’t have beds like you will find at Sears. Today the villagers living on Sukkur’s roads have propped them up with one stick to form a shelter of sorts. If you prop two charpoys against each other, they form a rudimentary tent, that you can cover with blankets and sleep under. When I took a boat to village Rahimabad, we saw one man salvaging his belongings in a floating hamlet. He had converted his charpoy into a raft.

In all of the visits it becomes eminently clear that the water, in some places almost 6 feet deep, doesn’t have anywhere to go but up – as in evaporate. This means that the farming communities won’t be able to do anything till next March. Landlords are discussing how to drain the water back into the river but no one has the money to pay for those many pumps. The good news is that when you look at some of the houses in the floating fields, a watermark confirms that the water is going down.

This means that till March these families need to either be given a way to earn a living or be given a steady supply of rations and healthcare. The USAID’s Miriam Lutz told me earlier on that they have cash-for-work projects that can help people. It is clear to me that somehow donors will have to prop these people up until they can get at least one crop in the ground.

It is also really important to get these people out of the camps and off the roads and back into their villages. One landlord had a speed boat brought in from Karachi so that it could slowly and painfully ferry the people back to the main village. It just doesn’t make sense for them to stay in camps because there aren’t enough toilets and that is spreading disease. What makes more sense is to get them back to their villages and create a network of aid to them. The burden of disease can be avoided like that. Any boat donations are welcome.

Irrigation engineers say that they will have to wait for the water to go down to a certain level before they can rebuild the levees. This is going to take time and money. The barrages will also need an overhaul and I’m really hoping that the government will have the brains to make up for years of neglect. In the Sukkur barrage, for example, several of its gates were jammed shut by a buildup of silt. For years no one cleaned them and as a result there was, I believe, an uneven distribution of pressure of the open gates. The British left us with one of the biggest and most extensive and best irrigation networks in the world and we never bothered to look after it.

This is also a good time for the Pakistani government to register children and families. Across the board, wherever I went I realized that Foucault was right when he said that the management of a population was crucial for government and that can only happen if you know how many people there are and where they are located. In Pakistan, our equivalent of social security cards are the national identity cards (NICs) that is the responsibility of Nadra (National Database Registration Authority). I was shocked to find out that no new maps of Shikarpur or Sukkur city are readily available much less the surrounding villages and their road networks.

In Khanpur, a town whose outskirts sank, I meet Faisal Edhi, the son of Pakistan’s most famous charity organisers Abdul Sattar Edhi. Faisal was at Khanpur’s government high school No. 2 where Watan Foundation was at work. However, he found that the town officials had done a miserable job of registering families. Sometimes there were 1,200 people, sometimes 1,400. The numbers yo-yoed throughout the day. Fed up with the uncertainty, the Edhi staff put together a form and started registering people themselves so that they would be able to distribute aid properly.

Vaccines are needed, mosquito repellent, mosquito nets, cooking utensils, clothes, shoes and the usual medicines for diarrhea. The Aga Khan University Hospital, which is one of Pakistan’s best run, has dispatched doctors such as Dr Zulfiqar Bhutta to these areas. They should be contacted for need assessments as well as the USAID, UN, WHO, Unicef, Hope International, Edhi Foundation, ICRC. Vets are also needed. Desperately. The animals are dropping like flies and they are one crucial element of the economy for these people.

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August 16, 2010 | 1:43 pm

Killing pigs in Pakistan

Posted by Mahim Maher

At The Express Tribune we’ve dispatched reporters from our small team to cover the floods that hit Pakistan about two weeks ago. And the strangest of stories are coming in. One that Fawad Ali Shah filed from Khairpur in upper Sindh was that young men were killing pigs.

Not cops. No that lingo doesn’t swing here. Actual pigs. Wild boar actually. The animals are a menace for villagers because they eat crops and destroy stored produce. Fawad, who went to Khairpur from Karachi, hopped a ride with a navy rescue team that went around in a boat. They found some young men who had stayed back in one abandoned village. The women and children and elderly had been sent to safer ground already, thankfully. These boys kept some rations and hung out in the half-submerged village because the flooding had brought the pigs out in the open. Fortunately the men had a place to stay because their houses were built on slightly elevated ground.

These men keep dogs specifically for protection against the pigs. Fawad saw them having a stroll with them on Monday and when he asked, they replied to his amazement that they had deliberately stayed back so that they could catch the pigs once and for all. That, I suppose is the sweetest revenge.

Another great story, from our Express News television channel came from reporter Rehan Hashmi who found an elderly woman who had arrived at one of the relief camps set up in Karachi. She had threatened her family that she would kill herself in Jacobabad. But get this, not because she had lost everything she owned in the flooding. Because she wanted her hookah.

The cameraman got a great shot of the woman with the hookah, which is perhaps better known as the nargile or water pipe, or if you’re an American college student, a huge bong. Yup. Many women in the countryside, small villages and towns are awfully fond of tobacco. In a way, as I’ve seen it, people sit around in the evenings passing around the hookah and chewing the fat.

We also got some terrible, terrible photographs from our guy Athar Khan. He went to one of the relief camps set up on the outskirts of Karachi and caught a woman and two kids fighting over a bag of flour. I cannot tell you just how many photographs of crying, fly-covered babies have flooded us in the newsroom. Some of my sister’s friends returned from distributing relief in Rahimyar Khan. One of them was a young man, who had four packets of biscuits left. He leaned out of the window of the truck to give it and saw one hundred hands outstretched. He was crying as he told the story.

I basically belong to Sukkur in Sindh but have very weak links to my ‘hometown’. When this flooding hit Sindh I told myself every five minutes that I should go there – not just to take medicines and food – but to write about it. Unfortunately, I need to do my duty at the newspaper. It’s my job to work with the reporters and photographers.

Pakistan is never really going to properly recover from this disaster of epic proportions. Our government is so corrupt that everyone is skeptical that the money for rehabilitation will be properly used. There is talk of the government falling. Someone told me that Chaudhry Nisar will be the new prime minister. Someone reminded me that the cyclone of 1971 had a similar effect.

We spoke to a schoolteacher in Sindh who said that because the schools have been turned into relief camps, kids are obviously not going to start the semester on time. He also said that the displaced people were ruining the schools. They were chopping up its furniture for fire.

Some good news trickled in. The Americans flew in two flights of tent material from the USAID warehouse in Italy. The plastic sheeting is the same kind that became popular with the people displaced by the earthquake in 2005. I remember, at that time, we thought it was the worst thing that could have ever happen to a country already at its knees. Not any more.

(For these stories please visit http://tribune.com.pk and go to the Sindh section)

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August 15, 2010 | 2:34 am

Pakistan, down and out, once again

Posted by Mahim Maher

The flooding in Pakistan is the worst possible thing to have happened at this point in time. There has been so much destruction from the top of the country down to the bottom that we’ve been set back a few hundred years. And as usual we’ve been caught with our pants down. The governor of my state (or province as we call them) admitted on Saturday that the authorities had misinterpreted the actual amount of water heading down south. Great. Just great.

I cannot express how depressing this is for everyone. As it was, we were a country at our knees, and now this. Billions of rupees will be needed to rebuild the roads, highways, schools, homes and other infrastructure that has been destroyed or damaged by the water. The North-West Frontier Province (renamed Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa) estimates two trillion rupees in damages. Down south, in Sindh, 3.7 million people are homeless, and this is just an official estimate.

On Friday, the World Bank estimated that there has been $1 billion in crop damage. The UN estimates that flooding has destroyed 1.4 million acres of crops in Punjab province, Pakistan’s breadbasket. Cholera outbreaks are feared. The government relief camps are deserted in many places because people just don’t want to eat the rotten food they’re providing. Six million people need immediate food and water. Where do we go from here?

Once again with the begging bowl? Well, guess what. A lot of people don’t want to necessarily give us money because of such a poor track record of spending aid. The Daily Telegraph just published a damning report that 300 million pounds of help meant for the 2005 Pakistani earthquake survivors never made it to them. Still, the US has been at the forefront of donors. In an editorial in The Friday Times, Najam Sethi pointed out that China and the Organisation of Islamic Conference countries had yet to make their presence felt.
The latest news is that our prime minister is setting up a national commission or panel of well-trusted men to oversee aid spending. Two of the names shortlisted are Edhi, the man who runs one of Pakistan’s biggest and most successful charities, and Justice (retd) Bhagwandas, a former judge with an impeccable reputation. We can only hope that the money reaches the people who need it.

The good news is that young people from universities and schools have been working tirelessly to start small groups to collect donations. They have been heading off to the flood-hit areas in Sindh with truckloads of bottled water, biscuits, dried milk and medicines. Almost everyone one I know, poor and rich, have been giving money or other donations to people and groups they trust. We also know, based on what happened in 2005, that banned militant outfits and their charity wings are also active. These groups are incredibly organized (which the government is not) and they fill the gap the state leaves open.

I spoke to some people in the flood-hit areas, men who have been growers and tribal decision makers for decades. They are fearing an outbreak of violence when food supplies dwindle. We lost one rice crop in the monsoon rains and initial flooding and now we won’t be able to sow the next crop, which is wheat, in November. The water won’t dry by then. That said, however, other experts pointed out that once the water recedes the next seasons should be good as alluvial soil will have spread over the land, making it fertile.

As perhaps happens with natural disasters, it seems as if the worst and best of humanity surfaces. On one hand, armed men are looting the abandoned houses and farms of flood survivors who left for safer ground. Grownups are drinking the milk meant for children. Influential landlords are breaking through canals to divert water away from their lands, thereby flooding entire towns. However, on the other hand, young men and women are working day and night, while fasting, to organize and distribute food and water and cooked meals to people. Doctors have headed out from the cities into the water-hit heartlands to treat children. There was a report that a 12-year-old boy was going out on his little boat to keep rescuing people stranded in villages. The scouts, army and navy have been constantly at work.

The next year is going to be a very difficult one. I only hope that somehow at my newspaper we can keep doing the kind of stories that prevent donor fatigue and reader fatigue. I keep going over hurricane Katrina coverage to try and learn and refresh our own approach. I’m hoping we can keep going.

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August 3, 2010 | 3:33 pm

Anarchy breaks loose in Karachi

Posted by Mahim Maher

Karachi is on fire again. Body after body is being rushed in to the city’s three main hospitals, the one and only morgue has run out of space. Young men waving TT pistols are roaming the streets and picking off random targets. Buses, trucks, cars and rickshaws are being set on fire. Petrol pumps, markets and shops have all closed down. You couldn’t find a place to buy a packet of cigarettes, lamented one desk editor.

In less than 2 days, by Wednesday night 80 men were shot dead and at least 253 others were injured in the anarchic aftermath of the high-profile killing of a member of the provincial legislative house.

MPA Raza Haider was gunned down in broad daylight while he was washing up for prayers at a mosque before attending a funeral on Monday. His bodyguard Mohammad Khalid Khan was also killed as other worshippers ran helter-skelter to get away from the hail of bullets.

As the news spread, as expected, violence followed in its wake. The victims have been mostly innocent bystanders, commuters and even, in one case a speech-impaired girl whose mother had taken her to a shrine to pray for her recovery. Schools had just opened a day earlier, but were closed again. Because the petrol pumps were closed, hundred of people were stranded. And then, as happened when Benazir Bhutto was killed, traffic went into a gridlock at several important points downtown as drivers broke the rules in a panic to get home.

In a particularly sad case, a Pashto-speaking man was abducted by armed men, who forced him to take them to his house where his three friends were sleeping. They then proceeded to shoot all four of them.

It’s amazing when this kind of violence breaks out, people vanish off Karachi’s streets, that are normally packed and overflowing with humanity. The police and paramilitary rangers, who are generally unable to catch anyone in drive-by shootings, stood grimly at every corner.

We’re almost used to this violence by now. This is how it happens in Karachi. There is absolutely no rule of law and I would be hard pressed to give you even one example in which someone had been put behind bars. The killers are never caught.

WHO IS BEHIND THE KILLING?

Raza Haider was a member of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement [United National Movement or MQM], a political party that is rivaled by none in Karachi. But he was not necessarily killed just because he was from the MQM.

He was also a Shia, which is a minority sect of Muslims. There are several banned militant outfits in Karachi that don’t tolerate Shias. One of them is the Sippah-i-Sahaba (SSP). This name has surfaced in the investigations so far and the Karachi police rounded up several suspects from this organization by Tuesday night. The chief of police Waseem Ahmed wouldn’t disclose any details, but he said about 20 men had been arrested and were being interrogated.

According to media reports from SAMAA TV and Dunya TV, a Sippah man arrested in 2009 had a hit-list with the MPA’s name on it. Furthermore, the Sippah allegedly wanted to also blow up the people who turned up for the funeral with a suicide bomber. Federal Interior Minister Rehman Malik urged the MQM’s top brass not to attend the funeral on Tuesday, but naturally this wasn’t going to happen.

When my reporter called up the Sippah people, they said that the man arrested in 2009 wasn’t with their outfit but belonged to the Lashkar-i-Jhangvi or LeJ. The police can even question our men if they don’t believe this, they said. The Lashkar outfit broke off from the Sippah after accusing it of failing to follow its ideology. The Lashkar men are believed to have been behind the bomb attacks on an annual Shia mourning procession last year.

Later in the day, I spoke to an intelligence man who is currently heading police operations in one of Karachi’s 18 boroughs. I asked him whether he agreed with the Sippah explanation and he said he didn’t want to comment until the investigations were complete, but his personal opinion was that they were involved.

The style of the attack was very organized and brazen, he said, while referring how the four or five men barged into the mosque with guns and then took off on motorcycles. This is classic militant style, he pointed out. Also noteworthy is the fact that the mosque was run by the Barelvi sect. The Sippah subscribe to the opposite Deoband school of thought.

The problem also was that Raza Haider was messing with the Sippah in his area. The MPA was heavily involved in opposing the Sippah in Orangi Town. In fact, as a journo buddy of mine said, Raza Haider was scheduled to meet with the police to give them information on the Sippah’s work in the town. He had even been receiving death threats from a militant outfit.

SCAPEGOATS?

Despite this, however, the MQM has been pointing the finger elsewhere. And that is where it is starting to get complicated.

For its part, the MQM has blamed a rival political party, the ANP or Awami National Party, for Raza Haider’s assassination. This is where the element of a turf war enters.
The MQM wants to run Karachi and doesn’t want any interference. The ANP recently turned up on the scene and started to make a stink. The ANP basically is a party that represents Pashto-speaking people. This is a linguistic-ethnic division. The MQM is backed by Urdu-speaking people.

The Pashto-speaking people or Pathans originally (mostly) hail from the north of the country – the North-West Frontier Province, now renamed Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. Many of them started to migrate to Karachi in the 1990s in search of better jobs.

Over the years Karachi’s Pakhtun population has swollen to several million. In fact, many people will say that the Pakhtun built Karachi as these hardy mountain men formed the majority of the construction labour force. They have also a virtual stranglehold on its public transport system of taxis, rickshaws and buses.

(When the high court wanted them to get rid of polluting two-stroke rickshaws and replace them with the more environmentally friendly four-stroke ones, they got together and blocked all of the city’s main routes downtown in a display of clout. Bumper-to-bumper buses brought life to a standstill that day in Karachi, in a previously unseen show of solidarity by the Pakhtun)

Then the ANP started to gather steam and the Pakhtun realized that they needed a political party to represent them in Karachi, where the only other choices were the MQM and Benazir Bhutto’s PPP. They managed to have two men elected to the provincial legislative house, the Sindh Assembly, much to the chagrin and surprise of rival parties.

The problem is that the MQM and ANP are now locked in a turf war over Karachi. For its part, the MQM claims that the ANP patronizes the Taliban, who are also largely Pashto speaking and from the same northern areas. Whether this is true or not, I’m not so sure personally. But it is very convenient for the MQM to claim this and demonise the ANP. The Taliban and al Qaeda are largely believed to be using Karachi as a bank, and are probably running some element of their operations here. But the MQM would like to have the ANP kicked out with the ‘Talibanisation card’.

That said, however, the ANP is just as bad. Its men are also armed to the teeth.

The Raza Haider killing comes at the heels of a slew of target killings in drive-by shootings that had the MQM and ANP at each other’s throats. If an ANP man was killed in the morning, by afternoon the body of an MQM man was dispatched to the morgue. The tit-for-tat killings came in two waves this year and with Raza Haider’s murder, I expect more violence.

Sadly, no one will ever speak up against the MQM. No newspaper or journalist will take the risk. My own newspaper won’t. We all just sit like ducks. I don’t trust the police either because they are bought as well. We all toe the party line. And it’s not as if any of them will even squeak the truth, because they all fear Altaf Hussain sitting in London. The party discipline is tight from top to bottom. No investigative journalism there.

(Incidentally, I’ve always wondered why the British government allows the MQM’s Altaf Hussain to live there. A senior journalist told me once that the Brits allow him to stay because they think the MQM is the only liberal party that can be pulled out of the rabbit’s hat if the shit hits the fan and the mullahs take over Karachi/Pakistan. I’ve never really quite known what to make of this claim.)

Muttahida Qaumi Movement

The MQM is a party that was started to represent Urdu-speaking migrants from India who came to Pakistan in 1947 at Partition. The party was formed in the late 1980s by a charismatic, smooth-talking, urbane Altaf Hussain, who was a pharmacy studies student at the University of Karachi.

Since then it has transformed itself into a powerhouse of a political party and the only force that rules Karachi, a city of 20 million people and thus one of the world’s megacities. While it claims to be ‘national’ party, the MQM has not been able to make inroads in any other province of Pakistan.

Its leader, Altaf Hussain, by now a thick-jowled orator, whose speeches run on for hours, is living in exile in London. Every once in a while he threatens to return to Karachi but party workers beg and plead him to stay away for fear of his life. As a result, he works the strings via telephonic addresses, an obedient hierarchy and plenty of cash steadily sucked up from Karachi in the form of extortion.

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August 1, 2010 | 4:26 am

Ramadan and the God Squad

Posted by Mahim Maher

Ramadan is two weeks away and I’m already dreading it in the newsroom. Life slows down to a crawl in this month in Pakistan and while trying to keep your mind off food, the fast is made all the more difficult by the nausea induced by the fake piety of people around you.

“Are you fasting or feasting?” You will be asked this question by anyone who crosses your path with the exception of a few sensible people who understand that fasting is a personal matter and not something to flog in public. I generally hate being put on the spot about religious choices or matters of faith. And in Ramadan, each day becomes a battle to preserve the sanctity of this private decision.

If I say I’m not fasting, at the very least I will get a judgmental look dripping with moral superiority. At the other end of the spectrum I will get an unwelcome lecture on how it is the duty of every Muslim to fast (Yes, I know, but buddy I’ve got my period/am on medication/am pregnant/have cancer/have diabetes – I’m exempt). We are less obsessed with Islam, I think sometimes, than with the Islam of others. Muslims can be the cruelest measurers of morality. They think they’re passport control and immigration at the Gates of Heaven.

My sister once pointed out, when I went on a rant about an overly judgmental Islamist boyfriend, that in a sense it was blasphemy to sit yourself at the same table as God, who is, in Islam the only one who can and will be deciding who is going to heaven and who to hell. If you judge people you are purporting to set yourself at that level. In fact, this reminds me of Asma Barlas’ stellar work on interpreting the Qur’an (Believing Women in Islam) that when we refer to Allah as Him, we are assigning gender and thus blaspheming ourselves as God as no gender – we cannot give God human attributes.

So I’ve decided this Ramadan to give the Period answer whenever anyone asks if I’m fasting. It shuts men up at least. The Qur’an very clearly specifies that each person will be accountable for their deeds on the Day of Judgment. No one else can intercede for us.

That said, however, Ramadan is one of those times when charity visibly peaks in the city. I am amazed by Memon Mosque off MA Jinnah Road where each day anyone fasting can walk in and break their fast with hundreds of other believers – all for free. Lines and lines of steel trays are laid on the marble floor and bankers and bakers can sit together, shoulder to shoulder to sup together. Individual people and organisations put up trestle tables at bus stops across the city and set out jugs of flower cordial, bananas, melon slices, fritters, samosas and dates for any weary traveler who has not been able to make it home in time.

Ramadan is also a great time to see another side to Karachi. Last night, while driving back from the middle-class Gulshan-e-Iqbal after a night of Qawwali with Fareed Ayaz and his party at a friend’s house, I passed three sets of boys playing cricket at 3:30am in the street. After the break of fast at sunset and the subsequent Taraveeh prayers, young men stay out till sehri or the time to keep the fast again before sunrise. In fact, the Karachi Electric Supply Company even has a deal according to which you can put in a request for extra streetlights in your neighbourhood.

The problem with people in Ramadan is that they take the fast as an excuse to shirk work. I’ve been planning ahead for weeks because reporters simply can’t get enough material for the city section when Ramadan rolls around. People refuse to meet, government offices empty out at 11am, cell phones are turned off 4pm onwards. It is considered impolite to call after the break of fast because it’s family time.

The local wire services go dead and even the press releases dry up. Each page needs about 3,000 words with pictures and art. You’re lucky if you get people to file 300 words. And this doesn’t include fatigued reporters, pagemakers and photographers who don’t always have the energy to work. There is a tacit, silent understanding that pervades the newsroom that you won’t really assign any stories because it’s too hard to get them done. I, on the other hand, fasting or not fasting, have to ensure three pages are produced and sent to press each day. Some days I’m so desperate I’ve even considered using family photos.

And it’s simply unacceptable to actually call people on it. Hey, buddy if you’ve chosen to fast, that isn’t my problem. You’re doing it for God. And fasting doesn’t mean that you sleep till one in the afternoon, wait crankily till sunset and then doze off again. My father, a surgeon, has seen doctors leave patients open on the operating table just so they can go break their fast.

And yes, I do realize that I’m angry and sound angry. I hate how other people get me so worked up about religion. I only hope that this Ramadan I get to meet calm people, who add to my knowledge of Islam rather than my fear. 

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July 21, 2010 | 2:24 pm

This is between me and my Maker

Posted by Mahim Maher

Mere anarchy may be loosed on my world, to borrow from Yeats, but there must be something to stem the blood-dimmed tide.

As we wrapped up the page Tuesday night, the crime reporter Fawad came running. I was going through a proof for Page 14. I looked up. He held up seven fingers. I nodded to him. He ran off.

The drive-by shootings have resurfaced in Karachi. Each day the pages fill with rape, gang-rape, incest, sodomy, honour killing, acid attacks. The three-page city section reads like an anthology of licentiousness that would have had the Marquis de Sade rushing off to get a visa to Pakistan. I’d love to know what Camille Paglia, the author of Sexual Personae, would have to say about the cop who threaded a cord through a young man’s nose to punish him. There seems to be no end to this bottomless pit.

Lest I dedicate another entry to the depressing state of affairs in my province, I have decided to draw some inspiration from my pint-sized nephew.

Three-year-old Master Ibrahim* has been bopping to the performances of Coke Studio (www.cokestudio.com.pk) these days and he introduced me to the stellar, sufic work of Arif Lohar, the chimta-thrashing headbanger who has young people in thrall all over Pakistan with his ‘Dum Ghutkoo’ or Alif Allah song with the crimson-lipped Meesha Shafi.

For three years now Coke Studio has brought together the best of this country’s musical talent – and not just the pop stars but the old folk singers and musicians as well. This series has breathed life into the music scene and its fantastic website and downloadable content means that it’s all free.

The idea is simple. The good people at Coke created a studio and lined up artists such as Abdia Parveen (whose voice has been described as the best in the world), the gravelly voiced Arieb Azhar, the younger pop crowd like Aunty Disco Project and the ground-breaking female Pashto duo Zeb and Haniya.

Zeb and Haniya created quite a stir when they hit the scene in 2000 with their Farsi, Darri and Pashto work not just because they are so good, but because the Taliban had been squeezing the life out of musicians from the North-West Frontier Province, now renamed Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The musicians, who are not just Pakhtun but are from other ethnic and linguistic backgrounds, fled Peshawar for fear of their lives. Check out Bibi Sanam Janem at Coke Studio’s YouTube link to understand these lyrics. Master Ibrahim was thrilled with this song because my sister, his aunt’s name is Sanam.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuY-2sHJYhg&NR=1

Master Ibrahim also introduced me to Alif Allah by Arif Lohar. Alif in Arabic and Urdu is the first letter of the alphabet, as if I’m not wrong, is the same in Hebrew. This song, that my nephew prefers to call ‘Dum Ghutkoo’, is a terribly playful number that I guarantee will have you singing along too:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjaH2iuoYWE

Master Ibrahim was singing along in the Punjabi with an alacrity that has stunned my family.

Pir mereya jugni ji
I have the spirit of my Guide
Ay way Allah walliyan di jugni ji
The spirit of all the messengers who brought His message
Dum ghutkoo, dum ghutkoo…
Every time I think of you God, my heart races

Now that is the message, I think to myself. All the messengers, Jesus, Abraham, Moses, Noah… we are not Muslims if we don’t believe in them. The message of love in sufi music always helps recalibrate, realign my faith when the Wahabi versions or literalists try to force down their rigid Islam in which we fear God. The fire and brimstone approach never appealed to me in the first place, especially when it came to justifying hatred or violence towards other people because they believe differently.

I assume that people outside Pakistan are fairly familiar with sufi music. For this, we can mostly thank Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Michael Brook for their 1995 collaboration ‘Night Song’ and Eddie Vedder (Dead Man Walking soundtrack). Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s voice can be heard in almost every corner of Pakistan. He is revered as one of the greatest Qawwali singers we have produced. For those unfamiliar with it, it can be helpful to think of Qawwali as a sort of sufi opera.

When Night Song was released it was all we listened to in our house for months. I was too young to really appreciate the lyrics but when I returned to Pakistan after my MA degree, I started to listen more and more to Abida Parveen and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Much of this dovetailed neatly with developing friendships with Shia Muslims who revere Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of Prophet Muhammad (SAW). Ali (RA) figures prominently in this tradition and one of my favourite qawwalis by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan is Haq Ali Ali:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eP7sCkRw7p8&feature=related

This one was a more recent discovery and I never tire of listening to it because of the pyrotechnics of his voice. The Khyber will still tremble at the name of Ali, sends shivers down my spine. And when he says Sher-e-Yazdan, I’m always reminded of an old friend whose son is named Yazdan.

Unfortunately, I’m a rather amateur listener. Some of my friends know saint Bulleh Shah’s poetry by heart (and show off by quoting it randomly and at the oddest of moments). If you ever want to be persuaded that not all Muslims and Pakistanis (in particular) are terrorists, you just have to show up at one of Abida Parveen’s performances and wait for her sing Bulleh Shah’s Arey Logo (Oh People). This line makes the crowd go wild:

Arey logo, tumhara kiya? Main janun mera khuda janay
Oh people, what is it to you? This is between me and my Maker.

My translation is perhaps awkward and fumbling, but when she sings these lines the response is phenomenal. It is about tolerance in religion and at one or two performances I’ve heard her change the word ‘people’ to ‘maulvi’ or cleric, in a scathing critique of hair-splitting fundamentalism and religious policing that is oppressive in the worst of Orwellian senses. This type of thinking is unlikely to ever go away, and I suppose the challenge is to tolerate it to uphold the principle. I suppose I’ll be able to do this as long as they are singing qawwali.


* When Ibrahim was hospitalized recently for gastroenteritis we discovered to our glee that boys were given the title of Master as patients.

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July 10, 2010 | 4:42 pm

Comfortably numb, carelessly vocal

Posted by Mahim Maher

Truth be told, I haven’t been able to write the blog since I returned to Karachi this week after a month’s holiday in London. The depression is too great. And I just didn’t want to whine about how shitty Pakistan is. I just didn’t want to say it. I still don’t. Because I love this Godforsaken place and because if I said it, something would open up in a shuddering, heaving cataclysm.
I went back to the newsroom the day I landed. Piles of crap were waiting for me. They’ve been killing Shias again. The Punjab is cutting off our supply of water by siphoning it into a link canal reserved for flooding. Little babies are growing gaunter by the day in village clinics because the water they are drinking is dirty. The heat is so thick and pervasive that I am eternally covered in a thin film of sweat. On a more personal note, my 14-month nephew got sick and the sight of a canula in his baby fist made me want to tear the world apart.
The stories were endless and morbid. A 22-year-old girl was thrown into a fire by an exorcist who thought he would be able to smoke out the evil spirit. We spoke to a psychiatrist about the symptoms she was displaying and grew convinced that if taken to a doctor, the girl would have stood a better chance of getting better. They’ve never heard of Tourrettes Syndrome here. (http://tribune.com.pk/story/26357/exorcist-throws-22-year-old-into-fire-to-%E2%80%98smoke-out%E2%80%99-evil-spirit/)
Aside from what was pouring in, the first thing I had to do was commission a piece on why the hell Shias were being targeted again (http://tribune.com.pk/story/26860/money-makes-the-world-go-round-but-in-karachi-it-brings-lives-to-a-standstill/). I was rumour weary, I wanted some explanations why 11 of them had been targeted in two months. The Jafferia Alliance of Pakistan actually puts the number at 23, but when we asked them to provide the names and places where they were killed, they refused.
When my best friend, another journo, himself a Shia, told me late one night that one of the victims, 24-year-old motorcycle factory worker Fayyaz Hussain Naqvi was the third man in his family to have been targeted in one year, I could barely take on the information. Where the hell do you put that kind of information? Where do you store it and what do you do with it? (http://tribune.com.pk/story/26861/in-1-year-family-loses-3-members-to-target-killings/) At night when I returned after a harrowing day I went to take a look at Susan Sontag’s book on regarding the pain of others. But my own ‘pain’ or sadness was too great to let me read it.
In a city of 20 million people a death rate will be high. But it is the nature of this crime, the drive-by shooting, that chills me. The hatred for Shias angers me. The fact that the killers are never caught angers me. I’ve run out of headlines. The stories are always the same. We are growing number by the day, numb to the corruption, violence, inequality, senselessness of society. I decided that I would say it clean: “Fayyaz Hussain Naqvi, the 11th Shia to die for nothing”.  (http://tribune.com.pk/story/26140/fayyaz-hussain-naqvi-the-11th-shia-to-die-for-nothing/)
The next day a reporter from our sister organization, the Express Urdu news channel, stopped me in the corridor.
“Ap ne Shia’on ko direct hit kia he,” he said in a voice filled with incredulity. Why did you hit out directly at the Shias?
“What do you mean direct?”
“You said, ‘for nothing’.”
I didn’t quite understand what he meant. I knew he was Sunni and probably of the more orthodox Deoband stripe. It amazed me that he would say it so openly. When I shared this with my editor Kamal Siddiqi, he was nonchalant: “He didn’t understand the headline.” The more I thought about it, the more that seemed an explanation. The reporter probably thought I meant that this Shia’s death didn’t mean anything. We had a good laugh.
My sister has been going around the city on her break from Bennington where she’s studying photography. She came back after a visit to Jam Chakro, Karachi’s largest landfill site. “The children were like zombies,” she told me. I knew of Jam Chakro, it is probably the saddest place in the world. Scavenger families live in the rubbish. My sister saw an old woman who wouldn’t stop twitching. Sixteen-year-old boys looked 10. I asked her to stop telling me. I couldn’t take it any more. We live like animals here.
There was good news, however. And it would be unfair to say that it was all doom and gloom. I just couldn’t absorb it.
In Karachi we’re really excited that ‘Dancing’ Matt is planning to shoot one of his videos on Wednesday. We ran the story today and I’m hoping and praying that the right-wingers don’t spoil the party.
In other good news, two young Pakistani girls are being sent to the UK by the British Council on an expedition in which they will interact with schools and try to talk about Islam and misconceptions. The Citizens Foundation, very strong non-government organization working across Pakistan, wrapped up its summer camp that brings together rich kids from fancy schools and less privileged children. I learnt about a 16-year-old who started his own theatre company. The Edhi foundation has a shelter for animals. More and more people are growing organic here. I’ll take anything at this point.
I’ve been reading Toni Morrison’s ‘Burn this Book’ which has PEN writers speaking about the power of the word. David Grossman, who had I had never heard of before, struck me as the one who describes our situation in Pakistan the best:
“I feel the heavy price that I and the people around me pay for this prolonged state of war. Part of this price is a shrinking of our soul’s surface area – those parts of us that touch the violence menacing world outside – and a diminished ability and willingness to empathize at all with other people in pain.” In this job, they tell you to stop at a certain point. But for the life of me, I know I will never be able to switch off from Karachi, this explosion of a city that defies metaphor, escapes words. 

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