Traditionalism V Progressive, Reason, Equality, Democracy, Illusion

 

Frankenstein's Monster

Nadeem F Paracha in The Dawn 

Illustration by Abro


The phrase ‘Frankenstein’s monster’ has come to mean an ambitious (and even unnatural) creation which not only becomes a threat to society, and to itself, but also to those who created it.

The term is derived from an 1818 novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. In it, a brilliant scientist Dr Frankenstein discovers a way to infuse life into lifeless matter. He creates a humanoid, expecting him to be pure in emotion and thought. The creation tries to fit into society, but fails. After realising his failure, his immense yearning to be accepted mutates and turns into rage. He violently turns against society, and against his creator who abandons him.

Modern political commentators have often used the phrase ‘Frankenstein’s monster’ to describe powerful elites sculpting forces or individuals who could execute their political agendas. But the creations often mutate and turn against their creators. Their rage can also damage whole societies.

The intentions of Shelley’s Dr Frankenstein were ‘noble’. The scientist wanted to create the ‘perfect man’ who could be taught morality through reason and whose core emotion was to be compassion. But the creation’s core emotion became an intense desire to be loved by society. Once the creation failed to conjure this, the desire to be loved became an uncontrollable urge to hate those who refused to love him.

In his 1987 book Frankenstein’s Shadow, Chris Baldick writes that one of the things Shelly’s monster represented was the mob during the 1789 French Revolution. The principles of the Age of Enlightenment — reason, logic, science — had noble intentions i.e. to rid society of superstition and the totalitarian hold of the Church and the monarchy. But when these principles were manifested through revolutionary action, they became monstrous.

They took the shape of mobs going on a killing spree, negating everything that the Enlightenment stood for. If Enlightenment philosophers created the Revolution, the uprising dismembered their philosophies. The philosophers wanted to create rational individuals, but ended up giving birth to irrational mobs, mindlessly demolishing institutions and individuals.

Some historians have explained Marxism as a noble idea (seeking to create economic equality), but one which gave birth to totalitarian figures such as Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse Tung and Pol Pot. They turned into ‘monsters’.

Same is the case with Hitler. Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot’s creation was shaped by Marxism’s idea of establishing a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat.’ Hitler’s monstrosity on the other hand, was shaped by an assortment of 19th century racist theories and myths circulating in Europe.

It is easier to find noble intentions in Enlightenment philosophies and in Marxism, but not so in racist ideas. However, Nazism explained itself as a struggle to revive a noble Germanic past that was full of purity and honour, but was disfigured by ‘non-Aryan’ races and ideologies. After realising that the world at large was refusing to recognise this, Hitler sought to destroy the world. He ended up destroying Germany and himself.

Of course, a multitude of economic and political factors also contributed to creating these ‘monsters’. The rise of Ruhollah Khomeini was shaped by the manner in which the economic interests of Iran’s ‘petit bourgeois’ and Iran’s heterogeneous commercial class (the ‘bazaaris’) were impacted by the Shah of Iran’s ‘modernisation’ programmes.

Khomeini was moulded by this class as a messiah. Other anti-Shah forces, such as the Marxists and secular democrats, went along. Liberals and many Marxists invested a lot of their revolutionary energy in propping up Khomeini.

After the Revolution, Khomeini expected them to ‘understand’ his Islamist route to vanquish American capitalism as well as Soviet communism. When the understanding wasn’t forthcoming, he launched a ferocious attack on his former non-Islamist allies. In 1988 alone, over 20,000 Marxists and liberals were executed by the Khomeini dictatorship.

In the 1980s, the Afghan Mujahideen were engineered as ‘freedom fighters’ by the US, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. US President Ronald Reagan said that, to the Afghan Muslims, the Mujahideen were what the heroes of the 18th century American Revolution were to the Americans. The anti-Soviet Islamist militants were bolstered by billions of dollars’ worth of military aid to fight a ‘just war’ against Soviet atheism in Afghanistan.

Once the Soviet Union collapsed, the same leaders who were invited to the White House and glorified as forces who were ‘saving Islam’ (and the world) from communism, began to be seen as nihilists. In turn, the leaders who had romanced the US as a ‘Christian brother’ helping them fight atheism, became their enemy number one.

Like Shelly’s monster who couldn’t find acceptance, former pro-US Islamists went on a rampage, killing thousands in their compulsion to hunt down their creator.

In 2011, Pakistan’s military establishment began to create a politician who they believed would vanquish the country’s old mainstream political parties, and become the establishment’s civilian vessel. This wasn’t the first time the establishment did this. However, this time, a lot more resources were invested.

Imran Khan, who had been leading an insignificant little party since 1995, was provided enough resources to suddenly manage to gather thousands of people at his rallies, and gain constant air time on popular TV news channels as well as a sympathetic ear by the judiciary.

This despite the fact that he was a political novice. His understanding of history and politics was a curious potpourri of contemporary Islamist ideas, illiberal nationalism, a drawing-room-view of Pakistani society, and a muddled postmodernist understanding of imperialism. Yet, he was diligently propped up by at least three generals, various ISI chiefs and TV channels. Then in 2018, an election was manipulated to put him in power.

But as PM, he was an abject failure. He was only interested in being admired and accepted as a legitimate saviour of the nation and the ummah. Everything else was to wait.

Dismayed by his performance and utter lack of political tact, his creators withdrew their support. Within months after this, he was ousted by a no-confidence vote. Feeling betrayed, he is now on the streets claiming that sinister anti-Islam and anti-Pakistan forces engineered his ouster. In his obsession to denounce those who created him, and plunge the country into political chaos, it is likely that he just might be damaging his chances of ever being a viable political option again.

The many shades of darkness and light

If we do not recognise the multiplicity of our past, we cannot accept the multiplicity of our present


Tabish Khair in The Hindu


For most Europeans and Europeanised peoples, Western modernity starts assuming shape with something called the Enlightenment, which, riding the steed of Pure Reason, sweeps away the preceding ‘Dark Ages’ of Europe. Similarly, for religious Muslims, the revelations of Islam mark a decisive break in Arabia from an earlier age of ignorance and superstition, often referred to as ‘Jahillia’.

Both the ideas are based on a perception of historical changes, but they also tinker with historical facts. In that sense, they are ideological: not ‘fake’, but a particular reading of the material realities that they set out to chronicle. Their light is real, but it blinds us to many things too.

For instance, it has been increasingly contested whether the European Dark Ages were as dark as the rhetoric of the Enlightenment assumes. It has also been doubted whether the Enlightenment shed as much light on the world as its champions claim. For instance, some of the darkest deeds to be perpetuated against non-Europeans were justified in the light of the notion of ‘historical progress’ demanded by the Enlightenment. Finally, even the movement away from religion to reason was not as clear-cut as it is assumed: well into the 19th century, Christianity (particularly Protestantism) was justified in terms of divinely illuminated reason as against the dark heathen superstitions of other faiths, and this logic has survived in subtler forms even today.

In a similar way, the Islamic notion of a prior age of Jahillia is partly a construct. While it might have applied to some Arab tribes most directly influenced by the coming of Islam, it was not as if pre-Islamic Arabia was simply a den of darkness and ignorance. There were developed forms of culture, poetry, worship and social organisation in so-called Jahillia too, all of which many religious Arab Muslims are not willing to consider as part of their own inheritance today. Once again, this notion of a past Jahillia has enabled extremists in Muslim societies to treat other people in brutal ways: a recent consequence was the 2001 destruction of the ancient Buddhas of Bamiyan statues by the Taliban in Afghanistan, not to mention the persecution of some supposed ‘idolators’ in Islamic State-occupied territories.

Achievements and an error

Both the notions — the Dark Ages followed by the Enlightenment and Jahillia followed by the illumination of Islam — are based on some real developments and achievements. Europe did move, slowly and often contradictorily, from religious and feudal authority to a greater tendency to reason and hence, finally, to allotting all individuals a theoretically equivalent (democratic) space as a human right rather than as a divine boon. Similarly, many parts of pre-Islamic Arabia (‘Jahillia’) did move from incessant social strife and a certain lack of cohesion to the far more organised, and hence hugely successful, politico-religious systems enabled by Islam. It might also be, as many religious Muslims claim, that early Islam marked some distinctively progressive and egalitarian values compared to the predominant tribalism of so-called Jahillia.

In both cases, however, the error has been to posit a complete break: a before-after scenario. This is not sustained by all the historical evidence. Why do I need to point this out? Because there are two great problems with positing such decisive before-after scenarios, apart from that of historical error.

Two problems of a complete break

First, it reduces one’s own complex relationship to one’s past to sheer negation. The past — as the Dark Ages or Jahillia — simply becomes a black hole into which we dump everything that we feel does not belong to our present. This reduces not only the past but also our present.

Second, the past — once reduced to a negative, obscure, dark caricature of our present — can then be used to persecute peoples who do not share our present. In that sense, the before-after scenario is aimed at the future. When Europeans set out to bring ‘Enlightenment’ values to non-European people, they also justified many atrocities by reasoning that these people were stuck in the dark ages of a past that should have vanished, and hence such people needed to be forcibly civilised for their own good. History could be recruited to explain away — no, even call for — the persecution that was necessary to ‘improve’ and ‘enlighten’ such people. I need not point out that some very religious Muslims thought in ways that were similar, and some fanatics still do.

I have often wondered whether the European Enlightenment did not adopt just Arab discoveries in philosophy or science, ranging from algebra to the theory of the camera. Perhaps their binary division of their own past is also an unconscious imitation of the Arab bifurcation of its past into dark ‘Jahillia’ and the light of Islam. Or maybe it is a sad ‘civilisational’ trend — for some caste Hindus tend to make a similar cut between ‘Arya’ and ‘pre-Arya’ pasts, with similar consequences: a dismissal of aboriginal cultures, practices and rights today as “lapsed” forms, or the whitewashing of Dravidian history by the fantasy of a permanent ‘Aryan’ presence in what is India.

All such attempts — Muslim, Arya-Hindu, or European — bear the germs of potential violence. After all, if we cannot accept our own evolving identities in the past, how can we accept our differences with others today? And if we cannot accept the diversity and richness of our multiple pasts, how can we accept the multiplicity of our present?

The End of Enlightenment?

Pervez Hoodbhoy in The Dawn

I was invited to lecture on ‘Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness in the Age of Global Terrorism’ at Missouri State University. Missouri is Trump country — he had a 70 per cent majority there. Some essential points are excerpted below.

The first seven words of the title belong to the 1776 Declaration of Independence from Britain: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

America’s founding fathers derived these ideas of equalitarianism from Europe’s then-bubbling cauldron of the European Enlightenment. Thomas Jefferson’s phrase “all men are created equal” is perhaps one of the best-known and profound sentences in the English language.

But truths once self-evident to Americans are no more evident to very many today. They elected a president who sees differences between men as more important than their equality. Had America’s judiciary not struck down his executive order banning Muslims from setting foot on America’s soil, I could not have delivered the lecture. Europe — from where the Enlightenment sprang — is witnessing the emergence of exclusionists like Marie Le Pen and Geert Wilders. This phenomenon begs an understanding.

Some blame this on terrorist acts perpetrated by certain Muslims. Indeed one must not dismiss the importance of fear. Terrorism terrifies. Crazed fanatics piloting airliners into skyscrapers or driving trucks into holiday crowds scare everyone out of their wits. But how seriously should one take this threat, and where did these monsters come from?

Truthfully, we all stand guilty. All scriptures contain a radical strain but whether or not that tendency gets developed and amplified depends on political circumstances. A significant part of today’s organised terrorist groups — though by no means all — originate from the actions of the US and its allies. There would be no Taliban or Al Qaeda but for Ronald Reagan’s obsession with the ‘Evil Empire’, and no IS but for George W. Bush’s criminal invasion of Iraq.
Even so, terrorists — unless they somehow seize nuclear weapons — are not an existential threat to humanity. The number of victims of terrorism is small compared to wars, traffic accidents, killings by deranged individuals, etc. Terrorism alone does not explain why the US is drifting away from its wonderful Enlightenment ideals.

Among the real reasons is growing economic inequality. To profess equality of humans is one thing, to enforce and protect this principle is yet another. When differences of wealth and power become astronomically large, grand assertions lose meaning.

Example: A popular — but absurd — Urdu couplet tells of Mahmood (sultan) and Ayyaz (slave) magically becoming equals as they pray side by side. But could King Salman al-Saud — just back after traveling to Indonesia with 505 tons of expensive luggage — and a Javanese Muslim peasant become equals even if that poor chap somehow got within praying distance alongside the monarch?

The US is faced with an equally absurd situation. Extreme income inequality is imperiling its future, and a decent life for citizens is ever harder to achieve. American CEOs draw seven-digit salaries, workers just five-digit ones. University education is increasingly restricted to richer sections of society. Forty-eight years ago in Boston I could do a weekly average of 20 hours of menial labour and cover nearly half of my university education. Today the same number of hours would not pay for even an eighth.

The upsurge of angry populism is actually fuelled not by terrorism but by America’s losing out in the global race. This is the conclusion reached by a global investment firm (GMO) which recently carried out an extensive data-driven study of this phenomenon. The report details how neoliberal economic policies are leading the US towards disaster.

Arising in the 1970s, neoliberalism has four key economic signatures: the abandonment of full employment as a desirable policy goal and its replacement with inflation targeting; an increase in the globalisation of the flows of people, capital, and trade; a focus at a firm level on shareholder value maximisation rather than reinvestment and growth; and the pursuit of flexible labour markets and the disruption of trade unions and workers organisations.

The upshot: the US has increasingly become a winner-take-all society. According to Forbes, the combined net worth of the 2016 class of the 400 richest Americans is $2.4 trillion, up from $2tr in 2013. The New York Times reported that the richest 1pc in the United States now own more wealth than the bottom 90pc. An angry populace is vulnerable to hate-spouting demagogues who blame everyone — Chinese, Mexicans, and Muslims.

This is only going to get worse because the days of American hegemony are gone, as is its absolute dominance of the world’s economy. When crises threaten, people everywhere tend to retreat into their comfort zones. Resurgent tribalism, aggressive nationalism, and religious fundamentalism become more attractive. But these can only provide solace, not solutions.

It would be tragic if the US were to fail its own constitution. Many countries are not even formally committed to accepting the equality of their citizens, and many more sharply discriminate between them even while professing not to. Pakistan’s constitution explicitly distinguishes between Muslim and non-Muslim, Iran officially espouses vilayat-i-faqih (guardianship of Islamic jurists), Saudi Arabia prohibits all places of worship on its soil except mosques. Although Israel lacks a constitution because of a conflict between its religious and secular forces, legally, as well as in practice, it privileges Jews over non-Jews. And India, which was once committed to secularism, is now turning into a state for Hindus run by Hindus.

How can the future of humanity be protected against this return to primitivism? No magical force drives history; there is only human agency. We must therefore educate ourselves into rising above accidents of birth, think critically, examine facts before forming opinions, keep widening the scope of our knowledge and, above all, act compassionately. To fight for universal humanism, world citizenship, and for the Enlightenment spirit is the only option for a world where boundaries are increasingly irrelevant.

Far too many Western Muslims speak of freedom as a sin whilst Muslims who have never known real freedom yearn – and die – for human rights

YASMIN ALIBHAI BROWN in The Independent

Sunday 11 January 2015

Ill with flu last week, I watched the events unfolding in Paris with dread, rage and disbelief – feelings that surge every time there is an Islamicist atrocity. To kill so many over line drawings or as an expression of religious zeal? What drives these fanatics? In normal circumstances, I would have been on TV and radio channels providing immediate responses, soundbite explanations. Bedbound, I had time to reflect more deeply on this carnage and the question of freedom: what it means, how precious it is and how fragile. That fundamental human impulse and right has now become one of the most volatile and divisive concepts in the world today.

Yes, we, the fortunate inhabitants of the West, are more free than those who live and die in the South and East, but some of the claims made by our absolutists are hypocritical as well as outlandish. Public discourse is expected to be within the bounds of decency and respect; language matters and the wrong word can incite high emotion.

Internalised caution in normal life is a good thing. Not good is the way the powerful control our right to know or speak. People are prosecuted for thought crimes; the BBC films on the monarchy have allegedly been blocked by the royal family; the Chilcot report on the Iraq war is still withheld and when it is finally released the full truth will be censored. I don’t see Index on Censorship kicking up a fuss about these serious attacks on free expression. State power in Europe and North America overrides the citizen’s right to know or speak. These things are never simply black and white or about them and us.

Things get even more complex when you think about freedom and Muslims. Muslims living in the Middle East, Pakistan, Afghanistan, North Africa, Indonesia, Malaysia or Turkey have no freedom to say what they think about the political system or the faith. Turkey imprisons more journalists than any other nation. Iran is the second-worst country for journalists and bloggers. In Pakistan people are tortured for blasphemy – often false charges trumped up to keep people in line.

Last Friday in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Raif Badawi was dragged out of prison in shackles, brought in front of the mosque and flogged 50 times for “insulting Islam”. Imagine the scene: worshippers who had just finished praying to a merciful God then watched the merciless punishment. This will happen every week until he has been lashed a 1,000 times. He will also spend 10 long years in a Saudi prison. His body and mind will thus be shredded. Badawi, an activist, had started a website, the Liberal Saudi Network, and shared some of his perfectly reasonable views. For that he had to be punished so severely that no one would ever try to do the same again.

In Pakistan, Afghanistan, most central Asian states, Egypt, Syria, Algeria, Libya, even “liberated” Iraq, people know they must not say what they think about their rulers or their imams, not even to neighbours or friends. The only choice is to conform and live, keep your boiling thoughts locked in your own head. Imagine the psychological consequences.

When, in 2010, the Arab Spring unexpectedly arrived, Muslims rejoiced, and thought they could at last speak freely and get proper democracies. I was in the Middle East in the most optimistic months. Spring turned to winter and even harsher restrictions were imposed everywhere. Now thousands of Muslims try to flee every day, to get to places where they can earn a living, be safe, most of all be liberated from oppression. Those people on boats who turn up on Europe’s shores want what the brothers Chérif and Saïd Kouachi and Amedy Coulibaly had before they blasted it all away.  

Large numbers of Western Muslims are disturbed by the rights and liberties they have inherited and sometimes reject them. Meanwhile Muslims who have never known real freedom yearn for, indeed die to get those same liberties and human rights. That gap between Muslims who have and don’t want and those who crave and can’t have grows bigger all the time. For too many British Muslims, familiarity breeds contempt for freedom. They talk about it not as a priceless entitlement but a peril, out-of-control hedonism and lasciviousness – as a sin. I find that deplorable.

After my book Refusing the Veil came out last year, some female Muslim acquaintances organised a soiree for me to read from it and discuss its contents. These were reasonable, educated women. Here are some of the comments made:

“Why did you have to write this; who gave you permission?”

“Even to think these thoughts is wrong, and you go and publish them? If you were in a Muslim country you would be in jail.”

“If your mother was alive she would have slapped you for writing this.”

When I replied that my mother refused the veil when she was 22, the woman came back: “Then I feel sorry for you. She was the sinner and she made you one too.”

“OK I have not read the book because it will dirty my pure thoughts, but if you are a Muslim, you follow Islamic rules without question. Are you even a Muslim?”

Only two out of 14 women defended my right to write the book. But then said they could never challenge Islamic practices so openly.

What has led to this lethal closing of the Muslim mind? Third-generation Western Muslims are less liberated than were my mother’s generation in the Forties and Fifties. White women who convert are even more rule-bound and obedient. It just shows human history is not a straight road towards enlightenment.

Those of us who value freedom need to understand better what it means. Especially in a world which is both coalescing and splitting apart, where technology has unleashed hope and possibilities as well as limitless hate, where political and religious control is tightening. To seek to be free is a big responsibility. Too big and scary for some people, Western Muslims in particular. This is the debate that needs to open up now within Islam. Will it? No. And that’s our tragedy. 

The Haal Of Pakistan

• 11Mar 2013
•  

Osman Samiuddin looks for cultural answers to why Pakistan can turn it on like no other team in world cricket, in an article from new Wisden Cricket Quarterly, The Nightwatchman. 

One November night in Sharjah, Kumar Sangakkara and Mahela Jayawardene came together to do what they had been doing for what now seems like forever. It was a warm, oily evening, the air heavy and lubricated. The pair had joined forces at 53 for 3, chasing 201 for the win. The pitch was a grubby orangey-brown, where batsmen were regularly through their strokes too early. Pakistan were 2-1 up in the series and playing in a recrudescent stadium, but this was still pretty routine firefighting for the Sri Lankan pair.  

Neither batsman was comfortable to begin with because you couldn’t really be on that surface. But once they got past the first 20 minutes, the familiarity of the task took over. Boundaries were bonuses – only three came in 17 overs from the 18th onwards – so, like good traffic cops, they simply kept the flow moving along. Single here, double there, single here, double there, nice and steady. By the 38th over, they had put on 102 and were looking as settled as two old buddies watching the game on an old, much-shared couch.

Sri Lanka now needed just 46 with 74 balls still to come (the required run-rate wasn’t high, but the nature of the pitch made it a little steeper). The crowd, largely Pathan, were still pretty cheery but attention from the match had slipped, and was focused on the occasion itself; Pakistan were, after all, returning after many years to a venue where they had created love and magic and darkness.

We were sitting in the press box which, in the revamped stadium, was at Sangakkara’s long-on when, from around the wicket, Shahid Afridi skipped in to bowl his sixth over. He’d had an eventful game and an even more eventful but inactive six months preceding the series. In that time, the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) had stripped him of the limited-overs captaincy after he made public a dispute with Waqar Younis, the coach at the time with whom his relationship had always been the wrong side of edgy.

It went the way all big feuds in Pakistan cricket do. It became legal after the PCB, in a fit of pique, stopped Afridi from playing for Hampshire. Then it became political, Afridi pooling the many cards permanently at his disposal – Pathan by birth, a lifelong Karachiite, the land’s most popular cricketer, a true celebrity and among their best limited-overs bowlers in recent years – and bringing them to bear down on the board. The interior minister got involved, as did the President (rumoured only, and in the kind of detached way he is said to be ultimately involved in everything, at the level of invisible ombudsman).

Compromises were reached, petitions and objections withdrawn. Afridi, who had “conditionally” retired in protest, eventually withdrew his retirement but only after Ijaz Butt had been replaced by Zaka Ashraf as board chairman. Now in his fourth game back, he’d first steadied Pakistan with the bat: his 75 from 65 balls, plump with loudly cheered singles and doubles, meant Pakistan survived being 97 for 6. The innings was slow by Afridi’s standards but his best and most mature in some time.

Now he came in, shining with sweat, and angled one in. First he beat Sangakkara on length, the batsman pressing then pushing forward but realising he wasn’t forward enough. Then his leg-break spun, which doesn’t always happen, zipped through Sangakkara’s attempted drive and bowled him. Chewing gum, Afridi turned around and produced his trademark, star-man celebration. It was muted though, chest not as far out, legs only slightly apart. There was less gusto, more the resignation of a man who’d done a hundred takes of it already and this, really, was just one too many. Apart from the wicket-keeper Sarfraz Ahmed, happy just to be in the side, none of the players who gathered around Afridi looked overly chuffed.

In the press box I turned to Shahid Hashmi, the AFP sports stringer for Pakistan, and we both silently acknowledged a possibility. We did it knowingly, but without knowing precisely what we were being knowing about. As most agency guys would have done, he’d already prepared much of his copy, reporting a comfortable Sri Lanka win. Only the details needed to be put in. Now we looked at each other and he decided, just to be safe (which, as a rule for agency writing, is top five), to start writing an alternative version, describing a Pakistan win.

On air in the commentary box was Waqar Younis and he left behind a thought that, like a trail of cigarette smoke, hung around deliciously. “Has this come too late or is there a twist in the tale?” A few days later we were discussing the game and that moment in particular. “I was doing commentary and I said it very clearly on air, what I am saying to you right now, I can sense something here, we just need one wicket,” Waqar said. “When Sanga got out, I said OK. Roshan [Abeysinghe] was with me and he said, no it’s over. They showed some girls praying, he said those prayers aren’t going to work. I said hold on, I can sense something here. Just  one more wicket here and you watch this game, seriously, you watch this game.”

Indeed the game demanded watching. The night gave in to Afridi and Pakistan. He had been limping until then, the result of a nasty knee injury picked up while fielding that had forced him off the field and put in doubt his further participation. But now he took four more wickets. Sri Lanka lost seven for 19 including Sangakkara’s wicket in around seven overs to lose a game they had won in everything but the actual winning, by 26 runs. Hashmi sent in his copy, complete with alternative opening and end, on the dot of the last ball.

A week or so after the game, I met Younis Khan for an interview and asked him about the turnaround. “See, this is the tradition of Sharjah. Janaab-e-Aala [Gentlemen], 25 runs are needed and [Abdul] Razzaq and Azhar Mahmood come and take four wickets, three wickets, or Wasim Akram comes on and puts in a spell… this is a tradition we keep alive.”

I don’t know how or why it was that I, like Hashmi and Waqar, sensed the continuation of this tradition at that precise moment. There was no sound reason for it. Even after that wicket, Sri Lanka could and should have coasted it. But millions of others had it as well, probably, a fleeting feeling when Sangakkara went that Pakistan were about to turn it on, a feeling as real as a smell you smell, a sound you hear, a taste you taste and a dance you dance.

***

What we know about what happens, roughly, is this. Pakistan are in the field (almost exclusively so), drifting, amiably and contentedly, to defeat over five days, or one. They are comatose flat. Bowlers, uninspired, are on autopilot, the fielders heavy and ponderous. If there is a target, it’s down to, say, 45 off the last 10 with seven wickets in hand. If it’s a Test, the target being chased is a small one, under 200, or if it is the first innings, the opposition are 200 for 2. Coasting.

Sometimes, but not always, it takes an unusual dismissal to turn on the light – a run-out, an electric catch, a part-timer taking a wicket. And then there is total frenzy, so overwhelming and real you can almost hold it in your hands. Such is its force that it can be deeply moving even through the sensory dilution and sanitisation of TV, even on ball-by-ball commentary online. But to let it get right inside your head and start rearranging your brain – like acid but a lighter, less paranoid burn – you have to be there as it happens.

There is music, not heard but felt, a beat somewhere in the background, rising, unrelenting. Up front is the dissonance of a reality that is proceeding swiftly but with an impact that is unveiled languorously. Wickets begin to fall in heaps, twice, thrice in an over and each one seems the only logical conclusion to that particular spell of play. There is an appeal almost every ball, most justifiable. Fielders start hitting the stumps and taking catches which, in other situations, we can easily imagine them dropping.

If you’re a Pakistani, to watch this phase is to be removed into the elemental tape-ball game you might’ve played at the weekend in some street somewhere which only has a field on the leg-side. It is a devolved version of cricket; amateur, random, frantic. There is no ICC code, no strategy, no rules, no coaches, no support staff, no coaching manuals, no formality.

Pakistan begin to inflict their own chaos on the opposition, except that where they are using it as a force for good, the opposition is crumbling under the weight of it. If one moment accurately captures this frenzy – not the skill or beauty of it, but just the two-sided chaos – it is the run-out of Jonty Rhodes in an ODI Pakistan played in Durban in February 1993.

Pakistan had limped to 208 in their innings and South Africa were cruising, first at 101 for no loss, then with 10 overs to go, when they needed just 50 with nine wickets in hand. Asif Mujtaba, of all bowlers, began the collapse and by the time Rhodes fell – the sixth wicket – the show was in full, uncensored flow. Brian McMillan plays and misses at a Wasim Akram delivery. Spooked by the collapse, Rhodes tries to sneak a single. The wicket-keeper Rashid Latif, alert to this now, hits the stumps with an underarm throw. McMillan is safe but Rhodes has just arrived at the same end and, defeated, runs on, his fate decided.

Akram has run halfway down the pitch and appeals to nobody in particular as the stumps are broken, maybe just celebrating a direct hit. Realising that it isn’t a run-out but instead an opportunity for one at the other end, he starts running back. Mujtaba comes jogging in from point, still aware, picks up the ball and lobs it gently and high to the non-striker’s end. There, along with the retreating Akram, are now assembled Mushtaq Ahmed, Salim Malik and Inzamam-ul-Haq. They look like people who congregate around a road accident in the subcontinent within a second of it happening with nothing to offer but curiosity: haanji [yes, so] what’s happening?

Mujtaba’s lob is a little high for Akram, who has to leap to get it as he’s backpedalling, his momentum carrying him past the stumps as he grabs the ball. Momentarily, as he turns and finds no stumps in front of him, there is panic. Meanwhile, Malik also tries to catch the ball behind Akram – just to make sure? – and as he moves back he hits the stumps, nearly falling over, and knocks the bails off. More panic. Luckily little Mushy is at hand logging everything that is going on (Inzamam, as always, is inert) and he deliriously points Akram to the stumps: “Behind you, behind you!” as if Akram may not recognise the three stumps he’s been bowling at for the better part of his life.

Akram plucks out a stump and gleefully taps it with the ball, relief, elation, adrenaline all coiling into one another. Rhodes is halfway back to the hotel by this point, unaware of the mess he has left behind. It’s YouTube gold (type in “Waqar Younis 5 for 25 vs South Africa 1992–93”). Put it in black and white and it’s a Three Stooges out-take (and check out the contrast with the pristine, natural athleticism of the next run-out, again Akram; the story of Pakistan cricket in two run-outs).

Waqar calls these moments a tamasha, a spectacle, but also a cross between a rolling circus and a fair. “I don’t think you need anyone at that time to calm you down because if somebody calms you down, you just break the rhythm. The other day, when Afridi and Saeed Ajmal was happening, thak-thak-thak it was going, you don’t need anyone to come and say ‘no, no, we need to do it like this or that’. Misbah was just sitting waiting, letting it run: ‘Tamasha lag gaya he, chal ne do isse [let the tamasha run]’.

“And it is a tamasha. I swear to God, we used to say it, we used to talk about it like this. Chal para kaam, chaloji, pakro [‘It’s begun, come, grab on to it’], that kind of language in the middle.”

To the spectator, the entire passage can be supremely disorienting, the head buzzing like a mobile phone on silent. You’re trying to understand what’s happening in front of you – how it’s happening, when it started happening, how it will finish, will it ever finish, do you even have time to enjoy it – and before you know it, it’s over and you’re sitting there stunned, like the first reaction to death and not knowing how to react and you’re alive and flushing and you’re a fool because it’s happened already and it’s over… and what the fuck just happened?

WTF just happened is that Pakistan did a Pakistan, a tamasha that is so unique and delirious and Pakistani, that it says something specifically about them.

***

Pakistan doing a Pakistan represents the occasional triumph of raw over manufactured, of organic over processed, of individual craftsmanship over mass production. That is to appreciate it. To understand it? That is important because we’re talking here about moments or days during which life doesn’t work as we know it should.

There are rational ways to look at this, no less compelling for their reasonableness. And each incident has its own specific context. After the Abu Dhabi Test win over England in 2012, when Pakistan bowled them out for 72 (defending 145), Misbah-ul-Haq rationalised how they had done it (he seemed also to be consoling England): fourth-innings targets, you know, always tricky no matter how small; five days’ worth of pressure aggregating itself in one chase; struggled against spin, and so on.

In the ’90s these passages of play came to personify the Pakistan side so much, in England, Sri Lanka, in the West Indies, in Sharjah, in New Zealand (especially and always New Zealand), they became so abundant that it looked like it was happening to formula. It was the unplanned plan: wait for the ball to become old (or make it so), get it reversing, hand it to either Wasim or Waqar or maybe one of the new kids who’s just come in but was born with balls of steel and knows just what to do with the ball. And then watch the tamasha.

Alongside Wasim, Waqar remains the most vivid ringmaster of the tamasha and as he’d also just had a productive stint as the side’s coach, I asked him to make sense of it. “I tell you what, you know why this happens?” Waqar begins. “Because we’ve always had match-winners, individual match-winners. Not the team. Our team used to be titther-bitther [literally meaning scattered, but in this sense disunited and disparate] in the early days but there were guys like Wasim, myself, Inzi, Saeed Anwar, you know, one-man-show kind of players. We used to have so many that we would never lose hope.

“Even the game you are talking about, the Total Trophy, 40 runs with seven or eight wickets left… I still remember. I remember very few things from the ground, some big wickets of course, but there are certain things you do remember. I ran when Kirsten got out to Mujtaba, I ran to the guys and said, look, they need 40 runs, we need seven wickets, but we can see a window, there is a window. I said, it’s one wicket, the ball was swinging, new batsmen, no chance.”

Pakistan’s traditionally rich variety of unorthodox bowlers also means they pounce on new batsmen like no other side in the world. But in that situation, before it happens, why are they so flat?

“No, no, it’s not flat. It’s a waiting game. Sometimes in any game when the momentum goes to the other side, the fielding side becomes a bit flat. But we knew, back of our minds, every guy, Wasim, me, Inzi, Moin, even he could see and sense those small things, that there is an opportunity. Suddenly, jaan aajati he [you become alive]. When you have match-winners, when your bowler senses something, then your fielders pick up on it, they go along with them, you can see, you can see it in the eyes.”

You could tell that day in Durban?

“Not just in that match, but in that series, where Wasim also got five wickets in East London and they needed 30-odd runs in a similar situation, and thak-thak-thak, gone. You can sense those things. That was us.”

But how have Pakistan been so good at doing this?

“We’ve never given importance to coaching. We were never analytical or scientific. That guy is there [he points to the video analysis man on the dressing-room balcony], yah sure he’s there. And he’s sitting there, and it’s kind of a highlights package and you can sit and analyse moments. But actually in the ’90s we never did analyse anyone: ‘he plays well here, don’t put it there.’ It’s not how long do you bowl at him there, what kind of field, what lengths, what is the B plan, the C plan, after that if it goes wrong, what happens? We had one plan. Go out there, get a wicket. We had resources. We sensed it and said, OK, bring Waqar back. Not even the captain [decided]. Sometimes I would go to the captain, give me two overs, let me do it. It was a kind of teamwork within the team but not like we’ll have a plan from before.

“No other country does it. Match-winners are always handy. Shoaib Akhtar? Match-winner. He’ll be ugly throughout the game, but with one or two overs he’ll change it, one spell. That’s why you play those characters. You can’t put the game in a shell where you have to be calculating, or planned or on this laptop, seeing how often this guy has gotten that guy out. Don’t do that.”

And then, quite unprompted, he inadvertently revealed just how powerful a thing it is to be part of (or, unsaid, to watch). He spoke of it like someone who’s gone cold turkey.

“It’s that thrill I miss, you know. If you ask me what I miss about cricket, I don’t want to go out and bowl again because I’m dead, tired. But I miss that part, the thrill… in that [South Africa] match, we were so hyped up, so much adrenaline was pumping. When we got back to the hotel, my eyes were swollen. I had to go to a doctor, there was so much there. That I miss, that rush of blood.”

But the easiest mistake to make would be to assume that this is only about the pressure of fourth-innings totals, or the ability to reverse, or even that this is a recent manifestation. Take Sarfraz Nawaz’s spell of 7 for 1 in 33 balls in Melbourne in March 1979 (just repeat that slowly to yourself, roll it around your head slowly like some fine wine to fully appreciate the flavour: yup, it’s that crazy a spell). Not only is it commonly thought to be one of the first sightings of reverse swing as we now know and love it, but it’s also one of the most startling instances of Pakistan doing a Pakistan: Australia were coasting at 305 for 3, chasing 382 for victory. Soon they were all out for 310.

The only thing is, it’s not so clear if it was reverse swing. The frazzled footage available of it does reveal swing, and late swing in particular, but it’s not conclusive. Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack records that Allan Border and Kim Hughes, in putting on 172, had “carried on steadily through the second new ball and until half an hour after tea, when Sarfraz bowled Border off a deflection with a beautiful ball that cut back sharply.” That dismissal began the slide and it seems the ball was oldish by then. In his autobiography, captain Mushtaq Mohammad freely admits that players gave “the seam a bit of a lift” during the spell, as well as the more legal application of “good old-fashioned sweat, spit and polish” to get such swing; in other words, it was probably reverse (and Sarfraz could nurse the ball like he nursed grievances, carefully and deliberately).

In the unintentionally comic post-match TV interview, Sarfraz credits this bowling starburst to the dowdy black-and-white virtues of sticking to line and length, though it seems like interviewer and interviewee are playing some Candid Camera-type practical joke on the viewer. (It is entirely possible that Sarfraz was still hiding the idea of reverse swing from the public.) But a few years ago, I asked him about that spell and he was emphatic. “That wasn’t reverse swing,” he said, as if offended that he was being reduced to a one-trick pony. “I had taken two wickets with the new ball, then three or four with the old ball, and then the new ball again.”

Sarfraz is often an unreliable teller of stories though. The evening he told me this, he also tried to explain the connections between match-fixing, Benazir Bhutto’s assassination and a Scotland Yard cover-up. But in his earliest autobiography, Imran Khan also makes no mention of late swing of any kind; only that Sarfraz, as he always did, used the conditions extremely well and had a good eye for picking the new ball that might swing most.

Forget this and go further back for more definitive proof that this is about the soul of Pakistan cricket and reverse swing was merely a means of expression. What else but an intrinsic condition could explain the manner of Pakistan’s landmark 24-run win at The Oval in 1954? England were 109 for 2 on the fourth day of that last Test, chasing 168, with Peter May and Denis Compton at the crease. Pakistan were playing their ninth Test ever, against arguably the strongest side of that decade (between 1951 and 1961 England won nine out of 11 home series) and reverse swing was not yet even a twitch in someone’s fingernail.

And yet, led primarily by Fazal Mahmood, Pakistan managed to drop catches and still instigate a remarkable collapse of eight for 34 in about two hours. Fazal began landing the ball every time exactly where he wanted. So sharp and overpowering had his intuition become that once, as Kardar was about to take him off, he snatched the ball before another bowler could be found, ran in and bowled. He immediately got the critical wicket of Peter May, caught (to cross the “t” and dot the “i” of this tale) by Kardar himself. Later, Fazal would show to Shujauddin exactly where he wanted him to stand at short square leg: “You put your right foot here, left foot there, unfold your hands and stand ready for a catch. The ball will come right into your hands and you just grab it.” Next ball the last remaining English hope, Johnny Wardle, prodded Fazal’s leg-cutter straight to Shujauddin, who didn’t need to move.

The most forceful evidence that this unique ability to summarily summon chaos is a character trait more than just a skill, has come recently. The shows Pakistan put on in Sharjah against Sri Lanka and in Abu Dhabi against England were not even created by fast bowlers. Spinners wrote these scripts.

As partial explanation, I’m tempted to put some stock in simple Pakistani bluster and bluff. It’s the old Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto (the first truly populist and most seminal prime minister of Pakistan) trick of being down and out but fooling – or willing – everyone into believing that you’ve never been as powerful as this before. Bhutto’s political career and legend was built on this tricky but captivating duality.

The most outrageous and instructive example was his abetting in the splitting of the country in 1971 and then pretending that it was a gargantuan slight upon him and the country. It was crystallised in a memorable address to the UN Security Council in December 1971, a day before Pakistan surrendered to India in the war that turned East Pakistan into Bangladesh. Lounging back in his seat, allowing for the full effect of his feudal lordship, Bhutto promised that his country would fight (he had earlier promised they would fight for a thousand years, as they had already been fighting for the last thousand years), admonishing the Security Council, chiding and taunting them. It was all bluff because he himself – and West Pakistan – had played such a role in matters coming to this pass. Then, mid-rant, he tore up the notes in front of him and walked out, vanquished to everyone, but victorious to himself and his country. He then proceeded – briefly – to shake the country alive.

On a cricket field, this is like Pakistan strutting around pretending that the opposition needs 30 runs to get off two balls with a single wicket in hand, when in reality they need 35 runs off eight overs with seven wickets left. A game lost, in other words, merely being the apparition of a game won. Bhutto was the most potent symbol of this. But running through the list of the greatest names of Pakistan cricket, note how many of them were of similar blood, some to the point of delusion: Abdul Hafeez Kardar, Fazal, Sarfraz, Waqar, Afridi, Wasim, Javed Miandad, Imran, Shoaib.

The more illuminating examples are actually those with less talent still bluffing the opposition with their bluster. Ask yourself how on some days guys like Aaqib Javed, Azhar Mahmood, Aamer Sohail (on most days), Moin Khan and Ijaz Ahmed walked around like they owned not only the pitch, but the world itself?

I had an email discussion with Saad Shafqat about this, suggesting to him that this bluster, the sense that even if they’re wrong or losing, they are right and winning, is critical to such moments. A little denial perhaps, or even a refusal to accept matters for what they are. Saad is a cricket writer by love and a leading neurologist by reason. He ghosted Javed Miandad’s autobiography and writes regularly for ESPNcricinfo, an elegant and rational voice on screen, and a loving, believing one off it. He is untouched by cynicism to the point of being a Pollyanna. In true Saad style, he kind of agreed but saw a rosier picture.

“I see it more as self-belief and hubris, not so much denial,” he wrote back. “You could say denial if the outcome ended in failure; but here the outcome is success. Most times that self-belief is latent, but it gets triggered by some unexpected circumstance. And once triggered, it feeds on itself and explodes. I guess another way of seeing it is that this self-belief has an activation threshold, and once the threshold is met, there’s no stopping it and it goes all the way. The biological parallel would be a nerve action potential or a sexual orgasm.”

This leads to another imprecise consideration. In an article on Pakistan cricket last year, a state-of-the-nation kind of piece, I’d suggested that “Pakistan lives fullest in the imagining of its own imminent death. It is at – and for – this moment that Pakistan and its citizens stir and fight and burn bright.” It was written in the context of the wider troubles afflicting country and cricket, to explain how Pakistan had managed to turn things around in arguably their darkest moments.

In hindsight that could work as an explanation for these moments too. Only when Pakistan realise that they are on the verge of losing the game do they begin to do something about not losing it. It was a point Ramiz Raja, who’s lived first-hand through many such days, made to me just before the Abu Dhabi Test against England.

“We don’t know how the team is coping with the logic of method,” he said. “In our times it was always up to the brilliance of certain individual players. So when you get to a desperate situation, where you know you are going to lose, when you know you are going to get killed, for example, your reflexes and body matter reacts absolutely differently.

“If you were jumping 5ft and suddenly you know you have to jump 10ft to save yourself from a kill, you do that. It’s the kind of mechanism that, in a desperate situation, brings out the best in our make-up, and individual brilliance comes through and we look not only to survive but to kill our opponents. The aggressive mechanism within a defensive frame, that comes out and becomes haavi[heavy or overbearing] on the opponent.

“In our time we used to wait for the ball to get old and then ek naara lag jaata tha [a chant went around the team], a feeling on the field that it is happening now, a trigger point. We then had the quality to knock them over. Now it’s a different team altogether and a different opposition and different rules. But the principal mechanism is the same, where in a desperate situation it brings out the best in us. Fielding becomes better and you know you cannot make any more mistakes, that kind of a desperate mindset.”

Where Ramiz sees desperation, Saad sees opportunity. Of course. “It’s a combination of three major national characteristics – laziness, impatience, and latent brilliance. Since we’re lazy, we don’t get engaged until we sense an opportunity. But once we do get engaged, our impatience drives us to get the job done quickly, and our latent capacity for brilliance makes it all happen. Seen another way, we are an enormously gifted team that’s too lazy to apply itself. But when the circumstances are right and an opening appears, our natural gifts take over, with our innate impatience ensuring a speedy resolution.”

What Ramiz is talking about could be an offshoot of a tangible phenomenon which, most popularly, manifests itself in those apocryphal tales of mothers suddenly finding the strength they didn’t know they had to lift cars under which their babies are trapped. In his book Extreme Fear: The Science of Your Mind in Danger, the science journalist Jeff Wise goes deep into this, but one brief extract (prefacing the tale of a man who did lift a car to save a cyclist trapped underneath) is too relevant not to reproduce here.

“Here’s how it is: one minute, you’re going through your daily routine, only half paying attention. And the next you’re sucked into a vivid, intense world, where time seems to move slower, colours are brighter, sounds more perceptible, as though the whole universe has suddenly come into focus.”

In an email discussion, Wise equated this to the idea of the clutch performer. “There’s been a fair amount of debate as to whether there is such a thing as a ‘clutch performer’ – someone who’s so-so most of the time but consistently plays at a markedly better level when forced to come from behind to win a game,” he wrote. “Physiologically, there might be some people who are able to use that rush of adrenaline that comes over us in a high-tension situation and lets us run faster and react more quickly. On the other hand, some argue that this kind of clutch performance is just a statistical fluke, that inevitably sometimes sports people are going to come from behind in the end, and by chance some people will wind up doing so more often.”

***

Listen if you can to “Chori Chori”. An old folk song, it has been reconstructed by Coke Studio, an intelligent and hip Pakistani music show created by the soft-drinks giant which has managed to defy the fact of its own polluting commercialist birth, and produced more freewheeling creative authenticity than could be expected from such a union between art and commerce. Every season – this year will be Coke Studio’s sixth – the creative force behind it, Rohail Hyatt, digs out musicians big, obscure and lost from any scene or tradition, throws them together into a studio with a house band, and has the entire process of creation and final output filmed, recorded and then aired. Broadly, the formula is to mix contemporary sounds of Pakistan with older, more traditional ones. But really there is no formula and it’s not fusion in the Peter Gabriel style of forced fusion. Hyatt has fused sounds from Pakistan with those from elsewhere, from a previous age to this, so organically that he has created something anew.

“Chori Chori” was sung originally by Reshma, one of Pakistan’s greatest folk singers, and is rendered modern by Meesha Shafi. It was once written of Jimmy Connors that he played women’s tennis inside a man’s body; Reshma’s voice could be that of a man inside a woman’s body. Shafi – an elfin, glammed-up Beth Gibbons – is different but no less striking, bringing to the song a sore throat and smoking sexiness. Her voice has pain.

As the song begins to end, about five minutes and 45 seconds in, it does so with a quietly gathering gravitational pull. A gentle auditory whirlpool ropes in the different threads, building a pyramid of sound, higher, narrower. To the listener, vision and sense is tunnelled into nothingness, but in this crashing and mild percussive chaos, everything can actually be seen. When I first heard it, it was an indescribably powerful and briefly paralysing moment. That denouement, the world ending and simultaneously beginning, has become one of the many leitmotifs of Coke Studio: the slow, long build, the gradual bringing together to make one, the swift finish in ecstasy.

To me, this was a partial epiphany because it sounded like the musical and emotional resonance of what Pakistan do. Specifically it pushed me into thinking about Qawwali, even though “Chori Chori” is not Qawwali at all.

Briefly – and dryly – Qawwali is a form of devotional music, originating centuries ago but in the form that we now know it around the 13th century by one order of the Sufis. (Sufism is a practice of Islam but, with its modern puritanism belt much loosened, it asks for a more personalised relationship with God.) Generally but not exclusively, the lyrics will be the work of great Sufi poets, rendered in soaring, shrieking voices but to bare music; a tabla or dhol for a beat, a wheezing harmonium for rhythm and the clapping of an entourage. The voice, the clapping, the chanting: these are the structural planks. But the spiritual base is the most important because Qawwali is not just music. To those versed, it is a call to prayer, to ritual, to contemplation, to faith, to hope, to despair, to love, to mourning, to celebration. Other music, especially modern music, asks you primarily to listen. Qawwali asks that you submit, that you immerse yourself. Otherwise it asks – and gives – you nothing.

Taken casually, it can be a mood thing. Sometimes it’s left me flat, a mish-mash of voice and noise that, to an ear attuned to Western music, is too disparate and incoherent. But sometimes – live especially and, thus, raw – it catches. Maybe it’s the right lyric or the force of repetition but then – forget mind, body and soul – it can set fire to eternity.

The more I thought about it, the more apparent Qawwali became as a revelatory point of reference for Pakistan’s cricket in those spells. Is it too crazy? I spoke to Abu Mohammad, one of the country’s leading Qawwals (better known alongside his brother Fareed Ayaz) about it. I’m not sure that the argument struck him immediately but, by the end of our conversation, as he promised to send me articles from 2005 (when former President Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistan cricket team and Mohammad and his troupe were all in Delhi together) linking Qawwali and cricket, I thought he might have warmed to it.

There were two questions I really wanted to put to him. Could it be said, I asked, that to the uninitiated, a Qawwali can sometimes feel like a living, breathing but random collection of voice and sound until, suddenly at one moment, it surges together. And then transformed, it becomes momentarily a single, powerful force. (Take also, I thought but didn’t ask, the alaap, that sudden vocal burst in a Qawwali. Is that not exactly like a riff of wickets by one bowler from out of nowhere, at odds with everything that has gone before?)

He thought about it a little. “Yes, completely. When Qawwali is being read it takes a little time for it to get warm, to get into line and get going. But there comes a time when a Qawwal and his audience both become like one, they both come to one side together.”

But it was the next question, about haal, that had really gnawed away in my head. The literal meaning of haal is state, as in a state of being, and it can refer to a number of different states. But it has come to be interpreted, more often than not, as one ultimate state of ecstasy, much sought after but rarely achieved, in man’s journey to get closer to God. “In the ecstatic state,” explains Idries Shah in his book Oriental Magic, “Sufis are believed to be able to overcome all barriers of time, space and thought. They are able to cause apparently impossible things to happen merely because they are no longer confined by the barriers which exist for more ordinary people.”

One of the primary objectives of Qawwali is to attempt to bring the performer as well as the listener to haal. Mohammad recites a Sufi poem and then says: “The state of haal is such that if you, God willing, get there in a gathering, after coming back from haal, you will not be able to describe or explain the feeling. This is just that state that only he knows who has experienced it. Haal or wajd[the literal translation for ecstasy] is such a state that comes to that man and takes him to the goal that he has been in search of all his life. Then he is not with himself, he has reached somewhere else.”

Is there a moment in live performances when you can identify that haal has been achieved? “No, no, no. You cannot identify this moment [haal ultimately can only be granted to you, you have no control over its arrival]. Sometimes it is the traditional chant Allah hoo and it happens, sometimes a verse like Dam a dam mast qalandar and it’s there. This is dependent on the individual and their state of existence, the mood of the moment, where their point of thinking is taken from.”

As a relevant aside, Pakistan’s 1992 World Cup triumph was soundtracked by the Qawwali of the late, great Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. The players listened to him obsessively (on a stereo picked up by Ijaz Ahmed in Singapore on the way there) every day during practice, during lunch breaks, after games, before games. The entire tournament was, for Pakistan, like a Qawwali itself; disparate, floating aimlessly initially before suddenly coming together with such force that they became the best in the world.

Mohammad likes cricket and so I put to him that what Pakistan do when they do a Pakistan, when that tamasha erupts, could it be that they have come to haal? “The thing you have said about a team or group spirit, that happens directly, automatically, but not because of them. It happens naturally that they link together as one. You cannot understand how it happens. It happens to you.”

This isn’t so radical a connection because, from the off, the concept of haal struck me as a familiar one. In a way it’s what all athletes strive towards. Only in sports they call it “the zone”, that state of supreme focus which sees athletes perform for periods at the very peak of their potential. How similar is it? Well. Dr Roberta Antonini Phillipe, a sports psychologist at the Institute of Movement Sciences and Sports Medicine, University of Geneva, says that when a player is in the zone, it is like being in a trance.

“The zone is when your mind fully connects with achieving a goal,” she explains. “When you’re in the zone your mind only processes the thoughts and images that help you execute your task successfully. In that state of mind the athlete explains that he has positive thoughts, positive images and sometimes also music in his head.”

The trope that the zone has spiritual components and implications is not unexplored. The psychologist Andrew Cooper did so in his 1998 book Playing in the Zone: Exploring the Spiritual Dimensions of Sports. Cooper is a devout student of Zen. “The zone is the essence and pinnacle of the athletic experience, for it reveals that, at their root, sports are a theatre for enacting the drama of self-transcendence,” he writes. “Athletes and fans alike, focused as we so often are on the game of winning and losing, miss the deeper significance that is right before our eyes. But in the zone, the extraordinary capacities that lie within each individual are made manifest. To grasp this hidden dimension is to transform the very meaning of athletic play.”

Where haal deviates from the zone is in the idea that the latter can be sought, that through a series of steps or rigorous preparation and practice it can be achieved. Many sports psychologists – but not all – believe that using different techniques of visualisation, goal-setting and self-motivation can help athletes to achieve and stay in the zone. Pakistan employs no such techniques and never has done. Just as Abu Mohammad says that Qawwali rehearsed and recorded in a studio is the imprisonment of the form, so it is with Pakistan. Net practice and training – the rehearsed recordings of sport – are generally imprisonment for Pakistani players. That is not where they shine. For them, as with Qawwali, it happens live and it happens unprepared. Enlightenment, goes one saying of Zen, is an accident, as it could be in haal and as it is in Pakistan cricket.

There are other points to consider in Pakistan’s deviation. How often, for example, do you hear of a group of athletes going into the zone collectively? It can and does happen. According to Ed Smith, Mike Brearley recently described a team in a zone: “Each player breathes in the others at their best, is strengthened by that identification, and gives off similar vibes to the rest of the team.” Choking, almost an opposite of the zone, does spread through teams. But the most striking aspect of Pakistan’s haal is the effect it has on the spectator. When Pakistan achieve haal, to be there live is to almost achieve haal yourself, in unison, as is the hope of every performance of Qawwali.

The Abu Dhabi Test win over England in January 2012, to pull out just one instance, managed this. I wrote a piece in which briefly I wondered about haal and Sufism. One spectator, part of the English travelling support, read it and wrote in. “As part of the visiting England fan base we sat yesterday in awe of what unfolded. Seldom do you see a side in any form of cricket dismantled in two hours of play. What struck many of us – and we have all played the game throughout our lives – was the seeming inevitability of what was about to unfold. From the very start of the England second innings one could sense a quiet but definite shift in ownership of the moment, something beyond the playing conditions and the participants solely. It was like karma, strange as that may sound. Your article summed up the sense of ‘other worldliness’ some of us felt.”

In other words, submission. Because, finally, what Pakistan are doing in these moments is asking you to submit. They are asking you, opponent and spectator, to submit to their reality, their chaos, their unplanning, their spur of the moment, their pox, their talent, their wretchedness, their beauty, their spirit. They are inviting you to dance with them. Except that it isn’t just a dance. It is the dance of that great Sufi poet, Jalaluddin Rumi:

Dance, when you’re broken open. 
Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off. 
Dance in the middle of the fighting. 
Dance in your blood. 
Dance when you’re perfectly free.

The Enlightenment Business: Wisdom For Sale

by Harsh K Luthar

Religion and spirituality today are a big business. Generally the spiritual teachers, preachers, and the so called enlightened masters of the day are really motivational speakers and self styled self-help expert who are engaged in entrepreneurial ventures aimed at financial and commercial success.  Every year people spend billions of dollars buying the books, CDs, and self-help programs offered by such teachers.

The commodity that the spiritual teachers in the new age sell in the free market is called “Enlightenment”. Enlightenment is intangible and not well defined as a product. The cost of production and storage costs of “Enlightenment”  are very low, and so there is always plenty in the inventory to sell!  Of course, there is the cost of marketing “Enlightenment”. Still even with that expense, the profit margins for this product or service have the potential to be very large for the established experts or the spiritual teachers.

In a very real and substantive sense, the so called modern teachers of “enlightenment” are far removed from the sages of old who cared nothing for money and financial gains and adopted a life of humility, poverty, and service. Some of the well known saints of India such as Sri Ramakrishna and Sri Ramana did not even touch money with their hands. Generally, in almost all the pictures, Sri Ramana is shown wearing one simple cloth piece called Kaupina, which is equivalent to an Indian underwear. These sages were venerated by their followers because they demonstrated in their life what true enlightenment embodies.

Many of the spiritual entrepreneurs of the day appear to seek the adoration and veneration from their followers without much inclination towards demonstrating behavior or conduct befitting a sage. Although it seems self-evident to most objective observers, it is not always obvious to many disciples and students of yogis, spiritual teachers, and cult leaders that their gurus are simply human beings and therefore limited and sometimes deeply flawed.

Just like the students, the so called “gurus”, “masters”, and “spiritual teachers” are susceptible to all the weaknesses of the body and the mind. I have observed that the humanity of spiritual teachers or leaders is very difficult for many of their followers to accept. The mentoring relationship between a spiritual guru and his/her disciples can be very complex. When the students realize that their spiritual leader, despite claims to moral superiority and being divine, etc., is just like them, it can come as a shock, a rude awakening. For many followers this can be a very traumatic event.

Many people continue to view their guru or their spiritual leader as being infallible even when overwhelming evidence points in the exact opposite direction.  To avoid facing the painful reality, some followers interpret the facts of their leaders conduct in creative ways to explain them away somehow. It happens. One has to only read the newspapers and the Internet sites to discover all the information there.  Spirituality and selling of wisdom is a huge business. The behavior of spiritual leaders can be analyzed from that perspective for a more complete understanding of the business of enlightenment.

Of course, we need to understand each others’ humanity and even forgive friends, teachers, and gurus when they have made mistakes in judgement. I am not criticizing the whole spiritual arena but simply pointing out the importance of objectively and rationally assessing situations involving marketing of wisdom by the spiritual leaders of the day, whoever they may be and in whatever religious or spiritual tradition.

The need to remain loyal to our own intelligence and common sense when analyzing facts and situations, even when it comes to spiritual teachers, is important. To put another human being on a constant pedestal, even if that person is a guru or a spiritual teacher, is not fair to either that person or our own self.

Who is the ultimate Guru, other than our own Heart? This is the sacred Truth that we should grasp firmly and make it our own.

I don’t like to be overly critical of spiritual teachers in any religion or spiritual tradition. Certainly, they bring many benefits to people and parts of humanity.  But it seems to me that that many of the so called “gurus” and “spiritual masters” are plainly lacking in anything but the most superficial insight and knowledge.

Many of these self-help and self-proclaimed gurus struggle with serious emotional and psychological issues and need to be constantly on a power trip and thrive only when dominating their students and disciples. Some of these so called “spiritual teachers” even appear to lack proper mental balance, suffer from low self-esteem, and need to carefully reflect on their actions and behaviors before they go around advising others on how live properly.

It is no wonder that traditional religious and yogic orthodoxy in India  responded so negatively to the attacks of  Jiddu Krishnamurti and later Rajneesh (Osho). Despite the serious personal limitations and weaknesses of these two critics of  the existing orthodoxy, they were powerful voices in pointing out the hypocrisy of  gurus and masters in spiritual traditions who “sell” Universal Truths, and make disciples dependent upon them.

Ironically, both J. Krishnamurthy and Rajneesh (Osho) fell into the same mental and spiritual traps that they accused other teachers of being in. It happens. This is all part of the human condition. Everyone, including the so called gurus and teachers and the enlightened ones are struggling to find their place and path in this world. As long as “Enlightenment” is viewed as a commodity that can be sold and bought, there will be sellers and buyers. This is simply how the free market works!

I don’t know if it is completely up to us to decide what our part in the spiritual circus is. We should not be overly judgemental but simply use our rational intelligence in evaluating the spiritual scene. Despite the force of circumstances, if we stay aware and devoted to the Heart, the True inner Guru, I feel we will be OK.

Love and Namaste to all — Harsh K. Luthar

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