Usually played by the venerable Shabnam, she meets an upright Nadeem whose concern for her is expressed by taking care of her while expressing his moral consternation. In her tanked state, she warns the man who will be her suitor eventually: “Mein eik liberal aur roshan khayal soch wali larki hoon.”
That definition of liberal is the most commonly understood one. This meaning refers to the connotations of using this English word when conversing in Urdu. Liberal, therefore, is not really a reflection of a political philosophy, but personal choices of morality.
Referring to oneself as a liberal is likely to be misunderstood very narrowly, and to one’s detriment. As the space for discourse in Pakistan has narrowed, with rising levels of sympathy for extremist thought in this country, the tragedy is that nuances of many positions and variants of the political left have become superfluous, leaving liberalism as a straightjacket defining everyone.
This leaves everyone who comes under the liberal category at a distinct disadvantage because, comparatively, one is better off seen as a nationalist, a member of the religious right or even as a military fetishist. Why? Because as a liberal one is believed to stand for personal hedonism, not more complex freedoms and principles of law and equity.
Going through the pages of GT and other society rags, I am pretty sure that the layman would classify the people enjoying themselves in the glossy pics as liberals. But why do people make this connection?
Well, it’s not so much the personal behaviour of those who are classified as liberals, as much as their belief that many personal choices are exactly that, personal choices without larger significance.
That Dr Abdus Salaam was a great scientist who did love Pakistan is entirely ignored because the state had declared him a non-Muslim for being an Ahmadi. Incorrectly, many discredit him as a scientist because of his religious choices. A great patriot, a soldier who imbibes, will be considered less of one even though he shouldn’t. Quaid-i-Azam is yet another example, the liberals will resist the entirely unnecessary effort to paint him as a Muslim saint because his contributions stand out, despite him not measuring up to contemporary moral standards in Pakistan.
This is also why there is such a gulf between ‘liberals’ and the rest. The former pushes back at the mythologising of the latter, and in doing so tries to establish a far more complex picture of history, and our current situation.
A far more eloquent explanation appears in Khaled Ahmed’s article (“Desperately seeking liberal-fascists”, February 6) on the oxymoron of ‘liberal fascism’, where, in deconstructing the term, he explains liberalism and its inherent lack of absolutes beautifully. This, in turn, explains liberalism as encompassing, even with regard to Islam which is not what many Pakistanis think.
Increasingly, the divide between ‘liberals’ and the rest is defined by the willingness of the left to ask questions, whereas the religious right asks not questions, but articulates resentments simplistically. Both the left and right is relatively on the same page on someone like Raymond Davis, yet more realistic concerns are articulated by the liberals, that encompass not just what is right and wrong, but questions of law and the client-agent relationship between the US and Pakistan. Emotional jingoism, almost always wrapped in concerns of ghairat are useless because they will not engender a real strategy in doling out justice. While many may disagree, but the liberals articulate with relatively stable value sets. The religious right and nationalists do so with huge variance. In Malaysia, there is a stern critique against Lee Kwan Yew for describing Muslims as separate and not open to integration. Yet here in Pakistan that is the basis of this country under the two-nation theory.
The crux of the backlash against the liberals is also a security establishment one. People who don’t share their fantasy world are ‘dangerous’. Ironic, since most are pacifists.
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