For many members of threatened minority communities, places of worship offer solace. Last year, more than 70 Christians were killed while celebrating Easter in a park in 2016. The forced conversion of Hindu girls and the marginalisation of community members have been among other factors fuelling feelings of insecurity and isolation for minorities.

At the same time, places of worship also represent an important lesson for Paksitan’s fragmented society. This can most clearly be seen in the religious crossover, known as syncretism, between Hindus and Christians, who both venerate the Virgin Mary in Karachi.

It serves as a vital message of the need to co-exist and create structures that minimise discrimination.

A look back in history

The history of Tamil and Goan Christian devotees in Karachi can be traced back to nearly 50 years ago when A M Anthony, a Tamil Christian, established Saint Anthony’s Club at his house on Somerset Street, in the town of Saddar, a neighbourhood of Karachi.

As described to me by his granddaughter, devotees would gather to recite novena, or nine-day, prayers to ask the Virgin Mary for blessings and good health. The Virgin Mary is known as Our Lady of Valenkanni, based on apparitions she is believed to have made in the Indian town of Velankanni, in Tamil Nadu state, 2,000km south of Karachi.

After his landlord objected to the loud singing and recitation, Anthony and his fellow Christians, many of them immigrants from Chennai and Goa, were allowed a hall space in the premises of St. Anthony’s Church.

The Christian devotees then invited both Hindus and Zoroastrians to join them in asking for benediction. In this way, novena prayers to Our Lady of Valenkanni became a part of Catholic churches’ ceremonial activities across Karachi, and opened up the veneration of the Virgin Mary to new faiths.

For some Hindu devotees, Our Lady of Velankanni symbolises prosperity, aspirations, well-being, while providing answers to their prayers.

The origins of Our Lady of Velankanni

Of course, the home of Our Lady of Velankanni is in the town of Velankanni itself, which also demonstrates the intersection of Hindu and Catholic practices in contemporary religion.

The basilica attracts millions of devotees each year. As in Karachi, these include both Catholic and Hindu residents. Some Catholic devotees from Karachi embark on a spiritual journey to the basilica of Our Lady of Valenkanni to ask the Mother for favours and intercessory graces.

Three accounts of the apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Velankanni have been documented over the years, and subsequently narrated by her devotees.

The first story dates back to the end of the 16th century and is about a Hindu shepherd boy’s sighting the Virgin Mary by a pond. She asked the boy for milk for her son, Jesus. The boy readily offered the milk. Locals remain intrigued until the Mother appeared at the site again. Thereafter, the pond was known as “Matha Kulam” or “Our Lady’s Pond”.

The second event is said to have happened a few years later. A crippled boy in Nadu Thittu was apparently cured by the Virgin Mother after he offered her buttermilk. The Catholic residents of a nearby town then built a shrine in recognition of the healing.

In the late 17th century, Portuguese sailors transformed this early construction into a chapel, based on vows made during rough seas between China and Colombo on a merchant vessel.

Today, Our Lady of Valenkanni has special meaning for both Hindu and Christian devotees because of the miracles she is associated with, including the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami which caused massive destruction in Tamil Nadu. Basilica officials were quick to report this as a miracle, as 2,000 pilgrims were attending mass when the town of Valenkanni was hit. News sources and official disaster reports showed that the basilica was the only building to escape this large-scale catastrophe.

Acts of devotion

Some devotees make offerings to the Virgin Mary through purchases of expensive fabric for a sari. This is associated with the historical and symbolic depiction of the Virgin Mary draped in a saffron sari, a common garb across the subcontinent. There are others who make sari offerings to the poor upon fulfilment of their vows.

One woman I spoke to as part of my research, a Goan Christian born in Karachi, was taught devotion by her grandmother. In 2004 when she was visiting Valenkanni, she prayed to Our Lady of Good Health to be blessed with the gift of a child.

Nearly a year and half after her return to Karachi, she gave birth to a boy. A few years later, she and her family completed rituals to fulfil their vow. She cut off four inches of hair while her husband and son shaved their heads. They bathed in the sea as part of the ritual. These practices are taken from the Hindu faith, showing that interfaith exchanges go both ways.

Since then, the woman has worn a head-covering during prayer times as a lifelong promise to the mother for the graces received through her son.

I heard other tales of devotion from A M Anthony’s granddaughter:

There was a lady who would not wear shoes. She would be spotted even at weddings without shoes … Imagine going everywhere barefoot in Karachi’s heat. But that is how she fulfilled her vow and everyone knew about it.

Spirituality and togetherness

Annually, hundreds of devotees come together in the premises of churches across Karachi and in Tamil Nadu to hoist a flag bearing an image of Our Lady of Valenkanni and partake in a short prayer followed by other rituals including the distribution of blessed medals by a priest.

The ceremony devoted to Our Lady of Valenkanni occurs on September 8, marking the birthday of the Virgin Mary.

Each year, Our Lady of Valenkanni’s statue in Karachi is decorated with fresh flowers and streamers.

This day sees some members from the Hindu, Zoroastrian, and Muslim communities all venerating the Virgin Mary.

As the parish priest told me, “Mary brings everyone together and it makes sense why you would see Muslims here who can tell you a lot about Surah Maryam.” Named after Virgin Mary, Surah Maryam appears in the 19th chapter of the Holy Quran.

“Muslims do not partake in novena prayers, but on September 8, they come here to respect Mary as the Mother of Jesus”, Rodrigues said.

For believers, miracles are not just about healing of ailments and turning water into wine. They can be a way of dealing with the dominant, narrow and bigoted narrative prevalent in Pakistan’s society.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Whose mischief created a world of beseechers?
Each petitioner is seen wearing a garment of paper

This line from Ghalib refers to what he claimed to be ancient Persian tradition of petitioners wearing paper before entering the courts to get justice.

Indeed, for a country that has a low literacy rate, the written word is a central part of Pakistani society. All over Karachi, “wall chalking”, as it is called, lines the streets with announcements of political meetings, informal advertising and messages in support of or against political leaders.

Intelligence agencies and the press pick up writings that appear overnight as a show of political strength or indicators of political party infighting. Sometimes walls carry threats against specific people, such as “ainda na dehkoon” (this should not happen again) written by “bosses” to keep the local heavies in check. These are usually written in Urdu calligraphic style.

An unusual message stands out for its untidy spray painted phrase “Perfume Chowk”. Curious viewers discovered it was a message written by the heroic owner of a small stall selling *attar* in Gulistan-i-Jauhar, whose stall was regularly destroyed by people to whom he refused to give protection money.

A people’s narrative

Countries have many narratives: the official state narrative, the narratives of friends and allies, that of enemies, of moral custodians; and then there is the complex, layered narrative of a country’s people. These occupy sociologists, historians, literary critics, artists, film-makers, musicians, novelists and poets. Beneath the surface waves, one has to dive deeper to understand the true nature of the soul of a people, but occasionally the hidden becomes visible and lends itself to decoding.

This is most true of the place occupied by poetry in Pakistan. Classic forms can be of religious songs such as naats, qawalis and marsias.

But often poems are also more worldly love songs of film; colourful metaphors that take place during mushairas or poetry events. The preferred form of Urdu poetry is the ghazal, or couplet, which has its origins in Arabic literature via Persian poetry. Ghazals are composed as sophisticated conceits, ostensibly about love, longing, separation and loss, but imply commentaries that range from Sufi love of the divine, to local politics.

Hearing the voice of the individual

The decorated transport of Pakistan is much celebrated for its excessive colourful adornment and painted images. Less noticed are the embedded verses that are an essential part of all trucks, buses and rickshaws.

These are attempted conversations with “someone out there”, an amplification of one’s presence in a society that renders the common man invisible. “Whispering in our ears”, these writings express personal feelings, outrage or simply indignation, loss, desire, or a moment of reflection.

Hungarian philosopher Ferenc Hörcher has suggested that conversation “liberates the human self from the bondages of practical life and brings about a sense of equilibrium”. Intimate expressions are externalised in the public sphere addressing an assumed community. These writings symbolise an attempt to wrest authorship by marginalised citizens.

As Pakistani poet Noon Meem Rashid (1910-1975) wrote:

From amidst the crowd of men
The voice of the individual is heard

There are 600,000 commercial vehicles, which include buses, trucks and three wheelers (among them rickshaws), that circulate on 260,760 km of roads according to 2010 data published by the government. Most of these vehicles carry writings.

Pakistan is portrayed as a belligerent, angry country, churning out extremists. The poetry on decorated transport tells another story. The most commonly used phrase is Maan ki dua Jannat ki hawa (A mother’s prayer is a breeze from heaven) followed by Dekh magar piyar say (You can look, but with love), and a newcomer, Jiyo aur jinay do (Live and let live).

The themes of the poetry varies with the type of transport. The poetry on long-distance trucks transporting good across the country reflect the insecure journeys they face and the loneliness of being away from their families:

Road se dosti safar se yaari
Dekh pyaray zindgi hamari

I befriend the road, my companion is the journey
See the life I lead, my dear friend

The city buses are usually more light-hearted and risqué:

Dil Barai farookht. Qeemat aik muskarahat

My heart is for sale. The price: one smile

Aaghaz i jawani hai hum jhoom kay chaltay hain dunya yeh samajhti hai hum pi kay nikaltay hain

I swagger because I am young
The world thinks I reel because I am drunk

But occasionally the concerns are serious:

Pata kiya khaak batain nishan hai be nishan apna laga baithay bistar jahan wahin samjho makan apna

How can I tell you my address, I have left no mark
Wherever I lay down my bags, that is home

Mohabbat na kar ameeron say jo barbad kartay hain mohabbat kar ghareebon say jo hameesha yaad kartay hain

Do not love the rich who only ruin you
Love the poor who always remember you

Buses and trucks are usually a lucrative business. The rickshaw on the other hand is usually owner-driven and provides an insight into Pakistani society’s least privileged communities.

Rather than the ghazal couplet seen on trucks and buses, rickshaws have boldly written enigmatic poetic phrases such as Kaash (if only), Bikhray Moti (strewn pearls), zakhmi parinda (wounded bird), akhri goli (the last bullet). Sometimes a rickshaw simply carries the name of a beloved daughter or a Sufi saint.

Funny poems or phrases are common to all forms of transport, making life’s problems and suffering bearable if only for a while. This is a feint that compels us to read between the lines, an essential component of the layered and often esoteric nature of Pakistani society.

Arabic poetry also gave Urdu the influence of Hija or satiric poetry. While the -qit'ah (a light-hearted fragmentary poetic phrase) extolled the virtues of tribal heroes, the hija denigrated rival tribes.

Another influence is that of Sufi poetry. The majority of Pakistani Muslims are of the Barelvi sect, which is interwoven with Sufism. Most decorated vehicles carry messages and prayers collected from Sufi shrines.

This penchant for bitter-sweet or dark humour pervades Pakistani society and may spring from the loss of agency in a region that has been repeatedly invaded since at least 1800 BC, each invader creating a powerful ruling elite imposing its culture and ignoring, for the most part, the lives of ordinary citizens.

In this sense these subtexts are essentially a protest, reaching out to a community longing for social justice and recognition. As poet Noon Meem Rashid wrote:

We are a solitary letter of the alphabet
At once silent and eloquent

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

We have been warned over and over again about terrorists and extremists. These warnings are entirely biased. They only speak of stereotype terrorists and extremists; or those who may actually be, and most probably are, good guys.

In fact, they are phantoms. They really do not exist, but were created as a hoax to distract our minds away from the real terrors. Such as, Valentine’s Day!

A dangerous spectre has been rising on the horizon of our great bastion of morality. It goes by the name of Valentine!

Valentine tempts womans to crave chocolates, pink balloons and flowers – from MANS!!!

And when mans give womans these on a day called Valentine’s Day, womans become loose characters because chocolate loosen their teeth until they (the teeth) are no more …

As you can see, brothers and sisters and sisters who became brothers, Valentine's make womans lose her natural beauty. She starts to age quickly. And then, tragedy! No one is willing to marry her. Old hag!

Shame and sadness falls on her family. She is left with just memories of an old pink balloon. And that too bursts in her face.

As responsible parents and honourable brothers of womans, you must report evil sellers of obscene Valentine’s balloons to the police. Help the government, police and the courts eliminate this terror.

But remember, it is okay for mans to make Valentine’s Day. After all, it is always gallant mans who make most noise about womans morality issues. What bravery and gallantry, indeed. Go, boys. Go forth and cleanse society of womans obscenity. Muuah!

But Valentine's is a clever, clever devil. He can tempt womans in the most clever, clever ways. So you have to become clever, clever as well.

For example, keep eye on flowers in pots. Are they sending scent in air that is making womans woozy and dreamy and craving for chocolate and romantic talk? Are they too red, too pink or too yellow?

If so, then with great manly anger, tear flowers out, throw them out with pot and set them on fire, while shouting ‘Go, Nawaz Go!’

Clever, clever, no? What a mans.

Also check womans breathing on Valentine’s Day. Is she breathing too fast or too slow? If possible, try to hold womans breath for whole Valentine’s Day.

And if she passes away because of breath-hold, well, then, she die for good cause. Clap hands.

And as good moral mans say, no womans, no cry. Meaning, no womans, no Valentine's. Only brave mans, talking about how to hold breath of weak womans and saving nation from obscenity. So, brave.

Disclaimer: This blog is categorised as satire.

The blog was originally published on January 9, 2017.

At least once a month, I drive down to Lahore from Islamabad using the Motorway. Just before the Jhelum River, as the Salt Range and Potohar Plateau gradually merge into the plane of Punjab, I always a notice a small isolated shrine located on the top of a hill. A flag swaying atop the shrine testifies that pilgrims still visit it.

Scattered all over the Potohar Plateau, there are several such Sufi shrines on hilltops, to which pilgrims are expected to hike. The difficulty of the journey is part of the spiritual process. The tradition is similar to other religious pilgrimages in the region.

A little north from here is the historical temple complex called Tilla Jogian, a pilgrimage site for jogis in Punjab, abandoned at the time of Partition. There is still no path that leads to the top. Visitors to the site are expected to climb the mountain as pilgrims once did.

Further north, deep within the Hazara territory is the shrine of the Muslim Sufi saint Wali Qandhari, who had a confrontation with Guru Nanak and was humbled.

The Gurdwara Panja Sahib, at the base of the mountain, atop which is the shrine of Wali Qandhari commemorates this interaction. Every day, dozens of pilgrims climb this steep mountain, a trek of about two hours to pay homage to the Sufi saint. Before the technology of pumps, pilgrims used to carry water pots to the top for other pilgrims, as a religious duty.

“The shrine is called Khara Peer,” said my driver, as he noticed me observing the shrine’s silhouette on the top of the mountain on one of these trips.

A young man, my driver belongs to a small village not far from here. Not inclined towards institutional religion, he is particularly attracted to Sufi shrines, referred to as folk religion by academics, where the freedom allotted to its devotees is more aligned with his rebellious nature.

I wasn’t surprised. This entire mountain range, known as Salt Range, is one of the largest depositories of rock salt in the world. Khara in Punjabi means salty. The shrine was attuned with its geographical surroundings.

The Peacock Shrine

This is a particular feature of small Sufi shrines. Just a few kilometres from here, in the small town of Kalar Kahar, atop another mountain is the shrine of Mooranwali Sarkar (Master of the Peacocks).

At the time of sunrise, when the tourist rush at the shrine is at its lowest, dozens of peacocks waltz around the courtyard of the shrine that overlooks the natural lake, around which the town of Kalar Kahar is populated.

A handful of devotees offer them food and seek their blessings, regarding them to be the loyal pets of the saint interred here. Till a few years ago, before the construction of Motorway brought along an influx of tourists, peacocks would strut around the shrine all day along. With the arrival of tourists and their irreverent fascination with the peacocks their number decreased here.

The shrine of the peacocks at Kalar Kahar too highlights the fact that such folk religious traditions adopted local geographical features into their devotional framework. It represents the unique relationship that these shrines developed with their surroundings.

Connected by a cable wire, there is another Sufi shrine on the top of a neighboring hill. It is a modest structure, less visited by tourists. A plaque on one of the walls of the shrine identified it as Rori Peer. “There is nothing but rori [small rocks] here and this shrine,” said a lone devotee sitting there.

On the bank of river Chenab is the village of Takht Hazara, believed to be the home of Punjab's legendary folk hero Ranjha. In the surroundings of this village is a settlement of a few houses referred to as Apal Moori.

The fame of this settlement comes from the massive banyan tree that stands next to it. It is an enormous structure, a forest within itself, with its branches disappearing into the ground and emerging anew.

There is no main trunk of the tree but several of them. At the centre of the tree is the grave of a Sufi saint regarded as sacred by the locals and people of the surrounding areas.

While the grave becomes the object of veneration, it is nothing but a symbol of the worship of this massive banyan tree, sacred in almost all of the religious traditions of South Asia, including folk Islam. The grave is an indirect way of worshipping the sacred geography, much like most of these shrines.

Vital symbols

Combined, these folk religious traditions serve as an important symbol. One of the oft-repeated accusations of right-wing Hindu nationalists against Islam has been its foreignness in the Indian peninsula.

Even 1,300 years after the arrival of this religion into the region it is asserted by some that it does not belong here. Such a criticism lacks an understanding of the cultural development of the religion in India.

As it reached the peripheral towns and villages of India, it was adopted, owned and indigenised. It is these folk religious shrines mentioned above that emerged out of this process, all of them deeply linked with their geographical surroundings.

In fact, it is not just Islam, but Christianity that also underwent a similar process. About a 100-odd kilometres from Lahore is the small town of Maryamabad developed around the shrine of Mary.

A little before Partition, a couple of local Christian men said they saw the figure of Mary appear here. A small shrine was constructed at the spot. In the 1980s, it was reported that a few children said they saw an image of Mary once again.

As the story of these sightings spread to other parts of the country, the number of pilgrims to the shrine increased. Since then many saints have been reportedly sighted here.

Much like folk Islam that used the geography of the region to evoke spirituality, folk Christianity too, represented by this shrine, found an actual geographical legitimisation, as a counter to Christianity or Islam being foreign to this land. A statue of Mary was raised on a small mound here and a shrine was constructed around it.

The article was originally published on Scroll and has been reproduced with permission.

What's the most impressive place of religious significance that you have visited ? What did it teach you? Share your experience with us at blog@dawn.com

It hurts, deeply. Lahore. Quetta. Mohmand. Peshawar. Sehwan.

I wonder if we'll ever live without this sense of fear – the fear that you or your loved one will never return as they step out of the house.

One of the ways I spend quality-time with my younger brother is to go to the cinema together. There have been times when I’ve been struck by this anxiety and seized by apprehension.

What if someone blows this place up? What if terrorists burst in? Where is the nearest exit that I will be able to push Abdullah towards? How can I hide him? No, he’s too tall now to be hidden. We shouldn’t be here. What if something happens? What if?

I wonder. I worry.

I worry that someday even the Badshahi Mosque or other monuments of historical and cultural significance might get attacked.

Nothing is sacred anymore.

I worry my cultural heritage will irrecoverably be taken away from me.

There are texts and emails every now and then. Security alerts and warnings. Places to be avoided.

I wonder how long we will continue to hide in our houses while our homeland burns.

After the APS attack, I thought it couldn't get worse after this, but after the spate of bombings this week, I learned that what’s broken can be shattered further.

The past few days brought back memories of 2009, a year in which Pakistan witnessed 500 bombings.

I thought we were past this. I had hoped. I had prayed.

The rising death toll. The call for blood donations. The full impact of the attack. The same old condemnations. The same old rhetoric. The same old statements. The same lies, the same passing of the buck. Forming commissions. Ordering inquiries.

Thousands and thousands of deaths. And counting.

We have come to a point where cities are symbolic of the violence, loss and tragedy they have borne. Peshawar is not its culture and beauty. Nor is Peshawar Fort Bala Hisaar or Khyber Pass. Peshawar is the APS attack.

Quetta is not Quetta. Quetta is Hazara killings.

Cities are no longer cities; they are signifiers and signposts of tragedies. Of losses borne, of lives mourned.

These are tragic ruptures in our collective identity, and cultural and social lives.

Everything is a reminder of what we face. There is no distraction, there is no relief.

I am at a point where I shut my social media when a tragedy occurs. But while I can shut down my social media accounts for a while, I cannot control the torment of my heart.

There are times when I want to escape Pakistan, perhaps not physically, but certainly emotionally.

There are times I want to close my eyes, my ears, my mind and my heart to the suffering in this land, for my own sanity and survival. Only to realise that its suffering is inseparable from mine.

Sehwan is different. Unlike the more officially-accepted shrines of Pakistan, such as the Data Ganj Bakhsh in Lahore, Bari Imam in Islamabad, and the lustrous tombs of the Suhrawardi sufis in Multan, Sehwan is rebellious and raging.

Sehwan is Laal — the red of resistance. Sehwan is Shahbaz — a soaring falcon with secrets in its heart and no fixed abode. Sehwan is Qalandar — the disorderly, the wanderer, the antithesis of the established law, form, and idols.

Sehwan is everything that a lot of contemporary Pakistan is not. It is inclusive and it does not impose religion. Sehwan is one of those cultural, geographical, and social spaces that stand on the peripheries of time and history, and defy everything that is official, resist the order of the day.

When Hindus perform the mehndi at the beginning of Lal Shahbaz's urs, one cannot tell if the Partition ever happened. When transgenders take part in dhamal and become part of the crowd without any mockery, one cannot tell that this is the same society where so much stigma is associated with deviant sexuality and gender.

When Shias and Sunnis pray in the same vicinity and a red alam flutters on the top of the shrine that belongs to a man named Usman, one cannot tell that we are in a country plagued by sectarian tensions. When Suhrawardis, Ismailis, and Shivaites claim the Qalandar to be one of their own, one cannot tell that we are living in an extremely polarised society.

Terrorists seem to have a problem with this. They claim to be at war with Pakistan. However, one must pause and ask as to which Pakistan are they at war with. They seem to differentiate between a Pakistan of puritanical seminaries, and a Pakistan of shrines, churches, imambargahs, and Ahmadi places of worship.

When we look at all the terrorist attacks in the last decade or so, a picture emerges which shows that everything that does not fit into a narrow definition of religion is condemnable to death and destruction. It is an ideology called takfir and takes on the form of militant extremism.

However, there exists a softer narrative that may not seem dangerous on the surface but fuels militant extremism by being apologetic about it. This worldview considers Islam of the masses as something alien to the spirit of the religion. Shirk, jahalat, bida’t, ghair-Islami are the buzzwords here. This holier-than-thou narrative is mostly prevalent mostly among the urban middle-classes who are contemptuous of indigenous and syncretic strains of religion.

This narrative may not be the official state narrative but when the state lets certain non-state actors off the hook again and again, questions need to be asked.

Qalandar rose up in defiance when some forms of sufism were adopted by kings' courts and saints were awarded state titles. Damadam mast Qalandar is a raging cry of rebellion against tyranny of established orders.

A day after the attack, devotees gathered at the shrine to resume dhamal in defiance of not only the attackers but also the police. One of the workers who looks after the shrine, Haja Shah, had tears rolling down his cheeks as he said, "This is no place for the police. This is our place."

Centuries after his death, despite all the trials and tribulations of time and history, Lal Shahbaz Qalandar continues defying the ruling order of the time, and probably this timeless resistance is something that terrorists are most afraid of.

Some call it a miracle. Some call it history. And above and beyond miracles and history, the Qalandar continues to dance.

“I am Usman i Marwandi, a friend of Khwaja Mansoor (Hallaj)
Although people blame me, I will dance upon the gallows”.

The earlier version of this article stated that there is a Hindu sajjada nasheen family of the shrine. This information was inaccurate and has now been corrected.

Work and what it means for the female franchise — independence in industry, social emancipation, progress from our primitive psychology and a need to be better than the women before us — has belittled and disturbed the fragile foothold that patriarchy enjoys pummelling over our necks.

It designates a sense of purpose and realisation of identity, which has long been denied the women and girls of Pakistan. It makes them just as important (if not more) as men.

Hina Shahnawaz was finding her place of dignity and economic purpose, her role in the bigger picture. At the age of 27, this Kohat native worked for an NGO and earned a sizeable income due to sheer hard work and a mind that wanted to be more than the social mores around her.

The main breadwinner for her widowed mother and sister-in-law, Hina traversed the backlands of communal contempt and did not get married, did not sit at home and did not wait for rescue; she became 'the man' most men around her simply could not be.

In a patriarchy as blemished and contorted as ours, those are values that disfigure the status quo. The potential and perseverance with which Hina went out into the world now lies riddled with four bullet holes, a shadow play on the intimidation and fear under which Pakistani women still seek a more promising future.

It is a story all too frequently told: killed by her paternal cousin for either a) working and emasculating him and others from the male side of her genealogy or b) refusing to marry that same cousin. Hina had a Masters degree in Philosophy; the cousin, it is reported, had not studied beyond 10th grade. Hina wanted better for herself.

It is a tale all too often spun: when women dare thrash about in the unchartered waters of financial freedom there will inevitably be blood in the water and a feeding frenzy will follow. Qandeel Baloch was 2016’s loudest and brashest case of honour killing. Hina Shahnawaz’s will undoubtedly be 2017’s saddest. Both women belonged to that untouchable realm of confident resurgence, a progressive place that looks patriarchy in the eye and laughs at it.

It is a grey line that colourblinds our men but brightens our femininist aspirations. It is dangerous territory and too many women have been paying the price for treading too far out under a disapproving male gaze. And all too many women have fallen between the cracks, killed and never acknowledged because their murders are never reported. It is, after all, a matter of 'honour'.

It is important to recognise the real monster here: the musky, sweat-stained smut of honour and haaya is but a contestant in this competition of carnage; women are being killed because the space afforded to outrage against this butchery is being compressed and deflated.

Left simply to the online warriors of social media campaigning and silent strokes of the battling keyboard, only a well-intended niche crowd of Facebook and Twitter users gets to understand the consequence of this crime, the complex cruelty of these bloodied beliefs. They type and they argue, claim and exclaim but they cannot conquer the dominion of the dogmatic.

It is out on the streets that these crusades must be won, that these assaults must be accounted for. Only when the pulpit and the puritan are brought together to defend the autonomous and the female will there be a change in the statistics of the ‘honoured’ and forgotten. When men are told what they do, how they think, who they blame and what they commend is wrong will they begin the hundred-year process towards self-growth and personal evaluation.

It is our institutions that do not do enough. Our courts, our thaanas, our own communal hunting grounds still canonise this cruelty, still believe in keeping our bodies in check. It is the most basic, most demeaning form of regulation — of our anatomies and our abilities. And it is a travesty of justice, a deftly signed treaty of humiliation.

The clan-like alliance of our men is a predisposed patronage of tribal patriarchy. It seeks a social wealth of gender isolation where the male is all powerful and the woman/girl is always at their mercy. Honour is a very flimsy thing in today’s world where permission is not sought and freedom is taken, where women make decisions and not babies, where the male ego has been neutered.

Hina Shahnawaz was no doubt a satisfied woman, an unbreakable reminder that women like her have gone much further than the archaic incompetencies of men. No hole in the wall can contain the female spirit when it decides to persevere; no prototypal Pakistani man can disembark from these winds of change. He can snuff out lights like Hina but he cannot sentence further the suppressed of centuries old who are finally breaking free of his chains.

Do you work in a male-dominated environment and feel discouraged by society about your life choices? Tell us about it at blog@dawn.com

The Pakistani state has a unique ability to find itself in farcical situations.

On Monday, February 13, the Islamabad High Court banned Valentine’s Day celebrations across the country on the eve of the festival of love.

The rationale was a familiar one – that the celebration is against Pakistan’s culture and religion and promotes indecency.

It is also a part of Western culture, imply members of the judiciary and parliament even as they are dressed in so-called Western clothes, holding power and ruling the country through institutions setup by the Westerners.

Even as police officials spent the next couple of days snatching heart-shaped balloons and trying to wipe all traces of Valentine’s Day from the country, catastrophe struck Pakistan.

On the day of the ruling, a bomb ripped through a crowd gathered outside the Punjab Assembly in Lahore, killing at least 13, including top police officials, and wounding several others.

Elsewhere in Pakistan, thousands of people prepared to converge at Islamabad to commemorate the first death anniversary of Mumtaz Qadri, who was executed on February 29 for the 2011 murder of Punjab Governor Salman Taseer.

Millions were collected in donations from all over the country to construct a shrine here for the assassin, by devotees who believe that by killing Taseer for opposing the country’s strict blasphemy laws, Qadri had done a service to his religion.

Facing this structure is a newly planned housing scheme that markets itself on its proximity to the shrine. As his death anniversary nears, banners are coming up across the country celebrating Qadri.

Last week also saw at least three more terror attacks, most recently on a Sufi shrine in Sehwan on Thursday, which killed around 80 people.

But while hate is seeping into the land, it is the celebration of Valentine’s Day the state has deemed a threat to its culture.

Fighting for love

More often than is required, different institutions of the state bring up the culture of the country, which perpetually seems to be under threat – sometimes from contraceptive ads or from TV discussions on child abuse and at other times from educational institutes teaching comparative religion. Quite conveniently the world 'culture' seemingly captures the essence of the multi-religious, ethnic, and cultural diversity of the country.

A few years ago, I drove to the small city of Chistian close to the Bahawal Nagar district in the Pakistan’s Punjab. The city is named after the prominent Chisti order of Sufism, which boasts prominent saints like Baba Fariduddin Ganjshakar and Nizamuddin Auliya. It is believed to have been established in the 13th century by a grandson of Baba Farid.

The Chisti order reflects the eclectic nature of Sufism and its religious syncretism, which drew into its folds devotees from different religious backgrounds, including Hinduism and Sikhism, thereby becoming popular. Qawwali, devotional Sufi music, for example, is believed to have been introduced in undivided India by this sect.

On an empty road, enclosed by darkness on both sides, we drove towards the shrine of Tajuddin Chisti, the founder of this city. Far away in the distance was a single ray of light emanating from the shrine. The darkness around us was a graveyard, “the largest in Asia”, we were later told.

In the graveyard, which extended into the shrine, were graves of family members and rich and powerful devotees who received the honour of being buried next to the saint.

In a corner of the massive shrine complex was a small building covered with pink tiles, at the centre of which was a modest grave. This was the grave of a nephew of Tajuddin Chisti, we were told.

There were a few mud graves outside this small shrine, perhaps of the devotees of the saint who were from humble backgrounds. Several burnt out lamps that once kept alive the memories of the deceased were scattered around them.

On an uncovered part of the nephew’s shrine, a small heart had been made out of pink tiles and around it, names of couples had been scribbled using oil from these lamps. Couples who are unable to marry because of social opposition come to this shrine and write their names on its wall. The saint, it is believed, then helps them iron their difficulties out.

There is a similar practice at the shrine of Heer and Ranjha in Jhang, Central Punjab. Standing on a small mound, this single-storey structure covered with blue and white tiles, crowned with a green dome, is said to contain the graves of Heer and Ranjha, the legendary lovers who were interred together to honour their timeless love.

If there is one thing that forms the essence of Punjabi identity irrespective of religious affiliation, it is the story of Heer-Ranjha. Every day, thousands of devotees gather at the courtyard of this shrine to pay homage to this legend of love. The wall here too is covered with names of couples whose love story faces societal hurdles.

Even as some Pakistanis were debating whether Valentine’s Day is in keeping with our culture, other citizens, far away from the urban centres, gathered at the courtyards of these shrines to pray for their relationships. Someone forgot to tell them celebrating love is not part of our culture.

This article was originally published on Scroll and has been reproduced with permission.

Mohenjo-Daro is one of the oldest settlements in the Indus Valley Civilisation. It is believed to have been built 5,000 years ago in an area which today is in the Sindh province of Pakistan. Most historians suggest that Mohenjo-Daro was abandoned some 3,000 years ago. It remained buried underneath thousands of years of dust, sand and stone until it was rediscovered in 1920 by archaeologists.

Subsequent studies of the site exhibit that Mohenjo-Daro was a sophisticated settlement of traders, fishermen and farmers. It had a written language (which is yet to be deciphered) and complex religious cults. The site is located west of the mighty Indus River in Sindh’s present-day Larkana District. Mohenjo-Daro was one of the largest cities of the Indus Valley Civilisation which spanned much of what today is Pakistan.

In the 1960s, archaeologists who took part in some of the last major excavation works on the site claimed that Mohenjo-Daro as a city declined due to invasions of warrior-nomads of Central Asia (the Aryans) who subdued the people of the Indus Valley Civilisation.

However, many later-day archaeologists and historians now believe that cities of the Indus Valley Civilisation such as Mohenjo-Daro had begun to decline and started to be abandoned due to a change in course by river Indus and the impact of climate change in the area which curtailed rainfall during the monsoon seasons.

I first visited the ruins of Mohenjo-Daro in 1974. I was just eight years old and a class three student at a school in Karachi. My visit was part of a ‘class away day', during which students from grades three and four from my school were flown on a PIA flight to Mohenjo-Daro in the morning, and then flown back to Karachi in the evening.

PIA used to operate regular flights to Mohenjo-Daro (mainly from Karachi) and for which a special (albeit tiny) airport had been constructed near the site. The site was hugely popular with historians, archaeologists and tourists who in those days used to visit Pakistan in large numbers.

I don’t remember much about the visit, but I do recall strolling with classmates and teachers on a sprawling site, surrounded by men and women, most of whom were quite clearly not Pakistani. I also remember constantly sensing the ground beneath my feet to physically feel the story of an ancient land which we had begun to be told about at school.

I had believed that the tale of this ancient land being taught to us in class was just another fairytale; but there I was, standing in the middle of this story, often thumbing my feet on its rough ground, now believing that what one can physically feel is the truth; and that which one can’t, is a fairytale. Or something of the sort.

The second time I visited Mohenjo-Daro was 11 years later, in 1986. By now I was a grade 12 student at a state-owned college in Karachi. Between 1984 and 1986, I often travelled deep inside the Sindh province, mainly for political reasons.

I was a member of a progressive student outfit, and since in the 1980s the interior of Sindh had become a hotbed of agitation against the Ziaul Haq dictatorship, members of the student outfit I was a part of frequently travelled to various cities and towns in central and northern Sindh.

In November 1986, I accompanied four other members of the student outfit on a trip to the ancient city of Sehwan Sharif in Sindh’s Jamshoro District. Our plan was to join anti-Zia protests being planned by some small far-left groups. We travelled by bus to Hyderabad (some 100 miles from Karachi) and from there we were to take another bus which would have taken us directly to Sehwan Sharif.

Sehwan is best known for its beautiful shrine of Sufi saint, Lal Shahbaz Qalandar. The protests were being planned around the shrine during the colourful and boisterous annual festivities.

In Hyderabad, some of our friends in that city warned us that the Zia regime had sent ‘hundreds of plain-clothed policemen’ to Sehwan who were to begin arresting possible agitators a day or two before the protests. We were advised to stay put until the rumours were confirmed or refuted.

Instead of staying in Hyderabad, we decided to travel to the diminutive city of Larkana and stay with an acquaintance there. We reached Larkana by bus but couldn’t locate him. One of his brothers told us that he may have been arrested in a nearby village where he had gone a few days before our arrival.

We ended up staying the night at a cheap, rundown hotel (Hotel Chaand), sharing a room which had just one rickety charpoy but lots of bedbugs! So we decided to sleep on the cold floor. What helped us sleep better (or at all), were neat swigs from a bottle of the very strong and entirely unsmooth whisky that we had bought for Rs60 from an employee of the so-called hotel.

The next morning one of the guys, Rehan (aka Roosi Sundi or Russian insect, because he was always claiming to be ‘more surkh' [red] than any of us) rented a motorbike (Honda 50) from a motorbike-rental-cum-tier-shop. The plan was to ride into the village where our Larkana buddy was supposedly arrested from. I accompanied Roosi. We failed to locate the village and on our way back to Larkana, I saw a board that read "Mohenjo-Daro 20 KM."

So, now, instead of Larkana we were riding towards Mohenjo-Daro. We reached the site late afternoon. I was stunned. It was breathtaking. Vast, and very still. As we made our way towards the ruins, I somehow remembered the spot where I had stood and thumped my feet on the ground 11 years ago.

There was hardly anybody there. There were just two gentlemen in the distance standing on a heap of ancient bricks. They were intensely studying what looked like a large map. I think one of them was Japanese. Or he might have been Chinese, I am not sure. Nearer to where we were, was a man sitting on a crumbling wall. He was smoking a cigarette and looking straight ahead in what seemed like a rather vacant gaze.

As I made my way to the spot where I had stood as an eight-year-old schoolboy, Roosi began walking towards the two men who were about 100 metres ahead of us. I stood on that spot again and began to gently thump it with my feet. This made me smile and chuckle. This was when I heard a voice (in Urdu) from behind where I stood: "Sain, are you trying to look for oil?"

I turned and saw the gazing man now gazing at me. I smiled at him and took out my pack of cigarettes (Gold Flake) and lit one. I then began to walk towards the crumbling old wall on which the man was sitting.

"Asalam o alaikum" I greeted him, shaking his hand. He must have been in his 60s, but his moustache was jet-black, most probably dyed. His head was covered by a grey turban and he was wearing a rose-coloured traditional Sindhi shalwar-kameez.

He responded to my greeting with a slight nod of his head as closely studied me. My longish, unruly hair blowing left to right, my four-day-old stubble, my dark glasses, my fading Lou Reed T-shirt, my dusty blue jeans and my beige Peshawari chappals.

"Are you from Karachi?" he asked in his heavily-accented Urdu.

"Yes," I responded. "Is it that obvious?" I chuckled.

He remained poker-faced and then began to gaze into the distance once again, as he lit himself another cigarette (King Stork, or 'Bagla Brand’ as it used to be known in these parts, a filter-less blast of unadulterated tobacco smoke).

"Are you from around here?" I asked.

He slowly turned his head towards me: "I used to be a guide here …" he said. "Nowadays there are more guides here than visitors," he added, expressionless.

I nodded my head: "Yes, looks that way. I first came here as a child in 1974. Were you a guide in those days?"

He just softly shrugged his shoulders: "My memory is not very good these days. My father was a guide here as well. Many people used to visit this place."

"Are you still a guide here?" I asked.

He finally managed to crack half a smile: "I can be if you want me to."

I smiled back: "I don’t have much money," I had said in a rather apologetic tone.

This made him laugh. Actually laugh: "Hahahaha … Sain, who asked for money? This is our motherland."

I nodded in agreement.

Watching me nod, he asked: "What did you understand?" The pokerface was back.

"Pakistan?" I almost whispered.

He began to laugh again: "Hahahaha … no, Sain, not Pakistan, but birthplace of Pakistan. Birthplace of India too. All this," he replied, gesturing with a jerk of his head and eyes towards me to look at the ruins around us. "Land of Sindhu."

"River Indus …" I said.

"Yes," he agreed (finally). "Sindhu gave birth to this place (Mohenjo-Daro), which gave birth to India and then Pakistan. What did you understand, Sain?"

"What about the Arabs?" I just had to ask this.

He was slightly taken aback. "Qasim?" He enquired.

"Yes." I said. "Bin Qasim."

"He was our guest," he said, matter-of-factly.

"But he invaded Sindh (in the 8th century) and defeated its ruler," I informed.

He gazed towards me again, but this time with more intent. He then shared a rather remarkable little tale. He said back in 1979 when one of his younger brothers travelled to Oman as an electrician, he was once badly insulted by his Arab employer. He said his brother told his Arab boss off by saying that he (the brother) came from the land of Sindhu which had taught the Arabs many things that they did not know.

"So what did his Arab boss say?" I asked.

"His boss actually began to respect him! He started to call him ancient Pakistani!" he laughed.

"Wasn’t your brother insulted?" I probed.

The man stared at me with a most unconcealed what-the-heck expression: "Sain, why would he be insulted? The ancestors of you and I were all from here. We are ancient people. What did you understand, Sain?"

I nodded and offered him a cigarette from my pack. He took one and I lighted it for him: "Where have all the visitors gone?" I asked.

He took an intense drag from the cigarette. Then exhaled as intensely. "Good," he said, praising the cigarette.

"Gold Flake," I said.

He nodded and then began to gaze at the sun which was about to set behind the ruins.

"You know what my brother began to call his boss?" he asked. "Camel driver!"

I laughed: "Really? And the boss did not mind?"

"I don’t know. I haven’t seen my brother for the past three years," he said, now gazing at the sunset.

"Why?" I enquired.

"He called his wife and children to Oman and then never came back. He thought this was not a suitable place anymore for his children."

"How come?" I asked.

He shrugged his shoulders: "Only Allah knows. But he began to look at us as if we were from some other land. He also stopped coming here (Mohenjo-Daro), even though he once used to love this place. So he went, and so did the visitors. Maybe they (the visitors) too began to see this place as some other land."

"Strange," I chuckled.

"Your friend is a Sindhi?" he asked, watching Roosi walking towards us.

"Yes," I said. "He is from Khairpur, but studies with me at a college in Karachi."

Addressing the approaching Roosi, he loudly asked him (in Sindhi): "Sain, what did you learn?"

"I learned that there is not a single cigarette shop here!" replied Roosi, equally loudly.

I laughed out loud. So did Roosi. But the man remained serious: "It’s not good to smoke at the burial site of one’s ancestors," he said to Roosi, who was now with us.

"But you were smoking," I immediately reminded him.

He smiled: "Like my brother, I too have lost the respect of our ancestors." Then addressing both Roosi and me, he added: "But you two are still young. You should not lose what we have lost."

And then it happened. In a blink of an eye, Roosi swooped down and touched the man’s feet: "Bhali Sain (sure, sir)," he said in Sindhi and then softly reminded me it was getting late. We bid farewell to the man whose name I never got to know, nor asked. We were soon riding back to Larkana. Silently.

From that day onward, till I last met him sometime in the early 1990s, I never saw Roosi smoke a cigarette again. He quit. Just like that.

A few years ago, I had gone on a long trip to south Punjab in Pakistan, where I wound my way through various Sufi shrines belonging to several traditions, some similar and others distinct.

I was working on my second book then, In Search of Shiva, a collection of several such idiosyncratic Sufi shrines around Punjab that draw their religious inspiration from pre-Islamic religious traditions of this land.

This ended up being a rather unique collection of shrines — there was the shrine of phallic offerings, one of sacred dogs and another of sacred cows, to name a few.

The search for one such shrine took to me to Tibba Haji Deen, a small village next to the colonial city of Bahawalnagar. On the outskirts of the village, on a vacant plot, was a huge shrine, thought to have the power to cure mental illnesses.

Those suffering from psychological disorders would be left at the shrine for a few days and would recover miraculously, or so it was believed. Beyond these myths about the shrine, they were also several stories of oppression and abuse, which could perhaps be discussed in another column.

While roaming the village in search for this shrine, I chanced upon another Sufi shrine with several graves in a row, all covered with colourful shawls and containing Quranic inscriptions.

An old man came up to me and told me that these graves belonged to seven generations of 12th-century Sufi poet Baba Farid’s male ancestors — his father, grandfather, great-grandfather and so on.

Baba Farid is buried in the city of Pakpattan 70-odd kilometres from here. His Punjabi verses are still sung by folk singers and qawwals in Punjab on both sides of the border. He also had a huge impact on Guru Nanak, the first Sikh guru, who collected Farid’s poetry from his ancestor and that is how it found its way into the Sikh holy book, the Guru Granth Sahib.

Before that, the great Punjabi poet’s work only existed in the oral tradition, remembered and passed on to the next generation through songs.

In one corner of this open courtyard was a small, humbly decorated grave. “Whose grave is that?” I asked the old man. “That belongs to one of my ancestors,” he replied. “Our family has been serving this shrine for the past several generations.”

Driving down the Multan road, on my way back to Lahore, I was still thinking about the shrine of Baba Farid’s ancestors and the connection between the old man’s family and the family of the saint.

Stories of the saint’s miraculous and spiritual prowess must have passed from one generation to another. His poetry recited, analysed and remembered through this channel. This was perhaps one of the few remnants of our country’s oral culture, once the backbone of our heritage.

Musical memories

Just as I was thinking about this, a rendition of Amir Khusro’s Aaj Rang Hai by Hadiqa Kiani on Coke Studio started playing in the car. The iconic Sufi poet’s 13th-century song is a tribute to Nizamuddin Auliya, Khusro’s spiritual master.

In the typical qawwali style, the song builds up slowly and gradually and after much repetition, bursts into its culmination, a divine ecstasy. Nizamuddin Auliya was the head of the Chishti Sufi order, still one of the most prominent Sufi schools in India as well as Pakistan.

Qawwali remains one of the central tenets of this Sufi order, a way for them to express their devotion. It is this unique relationship between music and devotion that allowed the Chishti order to become so popular in India, drawing devotees from Hinduism and Islam.

Almost midway into the qawwali, Kiani goes into a trance-like state, repeating a particular composition. This is an important stage before the song’s culmination.

In this repetition, she recited the name of the heads of Chishti order — Nizamuddin Auliya, Alauddin, Faridudin, Shah Qutubudin, Moinudin. The names melted into the melody of the song, slowly entering the collective memories of the listeners. These few lines contain 100 years of the Chishti order’s history in India.

Over generations, from the 13th century when this qawwali was first sung to the present, these names have been repeated and memorised by those who have heard the song. This is how oral history was preserved. While the written word was the preserve of the elite, the ordinary folk preserved their history by committing it to memory in other ways, of which songs are just an example.

Stories in names

Another beautiful example is that of names. Much before the Saffronisation of India and the Islamisation of Pakistan, names sometimes preserved within them a memory of an entire generation to be passed on to the next one. A few years ago, I heard about one Baba Raiyyah, an old man who lived in Lahore and whose family migrated to Pakistan from India’s Punjab at the time of Partition.

The word Raiyyah comes from ra, which means 'way' in Punjab. Raiyyah was born on the way to the new country in 1947 when his family, uprooted from their ancestral village, headed west to the safety of Pakistan. Three or four generations after him heard the story of how Baba Raiyyah got his name, tales of their family’s lost homes and the long journey to Pakistan.

There was also a story in the name of Baba Laskhar from Ferozepur — now a border town — before Partition. In the year he was born, their village was attacked by an armed group called Lashkar. Through his name, several generations of Baba Lashkar’s family kept alive the memory of that attack.

Sometimes, history is also preserved in a ritual. Maraka was a small, insignificant village when the forces of Afghan king Ahmad Shah Abdali, bored with a prolonged siege of the walled city of Lahore, burnt it down in the 18th century.

Decades later, as some surviving members of the village repopulated it, they constructed a small shrine and named it Shaheedan da mazaar, or the shrine of the martyred. Every year they organised a fair at the shrine to commemorate the barbaric attack on their village. The festival continued well into the history of Pakistan before it slowly faded away.

The article was originally published on Scroll and has been reproduced with permission.

This article was originally published on June 3, 2015.

One of my colleagues asked me some time ago:

‘Can you believe that Hindus and Muslims can pray at the same place simultaneously?’

‘Well, of course not, at least not in Pakistan,’ I swiftly retorted.

He smiled and responded mysteriously, ‘There is a place not far from here where they do.’

It was the curiosity to confirm this statement that led me to the shrine of Jhulay Lal. Interestingly, contrary to the popular conceptions of the puritanical and narrow confines of religion, there still exist certain elements in our society that are a manifestation of our centuries’ old traditions of religious coexistence.

The shrine of Saint Jhulay Lal is one of these examples.

We visited the shrine on a hot April day, though the cool breeze made it somewhat bearable. The town of Udero Lal, where the shrine is situated, lies almost 40 kilometers away from the Sanghar district. It is a small sleepy town with the shrine of a saint at its epicenter.

We arrived to see vendors selling edible items as people sipped tea in dhaba-styled hotels, with radio waves sailing through the air around us, piercing it with Sindhi folk music. The houses were small and the streets congested. But we had no difficulty reaching the shrine, for everyone we met knew the directions like the back of their hands.

The white domes of the shrine could be seen on the horizon from a distance. We entered the shrine and found it spick-and-span, painted spotless white with its battlements and bastions, reminiscent of an old fortress.

The inner sanctum, which is comparatively new, is a beautiful structure with ornate doors and exquisite woodwork. An Urs and fair commemorating the disappearance of the saint is held annually, where a large number of devotees from across Pakistan and abroad come and pay homage.

There is an adjoining room where a pair of sandals is kept, reportedly belonging to the saint.

Jhulay Lal is related to the River Indus and sometimes revered as an incarnation of the River God Varuna in Sindh.

Most Muslims call the saint Khwaja Khizar, who is believed to guide people travelling through water courses and on voyages. The muhanas or mallah (as the fishermen are called in Sindh), held the saint in high esteem. Jhulay Lal is also called Zinda Pir, Sheikh Tahir, Khawaja Khizar, Udero Lal and Amar Lal.

According to various historical and colonial accounts, Jhulay Lal is said to have lived in the 17th century. Mirkh Shah, the despotic ruler of Thatta, tried to forcibly convert his Hindu subjects to Islam. On hearing this, the Hindus went to the bank of the Indus, fasted and prayed to the River to liberate them from this ordeal.

As a result, an image appeared from the depths of the River and told them that a child would be born to an aged couple living at Nasarpur, who would help them.

The child was named Udero Lal and also given the title 'Jhulay Lal', as his cradle was said to swing on its own. This child grew up into a valiant man and argued with Mirkh Shah, who realised his mistake and let the Hindus peacefully live in his domains.

We entered the complex to the welcome of an eternal peace, enveloping everything around us. The tiled floor felt wonderfully cool, so we sat down in silence for some time. Inside the shrine, the air was laden with fragrance as the oil lamps were cast shadows over the walls; filling the room with a light yellowish glow.

Jhulay Lal is often depicted as sitting on a Palla fish (an indigenous species of the Indus) or riding on his horse. It is believed that he and his horse disappeared into a well mysteriously; his shrine now erected at the same place.

From that day on, the shrine has been a centre of attraction for thousands of Hindus and Muslims alike. The shrine, located in Udero Lal, houses a Hindu temple alongside a Muslim-style tomb, and the caretakers include both Hindus and Muslims. In the evenings, Hindus perform pooja and aaarti while Muslims too, offer prayers at the tomb .

In the courtyard, people tied colourful threads and cloths on a tree, as tokens of prayers which would only be removed once the problem was resolved. Then, they would bring offerings to the saint, especially miniature swings and cradles.

Before we left, we prayed to the saint of The River Indus too, silently wishing that we may revert to our old values of peace and harmony.

This shrine stands as perhaps one of the few remaining strongholds of the eclectic elements of the Sindhi society, which are now being threatened by fundamentalism. The heritage of our mystic traditions should be promoted at state level, so that we may revive the love of humanity and co-existence which has always been part of our quintessential values.

—All photos by author

Related:

• Bhit Shah: After the dhamaal
  
• The enchanting beauty of Sachal Sarmast's shrine
  
• Abdullah Shah Ghazi: 'The saint that keeps cyclones at bay'
  

February is Black History Month in the United States. It originated in 1926 with the efforts of the Association for the Study of African-American Life and History, founded by historian Carter G. Woodson and the minister Jesse E. Moorland.

Black History Month started as a week-long commemoration of the history of and accomplishments by African-Americans and peoples of African descent. It was held during the second week of February to coincide with the birthdays of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln.

This week-long commemoration evolved into a full month, and in 1976, President Gerald Ford officially recognised Black History Month, telling the public “to seize the opportunity to honour the too-often neglected accomplishments of black Americans in every area of endeavour throughout our history.”

South Asians have a lot to learn from African-American history, including during Black History Month. The history of African-Americans in the United States has directly impacted the lives, struggles, and resistance of South Asian-Americans. Moreover, South Asian and African-American communities have meaningfully collaborated and allied with one another to fight oppression.

Despite this history of collaboration, the reality remains that South Asians continue to perpetuate anti-Black racism (also called anti-blackness) against African-Americans and peoples of African descent, both in the United States and in South Asia.

Black History Month and African-American history more broadly are relevant to South Asian communities. The racism that both communities suffer has a common origin: white supremacy.

South Asian-Americans and African-Americans both live in a country that was founded on preserving white supremacy, through the attempted genocide of indigenous peoples, slavery, racial segregation, and restrictions on immigration and xenophobic policies. Furthermore, South Asians and peoples of African descent have both suffered through colonialism.

In the United States, African-Americans have long been perceived as being more criminal or dangerous than other people.After the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, South Asian-Americans have also come under suspicion and are treated as criminals even when they have not committed any crimes.

The intersection between the treatment of African-Americans and South Asian-Americans was highlighted in the case of Sureshbhai Patel. Mr. Patel, an Indian grandfather, was brutally assaulted by two police officers in an Alabama suburb in 2016. He was walking outside his son’s home, when a neighbour thought he looked suspicious and called the police.

The police officers arrived on the scene and later claimed that Mr. Patel would not answer their questions although Mr. Patel claimed that he had told them he did not speak English. The police officers then assaulted Mr. Patel resulting in him being seriously injured.

At first, this incident seems like a straightforward case of anti-South Asian racism. However, it was later revealed that the neighbour who called the police did so because he thought Mr. Patel was a Black man.

The incident reflects not only anti-South Asian racism but also anti-Black racism. It reinforces the fact that African-Americans are immediately considered suspicious and criminal, even when the person in question is simply walking down the street.

But the incident emphasises something else: Mr. Patel could not speak English and was considered uncommunicative by the police officers, which led them to assault him.

His status as a non-English speaking immigrant intersected with the fact that the neighbour who called the police thought he was African-American.

The result was that he was brutally assaulted. In this way, the oppression that African-Americans and South Asians face is often not only similar but also can be part of the same incident.

Black History Month is also relevant to South Asians because many South Asians are Muslim, just like many African-Americans. In fact, the history of Islam in the United States can be traced through the history of African-Americans Muslims.

African Muslims were in North America at least as far back as the 1500s. In 1522, a group of people including enslaved West African Muslims led a revolt against Christopher Columbus’s son, Diego.

Throughout American history, many slaves in the United States were Muslim. Even after slavery was abolished, Black Muslims continued to shape US history and participate in American life.

For example, in the 1920s, P. Nathaniel Johnson, who changed his name to Ahmad Din, was the leader of an integrated mosque in St. Louis. And of course, figures like Malcolm X and organisations like the Nation of Islam significantly shaped the Civil Rights Movement.

For South Asian Muslims, this aspect of Black History is also our history as Muslims. Non-African-American Muslims in this country can live and thrive here largely due to the efforts of Black Muslims, who were the earliest Muslims in America and who have continued being active and vocal in support of Islam, human rights, and civil rights.

South Asians, Muslim or not, should also care about Black History and about standing in solidarity with African-Americans because that is a part of our history. African-American and South Asian collaboration and solidarity has existed for a long time.

For example, African-American figures in the United States provided assistance during India’s fight against colonialism and for independence. In 1942, the African-American press covered resistance movements in India. Moreover, the famous American civil rights leader Bayard Rustin organised the Fellowship of Reconciliation’s Free India Committee in 1945, and he even visited South Asia during this time.

South Asians showed solidarity to African-Americans as well. For example, Ram Manohar Lohia, an Indian political leader, spoke out against Jim Crow laws and went to jail in Mississippi after participating in civil disobedience to oppose segregation.

These examples of solidarity between African-Americans and South Asians are very important. But it is equally important to remember that South Asians have perpetuated anti-blackness in our communities for a long time.

The colourism that is endemic in our cultures is reflected through our fear of dark skin and our attempts to lighten our skin as much as possible, through the use of creams like Fair and Lovely.

Many South Asians both in the United States and in South Asia use terms like “kala” to derogatorily refer to African-Americans and peoples of African descent. We perpetuate false and racist beliefs about African-Americans being more likely to be criminals.

Many South Asians use the n-word and other racist terms. South Asians also co-opt aspects of Black culture, including music, dress, and African-American Vernacular English, without giving any credit to African-Americans or without reflecting on their own co-optation and cultural appropriation.

During this Black History Month (as well as every other month), South Asians should reflect on their own contributions to anti-Black racism and should take concrete actions to combat such racism in our communities.

We should remember the rich history of solidarity that we have with African-Americans and the importance of the accomplishments of African-Americans to the history of the United States. We should also strive to fight the oppression that African-Americans face and stand in solidarity with them without co-opting or appropriating their struggles.

In order to do so, we must have difficult conversations with our family members and friends about their anti-blackness and stereotypical beliefs. We should take the time to learn more about Black history and educate others in our communities.

We should also attend meetings and protests and provide financial resources to the extent that it is possible to African-American-led organisations that are standing against human rights violations of African-Americans. This month, let us all commit to combating our own anti-blackness and supporting African-Americans in their struggles for justice.

We don’t realise how terrorist attacks affect our children indirectly. Have we ever stopped to think how it is changing our younger generation’s behaviour pattern?

I will never forget the conversation I had with my ten-year-old cousin when he came home from school a day after the attack on Lal Shahbaz Qalandar’s shrine. It was on this occasion that I understood the long-term impacts that these attacks have on children.

I couldn’t believe when he excitedly said to me, "Zawarah baji, you know what happened today? Two suicide bombers came into my friend’s brother’s school. All the children hid under the desks and Ayyan’s brother lay down on the floor pretending to be dead so that terrorists wouldn’t kill him. Then, the police came and took the terrorists away."

What he did not know was that this was a mock operation conducted by security forces to prepare and train children on how to react in case of an actual terrorist attack.

Read next: How to defuse a bomb, and other security training for Pakistani students

His naive enthusiasm transported me back to 2015 when he had returned from school on the day that marked the one-month anniversary of the tragic Army Public School massacre. I remember how proudly he told me, "You know what? Our teachers now have an app in their phones and if they tap it four times, the police will come in two minutes." Intrigued, I asked him to tell me more.

"Oh and before this, we had only four guards and now we have nine. Oh and you know what, before this we only had cameras inside the school but now we have cameras outside as well. The best part is that our windows are now bullet-proof and will only shatter if a bomb explodes. Our teacher told us that when we hear an alarm, we all have to duck and hide under our desks till our principal gives us more instructions using her special microphone."

I kept listening, till I finally gathered the courage to ask, "Why do you keep saying ‘before this’? Before what?" And then came his reply: "You don’t know what happened on 16th December? "No, what happened?" I asked him. "Terrorists killed so many innocent children in a school."

I wondered how a seven-year-old child knew all this since we have always tried to keep him away from television. Our news channels fail to understand the basic ethics of reporting and keep showing gruesome footage from different incidents, not taking into account how it affects the families of the victims as well as children who are exposed to such images.

He then continued telling me that terrorists did this. "Who is a terrorist?" I asked him. "Don’t you know? Terrorists are mad men. They are monsters. They are not Muslims or Christians, they are not even humans. They kill people for no reason because they are crazy," he angrily told me.

"Why did they attack children?" I asked him next. "Because, they strike for little meat first before targeting the big meat", was his unconventional reply.

Related: Tackling implications of enhanced security on schoolchildren

I was still marveling at his response when he added, "When I grow up, I will join the army and kill all these terrorists." "I thought you just said killing someone is a bad thing. If you kill them, wouldn’t that make you a bad person as well?"

That was the moment when he lost his calm and started arguing with me. "If I don’t kill these terrorists, they will kill more of us. They will strike our families. Do you want them to come after your family? Do you want them to kill all of us?" It took me a good five minutes and a chocolate bar to calm him down and change the subject.

Later after our conversation had ended, I sat down thinking about what had become of our country.

More than two years since the massacre in Peshawar, Pakistan is still in shambles. Instead of care-free morning assemblies, our younger generation has emergency drills.

The only thing I had to worry about when I was in school was whether my mother had packed Super Crisps and Frost juice or French toast for lunch.

Having French toast for lunch was my worst nightmare. But today, our kids face a different reality. Their worst nightmare is a terrorist attack. It breaks my heart.

We are a resilient nation, but how long will we keep suffering? I hope I live to see the day when we stop losing our people to war and terrorism.

Have your children or family members been affected by terrorist attacks in the country? Tell us about it at blog@dawn.com

As a doctor who has worked at sites of suicide bombings, I have realised that Pakistan is in a far more deplorable state in terms of emergency medical assistance than I had thought. Countless lives can be saved if we improve pre-hospital care in the country.

On February 13, 2017, a suicide bomber targeted a protest in Lahore, killing 13 people and injuring many more. A chilling video made by one of the eye-witnesses seconds after the blast shows bodies strewn across the road. The person recording the video focuses momentarily on a victim lying in a pool of blood with a visible neck wound.

The victim seems to be breathing and you can hear someone shout at the bystanders to help stop the bleeding. Someone does try to get close, but then suddenly everyone runs away from the scene.

We do not know whether the victim survived or not. But if his bleeding was controlled, his chances of survival and recovery would have increased.

In-depth: Six degrees of trauma

It is hard to filter the gut-wrenching and gory images from my mind, but it is imperative to share this example. With basic knowledge and training, we have the potential to help victims of trauma in the future.

As part of the an orthopedic surgery team, my colleagues and I analysed data from trauma victims over the last few years. We published the study in the Journal of Pakistan Medical Association, and also presented it to one of Pakistan's largest public sector Accident and Emergency Units (A&E), the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Center in Karachi.

The Advanced Trauma Life Support guidelines, developed by the American College of Surgeons, prioritise trauma recognition and prompt resuscitation. But in Pakistan, our most recent data shows that victims of trauma hardly ever receive pre-hospital care during transport.

Many critical injuries that compromise the vital airway passage and shut off oxygen reaching the brain are actually treatable with simple to complex manoeuvres that should be attempted during transport of these victims to prevent death and disability. Lack of oxygen results in permanent loss of brain cell activity in as much as five to six minutes.

A few years ago, a young man, Sarfaraz Shah, was shot by a member of the paramilitary force in Karachi. The chilling video shows the victim awake, alert and sitting uncomfortably holding his injured thigh.

The haemorrhage, which was most likely from his femoral artery, eventually killed him. His death could have been prevented had some pressure been applied or a tourniquet tied to stop the bleeding before transferring him to the hospital.

In 2014, our group published an academic paper on the pattern of injuries sustained by police commandos attacked by an improvised explosive device in Razzakabad, Karachi.

Read more: Chitral quake survivors recover from trauma through online clinics

The most concerning details of the attack was the time taken for the first casualty to get medical attention. It was 35 minutes.

A victim of polytrauma due to road traffic accident, bomb blast or fall, has been shown by data to have what is called the 'golden hour' during which early detection and prompt resuscitation prevents death.

In the tragic event that took place at the Shah Noorani shrine last year, victims suffered for hours without medical assistance as there are no functioning hospitals in the area. Many victims must have succumbed to their injuries, some of which were treatable had they been attended to by trained paramedics or aware citizens who can play the role of first responders in such events.

Karachi, a city of over 20 million people, has no universal emergency number that citizens can dial for help. In the United States and other developed countries, a universal number like 911 routes all emergency calls to the Emergency Dispatch Operator. This operator stays on the phone and asks a series of questions (6 Ws: Who, What, Where, When, Why and Weapon) and activates the appropriate emergency response while staying on the phone and guiding the victim.

We have a number of ambulance networks with their individual emergency helplines but unfortunately, most of these ambulances are ill-equipped with medically untrained personnel.

Having responded to a suicide bombing in Karachi in 2010, I have personally witnessed the chaos that takes place at the site of disaster. Victims do not get medical attention at the site. Instead of resuscitating the victims on the spot, there are fights and scuffles as to which ambulance network will take the casualty to the hospital.

A collective approach needs to be taken by the government, who has the largest resources, authority and platform to bring all the charity-run organisations under one roof with a single emergency number accessible through phone, radio or internet.

Also read: doctHERs: Remote patient care with female doctors at the fore

The research we conducted showed more than twice the level of mortality in mass casualty events in Karachi as compared to the 7/7 bombings in London and the Madrid train bombings of 2004. A team of 14 British Medical Association doctors responded to the London bombings and saved many lives by intervening on site.

In the recent shootings in Quebec, swift response from doctors meant victims with serious injuries were in surgery inside 45 minutes, which prevented the death toll from rising above six.

The overall mortality in the London bombings was 7.2% compared to the 18.6% at the Police bus bombing in Razzakabad. This underlies the importance of on-site and in-transport trauma management and resuscitation, especially when the trauma centre is located several minutes away.

We have a habit of not preparing, mitigating and planning for disasters and their aftermath. We rarely conduct debriefings sessions and gather feedback to alter our response plans.

Although there are some organisations that have trained paramedics who respond to disasters, the country’s health care policy has neglected the importance of paramedics in the trauma-response system.

On the same topic: Need for effective emergency response again highlighted

At the First Response Initiative of Pakistan, we believe that training the general population in basic trauma care and life support can significantly reduce morbidity and mortality caused by trauma.

Training people in simple manoeuvres like applying pressure to bleeding wounds and using a tourniquet in severely injured or amputated limbs, which are common in blast injuries, can save lives before emergency medical help arrives.

All that is needed is government support and intervention.

Have you or someone you know suffered at the site of a disaster or bomb blast due to the negligence of pre-hospital care? Share it with us at blog@dawn.com

On Friday January 27, 2017, United States President Donald Trump issued an Executive Order titled “Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States.”

The text of the order stops the admission of refugees from Syria indefinitely and further bans entry of all citizens from seven countries including Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen. The refugee ban does not state a time limit.

The ban on visa issuance will be in effect for 90 days after which the list will be reconsidered (and possibly expanded) to include other countries, including Pakistan.

The text of the order refers to 9/11 and the threat of “radical Islamic terrorists” as the basis for instituting the ban.

In an interview following the signing, Trump stated that the ban on refugees would not extend to Syrian Christians who are fleeing persecution. And while the ban does not call itself a “Muslim ban” its effect will be to ban non-citizen Muslims from the listed countries from traveling to the United States.

The day after Trump signed the Executive Order, visa and green card holders from the countries listed were already being stopped at US airports and in several cases pulled out of planes at other airports around the world as they attempted to travel to the United States.

US politicians opposing the ban appeared on various cable news channels, denouncing the action, noting that it had been instituted on Holocaust Memorial Day in the United States.

Prior to intervening in World War II, the United States turned away large numbers of Jewish refugees, many of whom were later killed in Hitler’s concentration camps. Syrian Muslim refugees are likely to face the same fate as they are sent back into the hands of Daesh and the Assad regime.

As for Pakistanis, although they have not – yet – been included on Trump’s list of seven countries, he has proposed “extreme vetting” for Pakistani visa applicants.

Even though the exact procedures that come under the extreme vetting label have not been explained, it is very likely that visa processing for Pakistani citizens wishing to travel to the United States will take longer than usual.

The fact that Pakistan is not included in the list does not preclude directives to consular officials to drastically reduce the number of visas issued to Pakistani citizens.

Another notable facet of the current ban is that it applies to all non-citizens from the countries stated. This means that even green card holders, known as “legal permanent residents” or “resident aliens” are also barred from returning to the United States.

Based on the above, Pakistani citizens who are legal permanent residents of US (green card holders) or hold other US non-immigrant visas must take seriously the possibility of an imminent ban on Pakistani citizens as well.

Pakistani citizens who are currently in the United States on F student visas, H-1B visas, J visas (usually issued to resident physicians and exchange programs) should not travel out of the United States for the next several months if they wish to return there.

Those who hold these visas and are currently in Pakistan and wish to return to the United States should perhaps return immediately.

Those Pakistanis who are legal permanent residents/US green card holders and wish to return and live in the United States must also return as soon as possible.

If the ban is extended to Pakistan, none of these categories of people (save US citizens) will be able to return to the United States.

Several lawsuits have been filed in the United States challenging the ban. Not only will it take a long time for the challenges to these bans to be adjudicated, it is also unlikely that the ban will be deemed unconstitutional.

This is because while religious tests and discrimination are not permitted under the United States Constitution, those constitutional protections do not apply to non-citizens or beyond the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.

Finally, US courts have already ruled that those denied visas do not have the right to appeal the denial in US courts.

For all of these reasons, all Pakistanis holding US green cards and non-immigrant visas should return to the United States without delay and if they are already there, refrain from traveling outside the country.

Update: The Department of Homeland Security has formally issued a notification that green card holders are exempt from the Executive Order.

Have you been affected by Trump's ban or know anyone who has suffered because of it? Tell us at blog@dawn.com.

There is no safe place left anymore.

It is hard to imagine a quieter suburb than Sainte Foy and a town quainter than Quebec City. But this façade of calm and peace collapsed Sunday night when at least two masked gunmen stormed a mosque in Sainte Foy and shot dead at least six Muslims. Several others were seriously injured.

Details about the mass murder, which appears to be hate motivated, are trickling in.

Only months earlier, someone left a pig’s head and a hate-laden message at the front door of the same mosque.

Wrapped in plastic, a greeting card accompanied the pig’s head that read in French Bon appétit, or eat well. The perpetrators knew that Muslims, just like observant Jews, don’t consume pork. It was not a peace offering.

Sunday's attack is a deliberate act of violence intended to terrorise Quebec’s minority groups.

Quebec is unique in Canada and North America for its distinct cultural roots. Most Quebecers speak French as their first or only language. For decades, French-speaking Quebecers have campaigned for independence from the rest of Canada. A 1995 referendum on the future of Quebec was decided by less than a percentage point difference when 50.6% Quebecers voted not to separate.

It is not just the French language, cuisine or architecture that makes Quebec unique. Most Quebecers have strong opinions about religion. The Quiet Revolution, as it is known in Quebec, was the people’s reaction against organised religion. Thus most Quebecers are steadfast seculars and oppose any overt manifestation of religion in the public sphere. Some also campaigned to remove a crucifix that hangs in Quebec’s National Assembly.

To have a mass murder unfold in the heart of secular Canada appears a puzzle. Quebec City, a mid-sized town of half-a-million is the capital of Quebec, Canada’s second most populous province. The city had its fair share of conflicts starting with the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759 when the English and the French fought for its control.

But that was in the past. Today’s Quebec City is a sophisticated, modern town that has remained faithful to its traditions.

The city is home to Canada’s oldest institution of higher learning, Université Laval, which opened its doors in 1663. A modern university with over 35,000 students, Laval attracts brilliant minds from across Canada and the world. The city’s architecture is perhaps Europe’s farthest outpost where Château Frontenac’s stunning façades rival the very best across the Atlantic.

Why then such a ghastly act of violence descended on Quebec City?

Regrettably, this is not the first incident of mass shooting in Quebec. The worst known incident took place in Quebec’s largest city, Montreal, where a deranged man shot dead several women studying engineering at École Polytechnique.

14 women lost their lives on that fateful day in December 1989. The 25-year old murderer, Marc Lépine, was born to an Algerian immigrant and a Canadian woman.

Quebec can be a tough place for immigrants. I lived in Montreal for several years when I taught at McGill University. Immigrants are often caught between the subtle struggle between the Anglophones and Francophones. Both want to influence Quebec, and both have succeeded only temporarily.

Often, the province is governed by a separatist political party whose stated aim is to separate Quebec from Canada. In the larger struggle for an independent homeland for Francophones, immigrants become the unintended victims.

I am reminded of the ordeal of a McGill student who was detained by the police for taking photographs at a transit station. The student, a native of Montreal, was of Sri Lankan heritage and worked in my research lab at the university. I had assigned him to document commuter flows at a subway station. He carried a letter from me explaining his assignment in case someone would question him. He was still arrested and charged.

On any given day, hundreds of visitors take thousands of photographs while riding Montreal’s buses, subways, and trains. They are neither discouraged nor detained. Yet, a dark-skinned young man with a camera put the security establishment in overdrive. Months later the authorities settled the matter out of court.

Such incidents are not necessarily rare. As recently as in 2013, the then provincial government run by the separatist Parti Québécois proposed a secular charter, Bill 60, which would have, among numerous other provisions, prevented public sector employees from wearing religious gear and symbols.

Hijab wearing Muslim women, and men who wore religious headgear, e.g., Sikhs, Orthodox Jews, and observant Muslims were the direct victims of Bill 60.

Several incidents of hate and racism followed when individuals tried to forcibly remove hijab from women in malls and on public transit. The crucifix hanging in the Quebec’s National Assembly was exempted.

Muslims are not the only victims of the infrequent racism in Quebec. In April 2016, Supninder Singh Khehra, while vacationing in Quebec City, was verbally abused and physically attacked by a group of men.

The Toronto native was trying to hail a cab in Quebec City when a group of young men in a car first hurled insults at him and then attacked him. The perpetrators ran away when the police arrived at the scene.

“I’m really worried about the safety and wellbeing of young kids of my community who wear turbans,” Mr Khehra told a news reporter.

Mr Khehra believed that he was attacked because of his race, colour, and the headgear. The Quebec police, however, didn’t consider it a hate crime.

The video of the attack is available online and leaves little to the imagination. It was a hate crime and ignoring it would only encourage bigots. One of the attackers, Gabriel Royer-Tremblay, was found guilty and sentenced to 10 months.

Mohammed Yangui, president of the Quebec City mosque, confirmed that the remains of the victims were already in the city’s morgue. There could be more fatalities as the number of injured is large. For now, at least six families in Quebec City, have lost a loved one in an act of terror.

It is hard to say what the future holds for the minorities in North America. American President, Donald Trump, has restricted nationals from seven Muslim-dominated countries from visiting the United States. Mr Trump is about to build a wall with Mexico. The space and welcome for refugees are fast shrinking in Mr Trump’s America.

Canada, despite the carnage in Quebec City, remains a welcoming place for refugees. Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister, pledged to keep Canada’s doors open to victims of war and violence.

“To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength,” he wrote in a tweet.

Are you an immigrant living in Canada who has experienced discrimination? Share it with us at blog@dawn.com

One of the most common liberal responses to the excesses committed by the powerful in Pakistan is to call for people to ‘speak out’.

This familiar refrain, voiced often in the aftermath of the January disappearances of liberal activists, is in most cases understandable and necessary. In the context of a society like Pakistan’s where critical speech and political outspokenness can be a death sentence, speaking truth to power is vital to break the grip of fear and expand the sphere of political possibility.

However, in light of the recent abductions and the vicious, coordinated campaign to malign the activists, there is an urgent need to reevaluate this approach. We must begin to conceive of a horizon to progressive politics that lies beyond the exercise and defence of speech and reactive protest.

The call to ‘speak out’ is a cornerstone of liberal pluralism the world over, often understood as a necessary antidote to the inequalities and prejudices perpetuated under authoritarianism. As an approach to political action, it is inherently tied to liberal political philosophy, exemplified in Hannah Arendt’s essay Truth and Politics.

This approach sees politics as being principally about debate, involving contestation between different ideological positions where citizens play the passive role of passing judgment on the course of society through the exercise of their free opinions (hence the inviolability of free speech within the liberal framework).

As an activist tactic, it has gained particular prominence in the age of social media, where words can be shared and weaponised at the service of political agendas with a speed and scale that was unimaginable some years ago.

The present decade has produced millions of social media activists who politically participate mainly through memes, videos, blogs and tweets, often with the sole purpose of ‘calling out’ the ideological deficiencies of their opponents and then measuring success in shares and retweets.

In reality though, politics is not just about conflicting viewpoints – it consists of concrete social and economic forces with material interests that are aggregated under various class, ethnic, racial, religious and ideological groupings. To be a political subject is not just to debate and express opinions, it is to engage in the organisation of collective forces that can advance those ideas and interests.

And organising involves much more than articulation of opinions; it is about creating political organisations, formulating long-term strategy, building institutions, forming coalitions and taking collective action to achieve specific goals. As one theorist of collective action defines it, organising is about turning a social bloc into a coherent political force.

Rarely though are instances of bigotry, terrorism and authoritarianism in Pakistan met with appeals to organise – a word that is conspicuously absent from the vocabulary of liberal politics of the country.

While the country’s liberal minority is relatively well-represented in the speech-heavy spaces of electronic media and civil advocacy, few tend to be engaged in the messy business of organising in a strategic, political sense.

One principal reason for this is class. Most liberals and progressives today tend to come from relatively comfortable and better-educated segments of society for whom political organising is not a survival need as it is for say, residents of informal settlements constantly at the risk of arbitrary eviction.

However, there are also distinct historical reasons for this stark oversight. Part of it has to do with the deeply-ingrained suspicion of political organisations, whereby anything remotely to do with mass politics – including the task of political organising – is seen as being inherently corrupting.

This is not simply a consequence of disillusionment with rampant political corruption; it is the result of the deliberate inculcation of anti-democratic attitudes by the state – through education, historical revision and media manipulation – that has served to undermine the very idea of political participation itself.

This mindset has seeped so deeply into liberal circles that it has bred a stubborn insistence on remaining apolitical even if the issue at hand is intrinsically political. At a meeting held by local activists last year to decide upon the response of civil society to the mob of pro-Mumtaz Qadri clerics that had descended upon Islamabad, a friend suggested involving local political parties in counter-mobilisation efforts. In response, a lady, who is a prominent civil society activist, immediately responded, “No, we don’t want to make this political.” One wonders how it is possible to take on the menace of oganised extremism if one doesn't even see it as a political battle.

Another critical historical factor is that progressives have largely lost the spaces in which they used to organise at a mass level in the 1960s and 1970s – universities and factories. Student politics, the backbone of most progressive movements in Pakistan’s history, has been illegal for 33 years since Ziaul Haq’s student union ban in 1984. An entire generation has passed through the education system without an iota of engagement with organised politics.

Trade unions have been under constant attack since the Zia era, further weakened by the onset of privatisation, occupational fragmentation and informalisation, with the result that now less than 3% of the Pakistani labour force is unionised.

With the near-elimination of these incubators for progressive politics by the state, most mainstream political parties remain in the grip of unaccountable feudal and capitalist dynasties and organised traders, for whom progressive principles are rarely a priority.

On the other hand, the organising spaces of the country's rightwing, including those using religion for financial and political gain, are now a multi-million dollar industry with deep-rooted material interests, from political parties to television channels to charity empires, protected by strength in numbers and arms.

This is hardly a political enemy that can be taken on through a mere ‘war of ideas’. The events of the past weeks are a particularly pressing reminder of both the vulnerability of a politics of self-expression and the necessity of concrete organising in this deeply uneven political arena.

The abductions and blasphemy accusations are a clear sign that critical speech on social media is now a target for violent repression.

At the same time, it is also evident that the protest campaign against the disappearances has only been made possible by the organised Left networks that Salman Haider, who was recently confirmed as “fine and safe” by his brother, was part of. Without these networks, the abductions may well have gone unnoticed like they are in Balochistan, Fata and Sindh.

In these bleak and dangerous times, there are no quick fixes to the fascism plaguing Pakistan. To begin to fight back, all citizens – not just existing progressives – who oppose the present state of affairs must overcome their political inhibitions and begin to organise; build political organisations or join existing ones; recreate and build new spaces for collective action; conceive and implement strategies to redistribute power and wealth, and forge empathetic and cooperative human and political relationships across class, ethnic and gender lines.

Yes, speaking out and protesting must also continue, but not simply in its reactive form; it must be tied to a strategy to build organised political power. Only if we undertake this process will we eventually build the popular political alternative required to push back the fascist tide. If not, we will simply be left counting the numbers of the disappeared and silenced amongst us.

The biggest question about Hafiz Saeed’s house arrest isn’t why, but why now?

After all, we’ve been here before.

He was placed under house arrest in December 2008, just days after the Mumbai terror attacks that New Delhi and Washington believe he helped orchestrate. He was detained again in September 2009. In both cases, he was released in relatively short order.

In more recent years, he has essentially lived free in Lahore, holding rallies and hosting journalists, including those from the West.

So why did Pakistani authorities decide to once again place him under house arrest on Monday?

One Pakistani media report points to US pressure, contending that in the last days of the Obama administration, American officials warned Pakistan to rein in Saeed or risk sanctions.

Saeed himself, in a video released shortly after his detention, bizarrely claimed that Pakistan was obliged to act because of US President Donald Trump’s warm relationship with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. A Saeed spokesman made a similar claim.

Washington, of course, has pushed Pakistan to crack down on Saeed for years, and unsuccessfully so. So it beggars belief to assume that US pressure would suddenly and magically prompt Pakistan to detain Saeed—and particularly at a time when the US-Pakistan relationship appears to be entering a period of drift. Washington is shifting its engagement with New Delhi into overdrive, while Islamabad is cementing its failsafe partnership with Beijing.

It’s also folly to assume the Trump administration was actively pushing Pakistan to move on Saeed. Trump has been in office for less than two weeks, and beyond his rapid-fire issuance of executive orders, his presidency appears frenzied and disorganised—not to mention hamstrung by numerous unfilled senior diplomatic and national security posts.

Bottom line? The Trump administration has too much on its plate to be focusing laser-like on Pakistan.

If any external pressure compelled Pakistan to place Saeed under house arrest, it’s more likely to have come from Beijing than Washington.

In a telling yet underreported development several weeks ago, China’s former consul general in Kolkata published a blog post calling on Beijing to rethink its default policy of blocking Indian attempts to have JM leader Masood Azhar sanctioned by the UN.

This all makes good sense when we think about the high stakes of CPEC. For Beijing (as for Islamabad), rapid and sustained progress on this project is a core strategic imperative.

Hafiz Saeed doesn’t pose a direct threat to China, but so long as he walks free he poses a direct threat to India-Pakistan relations.

The last thing China wants as it pushes forward with CPEC is an India-Pakistan relationship on tenterhooks — not to mention on a war footing, as was the case for several weeks last year.

China has long leaned on Pakistan to tackle terror more robustly — and it’s arguably gotten results. Some have speculated that Beijing’s prodding played a role in Pakistan’s decision to launch the Zarb-i-Azb operation.

The anti-state militants targeted in that offensive had not only terrorised Pakistan; they’d also posed a threat to Chinese investments and workers in Pakistan. Chinese pressure may also have helped prompt Pakistan’s Red Mosque offensive.

In short, we should never underestimate China’s leverage in Pakistan, including its ability to get Pakistan to do things it often resists.

And yet the question still remains: Why now? If we assume China influenced Pakistan’s decision to detain Saeed, why didn’t Pakistan act weeks or months ago?

Enter President Trump’s executive order on immigration.

It’s doubtful Trump actively pressured Pakistan to rein in Hafiz Saeed, but it’s likely Pakistan’s detention of Saeed was done with Trump in mind.

We can read the house arrest, at least in part, as an effort by Pakistan to showcase its counterterrorism bonafides to the new US administration, and to dissuade Trump from adding Pakistan to the list of countries that can’t send their citizens to the United States for 90 days. Trump’s chief of staff has suggested Pakistan could be added to the list.

Of course, all this speculating could ultimately be immaterial and Saeed may be released relatively soon.

Unless, that is, China has the ability to get Pakistan to go beyond token gestures when it comes to addressing anti-India militancy, and unless Pakistan chooses to do some big-time signaling to Washington by keeping Saeed in detention for an extended period.

Alas, given Pakistan’s core strategic interests and the value the authorities seem to accord to Saeed as a key asset, I wouldn’t count on either scenario materialising anytime soon.

The first people

Long before the emergence of the great Indus Valley Civilisation on the banks of River Indus 5,000 years ago, the earliest known people to make present-day Pakistan their home were the Soanians.

They were hunter-gatherers who lived 50,000 years ago. Archaeologists gave them this name because their tools, pottery, and fossils of various wild animals were found in Soan Valley near Islamabad, the capital of present-day Pakistan.

Still standing

16 stones, believed to have been erected almost 2,500 years ago by a civilisation of sun-worshippers, still stand in the Swabi District of present-day Pakistan. Each stone is approximately 10ft tall. Archaeologists believe they may be pillars of an ancient sun temple.

Alexander attacked in Multan

After conquering the vast Persian Empire, the armies of famous Greek warrior-king, Alexander, entered what today is Pakistan. In 326 BC (or over 2300 years ago), his campaign received a severe blow when he was wounded by a poison arrow on the walls of a citadel in Multan. Though he did not die, he soon fell sick and had to abandon his Indian campaign.

The citadel where Alexander was wounded was being defended by the Brahmin Malli tribe. Today, on the site of the citadel stands the magnificent tomb of Sufi saint Shah Rukh-i-Alam. It was built in 1324 CE by Muslim king, Ghiasuddin Tughlaq.

Born in Swat

Padmasambhava, the founder of Tibetan Buddhism (also called ‘the second Buddha’), was born in the 8th century CE in an area which today lies between Lower Dir and Swat District in modern-day Pakistan.

After ruling as a Buddhist king in the area, he is said to have abdicated his throne and travelled to Tibet to introduce Buddhism there. He is still revered as a sacred figure in Tibet.

Barbarian rule in Sialkot

Huns were fierce nomads in Central Asia. In the 5th century CE they managed to conquer vast lands in Europe, Central Asia and ancient India. They entered India through present-day Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province in Pakistan.

Huns were fire-worshippers. A Hun warrior, Mehr Gul (Sunflower), established himself as king here. He ruled from his capital in what today is Sialkot in Pakistan’s Punjab province. His rule was brutal and he was defeated and removed by a confederacy of Hindu Rajput rulers from Rajasthan (in present-day India) and Multan (in present-day Pakistan).

Qasim’s Landing

Armies of 8th century Arab general Muhammad Bin Qasim invaded Sindh from the sea. The army landed on the shores of Debal. Debal stretched all the way to the ancient city of Banbhore in Sindh from where Qasim’s forces defeated the armies of Brahmin king, Raja Daher.

Debal today is the Manora area in Pakistan’s metropolitan city, Karachi. An ancient Hindu temple can still be seen in the background.

A 5-star battle

Central Asian Muslim king Mahmud Ghaznavi invaded India from Afghanistan. In 1001 CE, he marched on to Punjab after defeating Hindu king, Jayapala, in a battle in what today is Peshawar in Pakistan. It was a fierce battle. Jayapala set himself on fire after his army was defeated.

In 1971, when a site in Peshawar was being dug up to lay the foundations of Hotel Intercontinental (now called Pearl Continental), workers found hundreds of old human, elephant and horse bones. Archaeologists believe that the ground on which the hotel was eventually built was the site of the fierce battle between the armies of Ghaznavi and Jayapala.

Sindh’s romantic rise

Famous romantic folk-tales Sassi-Punnu, Umer-Marvi, and Soni Mahiwal were all first conceived during the powerful Soomra rule in Sindh between 1024 and 1351 CE. During this period, Sindhi language and culture were greatly enriched. The Soomra dynasty folded in the mid-14th century when the last Soomra king was defeated by Allauddin Khilji, the second king of the Khilji dynasty ruling from Delhi.

Many of the folk-tales created by Sindhi storytellers during the Soomra rule inspired the famous 17th century Sufi saint, Shah Abdul Latif, who reproduced them in writing when he came and stayed in Sindh. It is through him that these tales also reached Punjab.

The war which ended the Soomra dynasty in Sindh was fought over a princess. Her name was Bilquees Bhagi. The Soomra dynasty had friendly relations with the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad. But when the power of the Caliphate began to weaken (due to attacks by the Mongols), the Soomras tried to rekindle their links with the Delhi Sultans.

Allauddin Khilji asked Soomra king, Doda, to send Bilquees to him as his bride. Doda refused and went to war with the Sultan. After Doda’s defeat, Bilquees is said to have vanished. Most believe she committed suicide. Her body was never found.

Medieval safari

Wild animals were aplenty in the region, which today is Pakistan, when Mughal king Babur invaded India from Afghanistan. A painting of him hunting rhinoceroses in the outskirts of Peshawar appears in his autobiography Baburnama. Babur founded India’s Mughal Dynasty in 1526 CE.

Rhinos, elephants, lions and cheetahs were common all across what today is Pakistan. Out of these, rhinos, elephants and lions became extinct here from 18th century onwards, mainly due to hunting, human encroachment and climate change. Cheetahs became extinct in the 1950s.

Paradise lost

Lahore’s famous Shalimar Garden was built in 1641 CE during the rule of fifth Mughal king, Shah Jahan. The land on which it was built belonged to ‘Mian’ family belonging to Punjab’s Arain tribe. The family was given the custodianship of the Garden by Shah Jahan.

The Mian Arian family retained the custodianship of the Garden for over 350 years until the site was taken over by the government of Pakistan in 1962 during the Ayub Khan regime.

Between 1965 and late 1970s, the Shalimar Gardens hosted a number of high-profile functions and receptions. It was also a favourite tourist resort. However, from the 1980s onward, the Garden began to deteriorate. Since 2001, it has been placed on UNESCO’s list of Endangered World Heritage Sites.

A flood of crocodiles

In a large pond adjacent to an old shrine of a Sufi saint in the Mangopir area of present-day Karachi are dozens of crocodiles. Legend claims that they have been staying and breeding here ever since a Sufi saint settled in this area in the 13th century CE.

19th century British colonialists, when they annexed Sindh, were fascinated by the phenomenon. They would go up to the shrine and watch the crocodiles being fed.

Scientists and archaeologists have found crocodile bones in the area which are actually older than 13th century CE. Scientists believe the bones may actually be 5,000 years old. They also added that the crocodiles were carried here in an ancient flood thousands of years ago that originated in what is called Hub and is situated in present-day Balochistan area. The crocodiles were stranded in Mangopir when the floods receded. They have been staying and breeding in this pond for centuries.

Even today, the crocodiles here are largely docile and are regularly fed by pilgrims who continue to visit the shrine.

The late blooming of Eid Miladun Nabi

Eid Miladun Nabi is celebrated on the birthday of Prophet Muhammad (Peace be Upon Him). He is said to have been born in Makkah in the late 6th century CE. Eid Miladun Nabi is a colourful and joyous occasion, which is observed by most Muslims - except for some Muslim sects and sub-sects. Eid Miladun Nabi is said to have first gained prominence in the 11th century CE in Egypt under the rule of the Fatimid dynasty. By the 13th century, it was being celebrated in Turkey during the rise of the Ottoman Empire.

In the subcontinent, Eid Miladun Nabi became a lively and boisterous occasion in the 16th century CE during Mughal rule. In the context of the area which is present day Pakistan, Eid Miladun Nabi was most actively observed in Punjab and Sindh during British rule. It was declared a national holiday by the government of Pakistan in 1949.

The Africans of Karachi

Lyari is one of the oldest areas of Karachi. The area grew from a community of fishing villages and began to expand in the 18th century CE. Lyari has always had a large community of Sheedis or Sidis. They are also known as Afro-Indians and/or Afro-Pakistanis.

The Sheedis were first brought from Africa to South Asia as slaves by Portuguese traders in the 16th century CE. After they gained their freedom during the start of British rule here, most Afro-Indians settled in Gujarat (in present-day India) and in the Makran area of Balochistan, and in Sindh in present-day Pakistan.

Sheedis who have lived for generations in Lyari were brought from Central and Southern Africa. According to some recent DNA tests of Lyari’s residents, scientists suggest that a majority of Sheedis once belonged to the Bantu-speaking tribes of Africa. Most of them converted to Islam.

Lyari has always been a working-class area. It started to become a slum in the 1940s. Crime and drug addiction began to increase in the area from the late 1960s. Lyari then became a hotbed of anti-government activism during the Ziaul Haq dictatorship in the 1980s. In the 1990s, violent gang warfare erupted here which lasted until 2015.

Unlike the rest of the country where sports such as cricket, hockey and squash have been popular, Lyari has produced some of the best Pakistani boxers and footballers.

The first cinema

One of the first cinemas in India was built in Karachi, Star, which was erected in 1917. It lasted until the 1940s before being pulled down.

In the 1970s, another Star cinema was built on the site where the original one had stood. The new Star cinema stood adjacent to Bambino cinema.

When Pakistan’s film industry collapsed in the 1980s, this Star too was closed down.

Bruce’s Quetta

When Quetta came under British rule in 1877, a British architect called Mr Bruce designed a street in that city which was said to be one of the most beautiful in the region. Called Bruce Road, it was lined up with high-end shops. It also had a pub simply called Bruce’s Inn which had Mr Bruce’s image on its signboard. The pub was often frequented by the British and local elite of the city.

The older buildings here were destroyed in an earthquake which razed the city of Quetta in 1935. However, until the early 1970s, there was still a tailor shop and a liquor store here both named after the enigmatic Mr Bruce.

Once upon an oil field

In 1915, oil was discovered in Khaur - an area which today is in the Attock District of Pakistan. British drilling companies believed that the area had huge reserves of crude oil. In fact, in 1938, when vast reserves of oil were discovered in Saudi Arabia, the British were sure that the oil fields of Khaur would be able to produce as much.

The oil fields of Khaur did produce oil but not as much as expected. When the area became part of Pakistan, the Pakistan government continued to drill more oil wells in Khaur. The last such well was drilled in 1954. But by then the oil in the grounds of Khaur had been exhausted.

Cleaner days

In the late 19th century when a plague struck Karachi, British colonialists (who had annexed the city in 1839), devised a hectic plan to cleanse the city. By developing the city’s creaky infrastructure and building a complex sewerage and garbage-disposal system, the British were successful. By the 1920s, Karachi was being described as ‘the Paris of Asia’ and it became one of the cleanest cities in South Asia. The roads were regularly scrubbed with water.

Even after Karachi became part of Pakistan in 1947, the practice of cleaning the streets and roads of the city with water continued. The practice stopped sometime in the mid-1960s.

Overcrowding in the 1970s created larger slums and by the mid-1980s, the city’s old infrastructure (which had not been improved) began to break down. The city fell into a crime-infested, frenzied mass of chaos.

Karachi also began to face a serious garbage-disposal problem from the late 1980s. This problem has continued to worsen.

The forgotten tides

One of the main threats faced by all cities by the sea are tidal waves generated by an earthquake or a raging storm. Over the years, Karachi has been lucky to have only received the fading tale of storms. However, the lesser-known fact is that the city has actually been hit twice by deadly tidal waves.

The first one hit the city in 1944 due to an earthquake in the waters of Makran coast. Newspapers of the time reported that as the earth shook, a 40ft tidal wave smashed the shores of the city. Over 400 people lost their lives. The water also made its way in the more populated areas of central Karachi.

In December 1965, an abnormal winter cyclone developed in the Arabian Sea. It generated massive waves which crashed into Karachi and completely submerged the entire southern end of the city. Newspaper reports suggest that over 10,000 people lost their lives. The cyclone which created this devastation was called Cyclone 013A.

A tent regime

When Pakistan gained independence in 1947, it was extremely short on land and other resources, especially when millions of Muslims migrated to the new country from India. Vast refugee camps were set up to accommodate the refugees. But the refugees alone did not live in the tents in these camps. Open fields in Karachi and Lahore were covered with tents which were also used by government officials and bureaucrats as offices.

Many government officials, including some ministers, and bureaucrats worked from these tents until new office buildings were built or acquired in the early 1950s. Pakistan’s first stock exchange in Karachi was also situated in one such tent.

Angry wives

When the 1956 Constitution declared Pakistan an ‘Islamic Republic’, many newspapers reported that the wives of most parliamentarians accused their husbands of hypocrisy. Cartoons began to appear in the papers satirising the situation.

In 1958, when military chief Ayub Khan and President Iskandar Mirza imposed the country’s first Martial Law, they suspended the Constitution, claiming that it had been used by cynical politicians ‘to peddle Islam for political gains'. The country’s name was changed to Republic of Pakistan.

The name was changed back to Islamic Republic of Pakistan in the 1973 Constitution.

A Little Israel in Karachi

Jews in South Asia first arrived in the 19th century. Most of them came to cities such as Karachi, Peshawar and Rawalpindi to escape persecution in Persia. By the 1940s, Karachi had the largest concentration of Jews, with most of them living in the city’s Saddar and Soldier Bazar areas.

Most Jews living in Rawalpindi and Peshawar began to leave after the creation of Israel in 1948. The last Jewish family to leave Pakistan was in the late 1960s. It had been living in Karachi for decades and its members were all registered Pakistanis who had supported Mr Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan.

The drowned town of Azad Kashmir

In 1967, the government of Pakistan completed the construction of the Mangla Dam. It remains to be the 7th largest dam in the world. Built on Jhelum River in the Mirpur District of Azad Kashmir, the dam’s construction caused the ‘controlled flooding’ of some villages and one major town. They were completely submerged underwater.

The inhabitants were all evacuated and compensated well before the submergence. For years, some structures of the drowned town would slightly emerge during low tide. Some of these structures can still be seen, but today they appear a lot more rarely than before. Curious folk still dive in this section of the river to investigate the remains of the drowned town.

The phenomenon inspired the finale of the popular Pakistan television serial, Waaris (1979). In the final episode of the series, a conservative and traditionalist feudal lord, Chaudhry Hashmat, decides to remain inside his ancestral house as his vacated village begins to submerge under water due to the construction of a dam.

The national dress

The shalwar-kameez (for both men and women) is often considered to be Pakistan’s national dress. The fact is, this wasn’t always the case. Until the early 1970s, Pakistan’s national dress (for men) was actually the shervanee.

Until the late 1960s, urban white-collar Pakistanis and politicians were expected to turn up to work either in a shervanee, a three-piece-suit or in shirt and trousers. Shalwar-kameez was not allowed.

Even college and university students were expected to turn up in a shervanee or a three-piece-suit during special occasions and functions.

The shalwar-kameez only got traction in urban Pakistan when the populist Prime Minister, Z. A. Bhutto (1971-77), began wearing it at mass rallies. Even though he was also known for his taste for exquisite and expensive three-piece-suits, he almost always appeared in shalwar-kameez at large public gatherings. The shalwar-kameez became a populist political statement of sorts and was then labeled as awami libaas (people's dress).

In the 1980s, however, during the conservative dictatorship of Ziaul Haq, the shalwar-kameez somehow began being associated with the Muslim faith. This was strange because, according to famous archaeologist and historian, Ahmad Hasan Dani, the first ever variants of the shalwar-kameez were actually introduced in this region almost 2,000 years ago during the rule of Buddhist king, Kanishka, in present-day Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

The tikka inventors

Most Pakistanis when they order a chicken tikka outside Pakistan get small boneless barbecued pieces of chicken. In Pakistan, a chicken tikka means either a whole barbecued leg piece (with thigh) or a chunky chest piece of a chicken.

Very few know that this version of the chicken tikka is available in Pakistan alone. In fact, it was invented by the chefs of the once famous Cafe de Khan in Karachi in 1960. The cafe offered this unique version of the chicken tikka which it then encouraged to be had with a paratha and a chilled Coke or a pint of beer.

People loved it and ever since 1960, this version of the chicken tikka has been popular all across Pakistan - and, for decades, only in Pakistan.

The casino

On the site where Pakistan’s largest shopping mall stands today (in Karachi’s Sea View area), there was once a stylish building erected between 1975-76. It was a widespread structure which was supposed to be the country’s first major casino.

The land for it was allotted by the Z.A. Bhutto regime to an entertainment business tycoon, Tufail Sheikh, who already owned a hotel and a nightclub in the city. The idea was to construct a giant casino to attract rich Arab sheikhs to Karachi after a civil war had broken out in Beirut. Beirut, before the war, had been a favourite haunt of rich Arabs and Americans frequenting its casinos.

The casino was completed in April 1977. It was an impressive and imposing structure with a huge hall where gambling tables and machines were placed. The casino also had bars, restaurants, guest rooms and a nightclub. The Bhutto regime was expecting a windfall of foreign exchange and a booming entertainment and hoteling industry to emerge around the casino.

In March 1977, the Bhutto regime got cornered by a violent protest movement by a right-wing alliance of opposition parties. In April, he agreed to their demand of closing down nightclubs, gambling at horse racing and the sale of alcoholic beverages (to Muslims). Ironically, these sudden bans were imposed on the day the casino was to be inaugurated.

Karachi already had the most number of luxurious hotels in Pakistan. Anticipating a flood of visitors from oil-rich Arab countries, Europe and the United States after the emergence of the casino, a huge hotel too began to go up in the city’s Club Road area. It was to be the Hyatt Regency and was one of the biggest in the region.

There were already two 5-star hotels on Club Road (Intercontinental and Palace) and two nightclubs (Playboy and Oasis). But as the casino’s inauguration was halted, the construction of the hotel too stopped.

In July 1977, the Bhutto regime fell to a reactionary military coup. The doors of the casino were locked, even though Mr Sheikh still owned the land and the building. In the 1990s, the casino building was turned into a recreational spot for children, with rides and all. In 2011, the building was bought over by real estate developers. It was finally torn down and a massive shopping mall was erected in its place. Many believe that had the casino survived and functioned as planned, Karachi would have become what Dubai is today.

Pakistan’s Polish soldiers

As the situation in Poland got worse during the Nazi occupation and then after World War-II, 45 Polish officers and scientists flew to Pakistan in 1948 and signed a 3-year contract to serve in Pakistan’s nascent armed forces.

The most prominent was a brilliant aeronautical engineer, Władysław Józef Marian Turowicz.

Turowicz joined the Pakistan Air Force as chief scientist and helped set up technical institutes to train fighter pilots and develop new aeronautical technologies. In 1952, he was made Wing Commander in the Pakistan Air Force and in 1959 he was promoted to Group Captain. The very next year he became Air Commodore.

In 1966, he convinced President Ayub Khan to develop Pakistan’s space programme. He was teamed up with future Nobel laureate, Dr Abdus Salam, to develop rocket technology for Pakistan. Salam and Turowicz’s work lay the foundation of Pakistan’s missile technology.

Turowicz stayed in Pakistan with his wife and two daughters, while rest of his Polish colleagues returned to Poland. His third daughter was born in Pakistan and became a gliding expert. She trained the cadets of Shaheen Air in the 1990s.

Two of his daughters married Pakistanis and the third one married an East Pakistani (now Bangladesh). Turowicz died in a car crash in Karachi in 1980.

He was given a number of state and military awards in Pakistan: Sitara-i-Pakistan (in 1965); Tamgha-i-Pakistan (1967); Sitara-i-Khidmat (1967); Sitara-i-Quaid-e-Azam (1971); Sitara-i-Imtiaz (1972); and the Abdus Salam Award (1978).

All photos are taken from Archives 150

My father always wanted me to be a lawyer. Like many Muslim parents, he was thinking of a job that was safe, secure, and lacking in ostentation. So I went to law school, passed the Bar Exam in my first attempt, and was sworn in as an attorney in May 2012.

But instead of choosing a safe, secure desk job that kept me tied up in paperwork from 9am to 5pm, I chose a job in criminal defence, defending people accused of serious felony offences both in the state of Illinois and federally across the United States. I spent my days with (alleged) gangsters, robbers, and murderers, and I was honoured to do so. I chose to be the kind of lawyer that fights.

When Donald Trump signed an executive order that has widely come to be known as the Muslim ban, I was at a loss for what to do. I had been trained to fight the good fight, but without any knowledge of immigration law, what was I supposed to do? My strength lay in defending sexual assault cases, not treading through the minefield of complex immigration laws.

After a day or so, watching news stories trickle in about an Oscar nominee unable to enter the country for the Academy Awards and a five-year old boy held in questioning while his anxious mother waited with protesters, I decided that I could no longer sit on the sidelines. I had to put my strengths to use. It may not have been precisely what my father envisioned for me, but neither of my parents have ever held me back from righteous fights.

My friend Elleni and I had attended the Women’s March in Chicago the weekend before, marching down Michigan Avenue with signs in our hands to the federal courthouse.

One week later, on January 29, each armed with a satchel containing a computer, tablet, adaptor, and some legal pads, we drove to O’Hare International Airport to offer our services as attorneys.

Terminal 5, by the McDonald’s. These were the directions I had seen on Twitter or Snapchat. They are excellent sites and apps for real-time updates on grassroots events and scrolling endlessly through them was the form my anxiety had taken since Trump had assumed office.

Sure enough, several tables were set up and attorneys were divided up in stations. Some were scouring social media to get updates on what was happening at other airports across the country and to coordinate procedures. Some were working on declaratory injunctions on behalf of those detained, while others were making signs. The woman heading the operation was speaking to a CNN reporter.

The first thing I noticed – because Elleni elbowed me excitedly and hissed it in my ear – was that the vast majority of the volunteer attorneys were women and a significant number of them were women of colour.

“It’s always women,” Elleni murmured to me. “We are always the one that rush in to help and actually get things done.”

We milled about for a few minutes, unsure what to do. The assembled attorneys were polite, but busy. Elleni and I made ourselves name tags, scrawling LAWYER with a pink marker, and tried to discern where we were needed. We made our way to a small table and, desperate to be productive, Elleni used the time to teach me one of her skills – drafting petitions for emergency guardianship of minors, in case a detainee wanted to name a guardian for his or her children in the event of deportation.

One of the female attorneys from a national firm noticed us and suggested we look at the intake sheets. She printed us a copy each and we skimmed it. This was an intake sheet – a means of gathering client information – and it was something I could easily master.

What Elleni and I realised as the night went on was that our strength lay in the fact that we belonged to solo and small firms. Elleni was a solo practitioner with one associate; I worked for a small firm of three attorneys, a paralegal, and a legal assistant. We were used to vertical representation, which means handling a client’s problem from the beginning until the resolution. We were used to having people rely on us, thinking fast and on our feet, and dealing with stressed, upset people. And, we were used to intakes.

As well-meaning as all of the assembled attorneys were, the intake sheet was a disaster. There were two parties that were represented: the person possibly being detained (who we would likely not be able to speak to) and their friend or family member waiting for them at the terminal. The questions for each of the two parties were interwoven in such a manner that the conversation did not flow properly, which Elleni and I noticed immediately. It took us mere minutes to reorganise the form and make it our own.

Rather than wait at the attorney tables for people to approach us, Elleni and I decided to walk back and forth between Gates A and B, looking for travelers’ family and friends who fit a certain profile. There are seven countries currently named in the Executive Order, but we knew it was likely that overzealous Customs & Border Patrol agents would overstep their bounds and possibly detain others that looked either Muslim or brown.

“Let’s walk around the airport and profile people,” I remember telling Elleni as I rolled my eyes.

“For justice?”

She laughed as we set off. We looked for people who looked Arab, and were likely waiting for their Arab family members or friends; we looked for South Asians, and we even looked for Hispanics and Latinos.

It is not unusual for Mexican nationals entering the United States on a visa, for example, to be placed in secondary inspections and held for lengthy questioning. A visa, after all, is only a request to be allowed entrance – it is not a guarantee.

There are certain red flags that can trigger Customs & Border Patrol holding a person and ultimately refusing them entry. This can include recent arrests and criminal convictions, illnesses, and mental health concerns, to name a few.

As Elleni and I walked through the airport, we found several families who had been waiting for more than six hours for a family member or a friend coming in from Mexico on a valid visa. We went through our revised checklist, gathering all pertinent information and quickly realising that none of the traditional red flags were indicated.

All the information we gathered was immediately given to the attorneys working by the McDonald’s. It was entered into a database by some attorneys, and then others began the work of reaching out to Customs & Border Patrol.

We patrolled the international gates for several hours, walking over to various sections of seating every now and then to ask, “Has anyone been waiting for more than two hours for family or friends?”

We had immediately learned that this was the most effective way to frame the question; attorneys understood the ramifications of the word ‘detained,’ but many others did not. Waiting for longer than usual, however, was something people understood very well.

Elleni and I coordinated to complete roughly 11 intakes of individuals that had been held for more than five hours. There was one Nigerian green card holder married to a United States citizen whose friends had been waiting for three hours. There were several Hispanic families who had been waiting since noon for their family on a flight from Mexico City. It was well past 7pm by the time we passed their information on to the immigration attorneys.

What was most disturbing to me, however, was the story of five Jordanian minors traveling on valid visas with their citizen stepmother. They had not emerged after de-boarding their flight from Amman, Jordan.

As I patrolled the gates, I noticed an older man sitting in the corner, keeping to himself. He did not engage with us when we walked by several times, asking if anyone had been waiting for long. My intuition told me, however, to approach him and inquire as to how long he had been waiting. That was when I learned that those five children had been held for more than six hours. He was their travel agent and had simply presumed the flight was late.

Trying not to alarm him, I gathered information as efficiently as I could and handed it over to the immigration attorneys leading the operation.

Elleni and I worked diligently, usually step in step, but occasionally separating, against the backdrop of a gathering crowd of protesters.

We took the time to return to the families we’d already spoken to, offering them comfort and limited reassurance. As we were not immigration attorneys, we did not offer specific legal advice. However, our general knowledge of immigration, as well as the procedures in place, was enough to keep the families calm and reassured that a large team of volunteers was working on behalf of their loved ones.

The earnest chants of “This is what America looks like!” certainly helped boost spirits.

When we left, the children from Jordan had still not been released. I was tired, but sleep does not come easily during a Trump administration.

Elleni and I groused that he had been in office for only two weeks and every single one of our weekends had been consumed with protests. We resolved to keep our social calendars light for the next four years so we could be on hand to either demonstrate or offer legal services. We also agreed to learn more about immigration law and to practice drafting petitions for a writ of habeas corpus, one of the uses of which is to challenge the illegal detention in immigration custody.

I scrolled Twitter that night, addicted to the false feeling of productivity that came with absorbing news in real-time. I saw a picture of Rahm Emanuel speaking to the brother of a man removed from O’Hare and sent back to Jordan.

Jordan was not one of the countries named in the Executive Order. I scanned tweets and Facebook messages, looking for anything about the Jordanian children who I had brought to the attention of the rest of the attorney task force.

Finally, I received confirmation from the head of CAIR-Chicago that the children and their stepmother had all been released later that night. Their father in Phoenix was overwhelmed with relief and gratitude.

I forced myself to shut down my phone and head to bed. These fights will continue and expand on multiple fronts. For those of us who have grown used to a life in the trenches, we welcome the challenge. We remain in our element.

Photos and videos by the author.

Are you an immigrant living in America facing difficulties under the Trump administration? Share your story with us at blog@dawn.com