Complete Biographical History of Imran Khan
Can I Still Play Cricket in Heaven? 1947-1979
OUTSIDE OF PAKISTAN. I am mainly known for my 21-year-long cricket career. But in my home country. I am the head of a party that is battling to take on a political elite that has for more than six decades stymied this great country. depriving it of its God given potential. Ruled alternately by military dictators like President Musharraf. or as a fiefdom by families like the Bhuttos and Sharifs. Pakistan has drifted far from the ideals of its founders. Far from being the Islamic welfare state that was envisaged. Pakistan is a country where politics is a game of loot and plunder and any challenger to the status quo - even somebody with my kind of public profile and popularity - can be suddenly arrested and threatened with violence. Founded as a homeland for Indian Muslims on the principle of the unifying qualities of Islam. it remains a fractured country. Kashmir to the north-east has been. since independence. the subject of a violent dispute between India and Pakistan. the region divided between the two. In the north-west a civil war between the army and militants plagues the Pashtun heartlands of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and FATA (the Federally Administered Tribal Areas). Baluchistan. a vast. rugged. unexplored and thinly populated province bordering Iran and Afghanistan. simmers with a separatist insurgency. To the south the Arabian Sea washes against the shores of Baluchistan and Sindh. where the provincial capital Karachi is riven with fighting between various ethnic groups. including Pashtun immigrants and the descendants of Muslims who came from the other side of the border at Partition. referred to as Mohajirs or refugees. Meanwhile. Punjab. home to more than half of the country's population. is resented by other provinces for monopolizing Pakistani political power and prosperity.
For me our country's woes began soon after Pakistan was created in 1947. when we lost our great leader Jinnah. Pakistan - which means Land of the Pure - was just five years old when I was born. We had such pride in our country then. such optimism. We were a new nation. wrested out of the dying British Raj as a homeland for Muslims. Gone were the insidious humiliations of colonialism and the fear of being drowned in an overwhelming Hindu majority in an independent India. We were a free people. free to rediscover an Islamic culture that had once towered over the subcontinent. Free. too. to implement the ideals of Islam based on equality. and social and economic justice. A democracy. as Pakistan's founding father Muhammad Ali Jinnah said. not a theocracy. We were to be the shining example in the Muslim world of what Islam could achieve were it allowed to flourish. Such dreams we had. It was only much later that we discovered how hard it would be to fulfil these dreams. even in a brand-new nation like ours. unburdened by the rigidities of history. As the years went by. we built our own tormented history. and drifted further and further away from the ideals that had inspired Pakistan's creation.
Pakistan's roots lay in the final days of the British Raj in India. Before then the territory - roughly defined as the Punjab. the North-West Frontier Province. the coastline on the Arabian sea of Sindh province and Baluchistan - had not been defined as Pakistan but. over the centuries. became first part of one empire and then another. The British. initially through the East India Company and later through the British Army. controlled the area from the early part of the nineteenth century onward. From the 1880s. though. the aim for millions of people throughout the subcontinent who wanted self-determination was the end of British rule. The Indian National Congress. which initially included Muslims. worked to achieve this end. The British did not want to relinquish control but the Second World War weakened Britain economically and politically. and by then the empire on which 'the sun never sets' was in its twilight years.
The Indian National Congress negotiated with the British to bring about the end of their rule over India. and they wanted to see the whole subcontinent remain one country. Here the histories of the two nations starts to diverge; wary of Hindu nationalism. and mindful of the kind of violence that took place at sporadic intervals over the 1920s and 1930s in different cities and provinces in India. the All-India Muslim League took a different view. As part of this league. two men in particular were fundamental in the foundation of Pakistan. Jinnah and Allama Muhammad Iqbal.
Iqbal. who died in 1938. nine years before the creation of Pakistan. is the visionary poet-philosopher considered to be the spiritual founder of Pakistan. In 1930 in an address to the All-India Muslim League. he said. 'I would like to see the Punjab. North-West Frontier Province. Sindh and Baluchistan amalgamated into a single State. Self-government within the British Empire or without the British Empire. the formation of a consolidated North-West Indian Muslim State appears to me to be the final destiny of Muslims. at least of North-West India.' Believing that 'the Indian Muslim is entitled to full and free development on the lines of his own culture and tradition in his own Indian homelands,' Iqbal felt that this was a necessary stage for the Muslim community to develop its collective selfhood. or khudi.
Iqbal not only conceived of a self-governing Muslim state. his passionate voice awakened and activated Indian Muslims. motivating them not only to strive to free themselves from the bondage of imperialism and colonialism. but also to challenge other forms of totalitarian control. Believing fervently in human equality and the right of human beings to dignity. justice and freedom. Iqbal empowered the disempowered to stand up and be counted.
When I was older. I found Iqbal's work hugely inspirational. He argued against an unquestioning acceptance of Western democracy as the self-governing model. and instead suggested that by following the rules of Islam a society would tend naturally towards social justice. tolerance. peace and equality. Iqbal's interpretation of Islam differs very widely from the narrow meaning that is sometimes given to it. For Iqbal. Islam is not just the name for certain beliefs and forms of worship. The difference between a Muslim and a non-Muslim is not merely a theological one - it is a difference of a fundamental attitude towards life.
Iqbal considered pride in one's lineage or caste to be one of the major reasons for the downfall of Muslims. In his view. in Islam. based on the principles of 'equality. solidarity and freedom'. there was no hierarchy or aristocracy. and the criterion for assessing the merit of human beings was taqwa (righteousness). As Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him) said: 'The noblest of human beings are those who fear God most.' In other words. those who are humane and just. because when you fear God you believe you are accountable to Him and must act accordingly.
To Iqbal the culture of Islam did not consist of the actual cultural practices of Muslims. It was an ideal value-system. based upon the ethical principles enshrined in the Quran. He believed that Islam provided the guidance needed by human beings to realize their God-given potential to the fullest. In his philosophy of khudi. Iqbal presented his blueprint for action that would lead to intellectually sound. ethically based and spiritually grounded development of individuals and communities. Iqbal and others. such as Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817-1898). who urged Muslims to obtain a Western education and established the Aligarh University for this purpose. argued that this vision of an ideal society could never be achieved as long as Muslims remained in a minority in a Hindu-dominated India.
It was not only that India, with its caste system and social inequalities, was the antithesis of everything they wanted. It was also that such a bold experiment of recreating the ideals of Islam could never be achieved in a country where Muslims were in the minority. At the time, much of the Islamic world was under European colonial rule, and realizing the promise of Islam required a country - or at least a state within India where Muslims would have the opportunity to live according to the highest ethical ideals and best practices of their faith.
When Iqbal died in 1938 - my father was one of the many who attended his funeral - it was left to the lawyer-politician Muhammad Ali Jinnah to create that country.
Iqbal was an idealist but he offered concrete guidance to Muslims about how to live a life grounded in the integrated vision of the Quran. Jinnah also combined idealism with pragmatism. 'Somewhat formal and fastidious, and a little aloof and imperious of manner, [his] calm hauteur masks a naIve and eager humanity, an intuition quick and tender, a humour gay and winning; the obvious sanity and serenity of his worldly wisdom disguise a shy and splendid idealism,' wrote Sarojini Naidu, the first woman to become president of the Congress Party. Jinnah had originally been a member of the Indian Congress Party and an ambassador of Hindu-Muslim understanding, committed to a united India. Yet he had fallen out with Mohandas Gandhi; when the Islamic Caliphate finally collapsed in Turkey after the First World War, it was Gandhi who led the protests for its restoration, seeing in this a way of challenging the British. Jinnah opposed the movement. He also disliked Congress leader Jawaharlal Nehru, who he felt had used his closeness to Britain's Viceroy of India, Louis Mountbatten, to outmanoeuvre India's Muslims in their fight for political power. Mountbatten in turn had no patience for the legal constitutional niceties put forward by Jinnah to seek special electorates to safeguard the interests of the Muslims. Mountbatten's wife, Edwina, was so close to Nehru that many Pakistanis afterwards believed they had had an affair, which turned British policy in favour of the Hindus.
Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Jawaharlal Nehru, Mohandas Gandhi and Congress member Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, a Muslim leader of the Indian National Congress who later became education minister in India's government, were four giants of the independence movement - even if they had their own idea of what freedom meant for the people of India. Even Gandhi and Jinnah, despite their differences, held views in common; both believed that their new countries were not secular ones but ones in which religion would play an important role. Gandhi said, 'Those who say religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion is,' as he thought that politics without religion would be immoral; while Jinnah, some years later in a speech to the State Bank of Pakistan in 1948, reiterated that 'We must ... present to the world an economic system based on the true Islamic concept of equality of manhood and social justice. We will thereby be fulfilling our mission as Muslims.' Both Jinnah and Gandhi believed that it was the compassion preached by every religion that could become a counterweight to materialism.
Anti-British unity fractured after the Khilafat movement, and from the late 1920s political battles within the Congress led to unrealistic demands being made of the Muslim organizations. This intransigence 'meant that Hindu revivalists were left with the greater part of the blame ... for the failure to reach some form of Hindu-Muslim agreement,' observed Professor Francis Robinson. Jinnah no longer believed Muslims would be safe in a united India.
At a meeting of the Muslim League in Lahore in March 1940, Jinnah added his voice to a call for the creation of two states, one for Hindus, the other for Muslims: 'It is extremely difficult to appreciate why our Hindu friends fail to understand the real nature of Islam and Hinduism. They are not religions in the strict sense of the word. but are. in fact. different and distinct social orders. and it is a dream that the Hindus and Muslims can ever evolve a common nationality .... he declared. 'The Hindus and Muslims belong to two different religious philosophies. social customs. litterateurs. They neither intermarry nor interdine together and. indeed. they belong to two different civilizations which are based mainly on conflicting ideas and conceptions. Their aspect on life and of life are different. It is quite clear that Hindus and Mussalmans derive their inspiration from different sources of history. They have different epics. different heroes. and different episodes. Very often the hero of one is a foe of the other and. likewise. their victories and defeats overlap. To yoke together two such nations under a single state. one as a numerical minority and the other as a majority. must lead to growing discontent and final destruction of any fabric that may be so built for the government of such a state.' At this time. democracy was still evolving in the world and people did not believe that it could accommodate different religions and ethnic groups.
In what is known as the Lahore Resolution. the meeting rejected the concept of a united India on the grounds of growing inter-communal violence. and demanded 'that the areas in which the Muslims are numerically in majority as in the North-Western and Eastern zones of India should be grouped to constitute independent states in which the constituent units shall be autonomous and sovereign'. Seven years later. Pakistan was born. although it was. as Jinnah complained. a 'moth-eaten state' with far less territory than its supporters had envisaged. It was created in two wings. West and East Pakistan. separated by 1.000 miles of Indian territory. The great provinces of Punjab and Bengal had been split apart. and at least one million people died in the tide of migration as Muslims moved into Pakistan. and Hindus and Sikhs fled to India. I had an uncle in the Pakistani army who was protecting the Punjab border crossing at the time. He always said that the bloodshed he saw during those six weeks was worse than anything he had seen in four years of fighting against the Japanese on the Burmese Front in the Second World War. He was appalled by the butchery. from which not even women or children were spared. Estimates of the numbers who died range from 200.000 to over one million. More than 12 million were made homeless by the act of Partition and had to travel long distances to settle in new parts of the country. and vast refugee camps sprang up as a result. Families and communities were devastated as those widowed and orphaned in the slaughter had to take what was left of their belongings on a voyage to a new part of the country. where they would be unknown and - often - unwanted. Margaret Bourke-White. the American photographer and the first female war correspondent. called Partition a 'massive exercise in human misery'.
The experience for individuals. in the accounts I heard and read. was heartbreaking. A sixteen-year-old boy joined the Pakistani army and was based on the border: 'There were atrocities committed by all sides - Hindus. Sikhs and Muslims. I saw people arriving on the trains that had been mutilated. women who had been raped and children who had been traumatized. I remember thinking at the time: "Is this what freedom means?" I had three uncles who lived in Simla at the time. Amid the chaos. we had lost contact with them. We never found them.' Amid the horror there were often stories of Muslims concealed from their would-be attackers by their Hindu neighbours. or the same tale but told by Hindu survivors. One such. from Jhang in west Punjab. remembered 'Mr Qureshi' who helped several Hindu families reach the border. only to be murdered as a 'non-believer' by his fellow-Muslims for having saved them.
The madness that took place was exactly that - a madness. No one anticipated or dreamt that such things would happen. and certainly no one expected the violence to reach such heights. Was it a reaction to the end of British rule. a release of pent-up frustrations after the decades of humiliation? It suited the British for there to be division between the peoples of India. and they actively fostered this. as an incoming viceroy. the Earl of Elgin. was informed in 1861: 'We have maintained our power in India by playing off one party against the other. and we must continue to do so.' The haste with which the plan for Partition was implemented certainly contributed towards the hostile atmosphere that created such mayhem. and the British were very much responsible for setting this timetable.
However. the Muslim political leaders. virtually against all odds and in the face of intense opposition from India's dominant Congress Party. had achieved the impossible. They had created a new country. Though we were in dire straits in the early years. the revolutionary zeal that gave birth to Pakistan carried us through.
Democracy. though. never had an opportunity to flourish in Pakistan as Jinnah died in September 1948. leaving us rudderless. In an era dominated by the great superpowers of the USA and the Soviet Union. Pakistan sided with the US. but even this was to prove troublesome. Our first prime minister. Liaquat Ali Khan. died in 1951. assassinated in Rawalpindi (in the same park where many years later. in 2007. former prime minister Benazir Bhutto would also be killed). He was killed by an Afghan opposed to the settlement that had left Kashmir divided. a man who felt Pakistan should be fighting to take it back. Many at the time saw more sinister signs in his murder. amid rumours of American pressure on Pakistan in relation to the access to Soviet airspace Pakistan could provide. The relationship Pakistan has had with America as a nation. although not perhaps with its government. since then has never been a satisfactory one. and after 9/11 it only worsened - but more of that later.
While India spent the early years of its independence with the stability provided by its first prime minister. Jawaharlal Nehru - who remained in office until his death in 1964 - we began a slow slide into alternating military and civilian rule which never allowed the political institutions to mature. We had other problems too. in part because of the division between the Pakistani elite and the masses. The idea of Pakistan had been conceived within a united India. and found its major intellectual wellspring in what is today the northern Indian province of Uttar Pradesh; the epicentre of the Pakistan movement was in areas that did not eventually become part of Pakistan. Later various ethnic groups. from the Bengalis of East Pakistan. to the Baluch in the deserts running into Iran. to the Pashtun in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan. would find reasons to rebel against the state. often with disastrous consequences. Since Pakistan. and especially its army. was dominated by Punjabis. these different ethnic groups felt they were denied both their economic and democratic rights. and sooner or later all took up arms against the state. We also began our life as a country at war. fighting India over the territory of Kashmir in 1947-1948. and the festering dispute since then has helped give the army (and by default the majority Punjab element within it) a disproportionately powerful role in Pakistan. Yet in the optimism and fervour of those early years. I believe we might have overcome all those difficulties had we been able to find a political system capable of implementing the egalitarian. democratic and ethical ideals of Islam that had inspired the creation of Pakistan.
Instead. the British-trained bureaucrats had a low opinion of democracy - at least as far as Pakistan was concerned. They had been educated in a system that had taught them to look upon the masses with contempt and. copying the former colonial rulers. had inherited a mindset that the natives were not to be trusted. Without leaders with the vision of Iqbal. or the stature of Jinnah. or for that matter of Nehru. whose long tenure helped bed down Indian democracy. we were condemned to slide back into the kind of discreet authoritarian rule which marked the British Raj. At the first opportunity. the military-civilian bureaucracy stalled the democratic process. Pakistan did not come up with a full constitution until 1956. because the West Pakistan ruling elite did not want to give the Bengalis an equal share in power. Given that the population of East Pakistan was larger than that of West Pakistan, to deprive the latter of their right to an equal share, experiments like the 'one unit system' (where the whole of West Pakistan was treated as one province) were introduced. This helped sow the seeds of Bengali resentment, and eventually led to the break-up of the country.
The 1956 constitution was abrogated by the commander-in-chief of the army, General Ayub Khan, who took over the country in 1958 and announced a presidential form of government. He remained in power for ten years before he was forced to resign amid popular unrest and was replaced by another military man, General Yahya Khan. Under Ayub Khan, Pakistan developed and changed - he introduced the Muslim Family Laws, which modernized some aspects of laws regarding marriage - but his efforts in agriculture and industry benefited the few, not the many. More importantly, he did not believe in democracy, so politically the country stagnated. Discontent in East Pakistan began to grow as the Bengali people, politically and economically excluded, had insignificant representation within the ruling elite. The creation of Bangladesh in 1971 was a direct consequence of this prolonged military rule, along with the reluctance of the ruling classes of West Pakistan to treat East Pakistan as an equal. Paradoxically, economically the country passed through a golden period. Our growth rate was the highest in our history, though the majority of the population was excluded from the fruits of this economic boom. Administratively the country was well run - along with contempt for the natives, the British had also bequeathed us a reasonably efficient bureaucracy. From my vantage point as a child in Lahore, and indeed as I have been told later by my parents, the optimism which had accompanied the birth of Pakistan survived and even flourished in this early period of military rule. It helped of course that we were living in Punjab, the most powerful province in Pakistan, where we had little reason to suspect the many dangerous undercurrents building up in our country.
Pakistan was five years old when I was born. As a child in a comfortably off family in Lahore, I felt only the quiet optimism of a country hopeful for its future. It was an idyllic childhood, with the freedom of plenty of space in which to play and the security provided by the Pakistani extended-family system. In Zaman Park where I grew up we were surrounded by ploughed fields and open spaces; there were few houses and everyone who lived there was family, so it was more like being on a farm. The first house in Zaman Park had been built by my maternal grandfather's brother - whose name was Ahmad Zaman. At Partition in 1947 my grandfather's family also moved there. In the hot summer afternoons I would go out with my air gun to shoot pigeons or to swim in the canal, and in the evenings play cricket with my cousins. There was no such thing as organizing play dates. I would be out till dark - my mother did not worry, she always knew I was with family. For fresh milk every house had a cow or a water buffalo.
Today, Zaman Park is in the centre of Lahore, so fast has the city spread in every direction. All that is left of those green and open fields of my childhood is a small park. There are so many houses that people do not know each other as they once did. Although boys still swim in the canal, it is now dirty and polluted. Lahore's water, which used to be delicious, has become so contaminated it has to be boiled before drinking. I used to go to a school friend's farm that was barely ten miles out of Lahore and there at the age of fourteen I used a shotgun for the first time and bagged fourteen partridges. It was the most thrilling thing I had ever done. My friend's farm is now part of a suburb of Lahore and has been transformed from a place of wildlife and green fields into a concrete jungle. Today in the entire province of Punjab there are probably only a handful of reserved areas where one gun can shoot fourteen partridges.
My mother would make us children go to see our maternal grandmother with our cousins every day for half an hour. These evenings with her were most enjoyable. She would know everything that was going on in our lives. In fact she would get involved in all our problems and we would tell her things that even our parents would not know. The love that my grandmother received from all her children and grandchildren must have been the reason why all her mental faculties were fully intact when she died at the age of a hundred. She might have lived longer, but when my mother died in 1985 she simply could not get over the loss, my mother being her youngest child. It almost seemed as if she decided it was time for her to go. She refused to get out of bed and three months after my mother's death she passed away.
In Pakistan, family is everything. Islam strengthens the family system by making the role of the mother sacred. In the words of the holy Prophet (PBUH), 'Paradise lies under the feet of the mother.' And the greatest influence on my life was my mother. There were five of us and I was the only son. She was a complete mother, happy to sacrifice all her pleasures for her family. I remember I would hide injuries from her just so as not to pain her. Once when I was eight years old my cousins and I were raiding someone's mulberry garden. Suddenly the gardener came. While trying to jump from the tree, I slipped and fell on a branch. The sharp stick pierced a couple of inches in my thigh, almost rupturing my main artery. When I was taken home I refused to show the wound to my mother because I could not bear to see her suffer. So great was my love for her that I hated to do anything that would annoy her. This is how love imposes discipline. She would make me do my homework every day but I was so single-minded about sport that I would be uninterested in studies. It was only her efforts that kept me going. However, apart from my homework my mother would never push me to do anything ifI didn't want to do it.
As its name suggests, there is a park in the middle of Zaman Park, where all us cousins - ranging from children to adults in their twenties - would play cricket and hockey. Matches would be played with such aggression that one year visiting hockey teams refused to play us. My passion for cricket, along with partridge shooting, developed thanks to my uncles and cousins. My mother's family was passionate about cricket. I was inspired to become a test cricketer at the age of nine, when I saw my older cousin Javed Burki score a century against England at what is now the Gadaffi stadium in Lahore. I used to treat my aunts' and uncles' houses as my own, as all social life revolved around the family, with my grandfather's and his brother's houses as the focal points. At family dinners everyone would be there, from babies to the oldest members of the family. The rules of etiquette were clearly defined. Age was to be respected. The older the family member, the more respect they were accorded. When the elders spoke, all the younger members listened attentively. In turn, the elders took personal responsibility for all the children. Hence a member of the younger generation could be disciplined by any elder, not just their parents. Any rudeness to an elder meant disapproval from all the senior members of the family. Unfortunately, amongst the westernized elite in Pakistan the respect for age is diminishing. Some, who are uncritically adopting Western culture, almost consider a lack of respect for age a sign of progress. (I remember how odd I found it when my tutor at Oxford asked me to call him by his first name. It was even more awkward for me when friends' parents would also insist that I did the same.) Our value system was also moulded by the attitudes of the elders. The younger members would carefully observe what was approved and what was condemned by the seniors. It was never the fear of being punished that made all of us follow family etiquette, but the fear of everyone's disapproval. Moral standards were high because immorality would have meant being ostracized. The greatest fear was to give a bad name to the family. Everything depended upon the reputation of a family, from arranged marriages to social acceptability. Any slight by an outsider on the character of a family member would mean an immediate closing of ranks by a united family front. It also put immense responsibility on family members to conform to certain moral and ethical standards. When I became a successful test cricketer and gave interviews to the press. I would be extremely conscious of what I was saying as I constantly worried about how my extended family would react to my comments.
Like most Muslim children. I grew up with religion. My mother used to tell us bedtime stories. each one with a moral message - about Moses and the arrogant Pharaoh. Joseph and his treacherous brothers. and of course about the life of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). We were also taught about Jesus. considered in Islam to be a messenger of God like Muhammad (PBUH). Muslims believe that God had previously revealed His message for mankind to the Prophets of the Jews and Christians but that Muhammad (PBUH) perfected the religion first revealed to Abraham. Muhammad (PBUH) is seen as the ' seal of the prophecy' - the last in the series of Prophets God sent to the world. Islam recognizes the teachings of the Jewish Torah and the Christian Bible and while it teaches that Jews and Christians have in some areas strayed from the true path. it acknowledges them as 'People of the Book'. Every night before going to sleep my mother would make us say our prayers. and tell me stories about the Prophet (PBUH). There was one particular story my mother would tell me: an old Meccan came before the Prophet (PBUH). and said to him. The only reason I want to become a Muslim is because all my clan has converted to Islam. but I am too old to change my habits. Tell me one thing I can do so that I can become a Muslim but keep my habits. The Prophet (PBUH) replied. Tell the truth. that is the one thing you need to be a Muslim. This story appealed to me as a boy. because I too found the rituals to be cumbersome. Besides. I could never lie to my mother. as she would always catch me out simply by looking at my face.
My mother also told me how her father. Ahmad Hasan Khan. modelled himself on the Prophet (PBUH). and would tell me stories about how. whatever he did. he would always tell us 'This is what the Prophet (PBUH) did' - even to the point of liking honey and dates.
The concept of heaven and hell was made clear to me ever since I can remember. The only problem was that I could not understand heaven. My poor mother frequently had to answer questions like - would I be able to play cricket in heaven? And would I be able to shoot?
When I was seven years old a maulvi (Islamic scholar) came to teach me and my sisters the Quran in Arabic. In school we had a religious knowledge class and our daily assembly started with a verse of the Quran. Every Friday I went with my father to the mosque. On Eids. the two biggest festivals of the Muslim calendar. all the males of Zaman Park. young and old. would go to the shrine of the great sixteenth-century Sufi saint Mian Mir Sahib. Mian Mir is also a legendary figure for Sikhs. who come to pray at his shrine in Lahore. Our family graveyard is outside the shrine - so after Eid prayers we would go to our relatives' graves and pray for their departed souls. Such shrines are common in the subcontinent. where Islam was spread from the ninth century onwards in large part through the Sufis. Their egalitarian message and doctrine of love. peace and compassion appealed to the poor and dispossessed. The Sufis' tolerance of other religions and cultures meant that as they made their way through what became the Islamic world the religion they spread blended with local customs to become a kind of populist Islam. Their followers made shrines of their graves. which became places of pilgrimage. Rich and poor alike still flock to these shrines to pray and make offerings. Once a year. usually on the anniversary of the saint's death. there is an urs (a festival). when prayers are accompanied by devotional dancing and singing and the distribution of food. This is the kind of Islam that the austere Wahhabi branch. which has influenced the Taliban. opposes.
My parents were both easy-going Muslims who always taught us that Allah was 'the most beneficent and the most merciful'. We were never forced to read our prayers or fast. At Ramadan, the month when Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset, it was we children who would choose to compete with each other to keep our fasts. I kept my first fast around the age of nine and was rewarded with presents from my father and mother. If there was anything said against Islam, both my parents would defend it vigorously.
My mother's extended family was originally from the Burki Pashtun tribe in Kaniguram, the biggest town in South Waziristan, which rests in a fertile valley close to the Afghan border in the tribal areas. She instilled in me a pride that the Pashtuns had never been subjugated and had constantly fought the British. Her family had ended up living in twelve fortresses, known as basti Pathan, near the town of Jalandhar (where she took much pride in saying my grandfather had hosted Jinnah), south-east of Amritsar, only forty miles or so away from Lahore but in what became India. The whole family had emigrated to Lahore at Partition, although none of them had been killed. When they moved out in a convoy the Sikh gangs who were massacring the Muslims in Punjab believed - wrongly - that they were armed, and left them alone.
My father's family were also Pashtuns (also known as Pathans), but from the Niazi tribe, which had come to India with invading Afghan tribes around the fifteenth century. Much of his family still lived in Mianwali (a town on the river Indus on the border with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, formerly known as the North-West Frontier) and family ties are still very strong there. In time amongst the Burkis (my mother's tribe), the family system will begin to weaken, and my children will only know their first cousins, but in Mianwali even third cousins know each other - I frequently meet Niazis who will tell me how they are related to me through my great-grandfather. Village communities have stronger family systems than urban ones.
In a place like Mianwali people often operate as part of a family group of maybe a hundred people. There is a network of siblings and first, second and third cousins. Everything is shared - salaries, responsibilities, friendships, enemies, hardships and successes. When people from rural areas go to look for jobs in the cities, the first people they contact are their relatives. If there are none, then they seek out people from their village or tribe. Millions of people have been displaced by fighting or floods in recent years, but you do not see hordes of hungry, homeless people sleeping on the streets of Pakistani cities. Many have been absorbed by the family and tribal network - people with little have taken in, fed, clothed and housed people with still less than them. All this of course helps free the country's rulers and elite from bearing the burden of so many displaced people, let alone the responsibility of paying taxes and implementing any kind of effective welfare system. As I have so often observed in Pakistan, the poor have taken the blow for the rich.
Crowing up in Lahore, I became aware of two strong prejudices. One was against colonialism. This, according to my mother and father, was the ultimate humiliation for a people. At bedtime, my mother would tell me stories of resistance to the British, about heroes like Tipu Sultan, the 'Tiger of Mysore' , who died defending his city when he was attacked by three armies, the British, the Nizam of Hyderabad's and the Marathas', in 1805. At the same time, she would contemptuously relate the story of the surrender of the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafa, who died in 1862 in captivity in Burma. She would quote the Tipu Sultan's remark, 'The day of a lion is better than a thousand of a jackal. '
The general thinking in the Indian subcontinent is that the greatest damage inflicted by colonialism was material. There is no doubt the subcontinent did suffer in such a way. In the 1700s the CDP of India was almost 25 per cent of the world's economy. By the time the British left it was around 2 per cent. The British lawyer Cornelius Walford estimated in 1879 that there had been thirty-four famines in the previous century or so of British rule - but only seventeen in the preceding two thousand years. M. ]. Akbar writes, 'The Mughal response to famine had been good governance: embargo on food export. anti-speculation regulation. tax relief and free kitchens. If any merchant short-changed a peasant during a famine. the punishment was an equivalent weight in flesh from his body. That kept hoarding down.' Millions died in these catastrophes. A materialist lobby feels that British rule gave India a strong administrative system along with an infrastructure of roads and railways. Up to a point this is true as well. In my opinion the greatest damage done to the people of the Indian subcontinent was in the humiliation of slavery and the consequent loss of self-esteem. The inferiority complex that is ingrained in a conquered nation results in its imitation of some of the worst aspects of the conquerors. while at the same time neglecting its own great traditions. It destroys originality as the occupied people strive only to imitate the occupiers. Furthermore. this slavish mimicry wrecks any sense of leadership in the elite - the people with the most expensive education in the country. One of Iqbal's great qualities was that he provided such new and original thought. despite having lived his entire life under colonial rule. In a well-known verse he told his son: My way is not one of being wealthy but of faqiri [spiritual poverty] Your khudi [self-hood] do not sell. in poverty make a name
The legacy of colonialism led to our other prejudice. against India. We as a nation felt we had been cheated out of Kashmir by the pro-Indian last Viceroy of India. Lord Louis Mountbatten. Hatred against our neighbour. in Punjab especially. reached its height in the 1950s and 1960s since so many Muslims had migrated from East Punjab at Partition in 1947 and hardly a family had not lost loved ones in the bloody massacres during the border crossing. It was only later. when I toured India playing cricket. that I realized how much we have in common and lost this prejudice.
Islam. we were told. was tolerant. and it had spread in the subcontinent not by the force of arms but by the great Sufi saints. such as Khwaja Muinuddin Chishti (known as 'Gharib Nawaz·. the benefactor of the poor. who lived in north India in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries). who won people over with their humanitarian message. Sufis were held in such esteem that. in 1303. when a Mongol army under Targhi laid seige to Delhi. Sultan Alauddin Khilji appealed to the great Sufi saint Nazam Uddin Auliya for help. Since both my parents had Hindu and Sikh friends from school and college before independence. we were never taught to hate people from other religions. There was no militant fundamentalism in those days and those few who could be classified as religious bigots were not taken seriously. We were told. however. that Islam was the superior religion since the Quran had been dictated to the Prophet (PBUH) by God himself. whereas the other holy books had been written by man and so human faults had slipped in. Muhammad (PBUH) was unlettered. He therefore had to ask other people to write down the messages he had received from God. Apart from being a book of wisdom. the Quran is still considered the greatest work of Arabic literature and the beauty of its words has converted many. including the great caliph Umar. One of the Meccans most opposed to the new religion being preached by Muhammad (PBUH). Umar was at the forefront of plans to assassinate the Prophet (PBUH). But according to Muslim tradition. when he heard his sister recite from the Book his heart softened. he wept and Islam entered into him. He went on to become one of Muhammad's (PBUH) main companions. inheriting leadership of the Muslims after his death. The only time I truly understood what the caliph might have experienced was when I took my sons once to the Faisal Mosque in Islamabad for Friday prayers. A visiting imam from Egypt was delivering the khutba. the sermon. Often you sit there during the sermon and become lost in your own thoughts because you cannot understand the Arabic. But when the imam started reciting I was immediately struck by the sound that gently filled the whole mosque. Looking around I saw that as his voice resounded through the building it was having the same effect on other worshippers. It was like listening to a classical symphony. It gave me goose bumps. I have never heard anything like it before or since. not even in the two great mosques of the holy cities of Mecca or Medina.
Islam is not just a religion to be practised privately by individuals. but a way of life. The Quran lays out clear rules for how a society should be governed. and guidance on how people should behave. I was taught it was also a forgiving religion that laid special emphasis on justice and compassion.
There were many challenges. most of all the incendiary issue of Kashmir. In 1965. when I was just thirteen. war broke out for the second time since independence. I will never forget this period; late one evening we started hearing the sound of bombardment. and the windows began to shake. From our rooftop we caught sight of the flashes of explosions along the border. I remember the anxious faces of my parents as the bombardment continued all night. The Indian army was advancing towards Lahore. There were rumours that Indian paratroopers might land in the city. and patriotic fever gripped the country. The elders of Zaman Park were called to my uncle's house for a kind of council of war. It was decided that my older cousins should group together in a civil defence force to defend Zaman Park. I was itching to be part of this force and. armed with the .22 rifle that my father had just given me for my birthday. I marched out to join them. only to be sent back and told I was too young. I cursed myself for not being old enough to join in. Along with my mother and sisters. I was sent away from the city for my safety. As we approached Pindi. I remember seeing open areas outside the city swarming with warriors from the tribal areas volunteering to assist the army. Later I found out that my overzealous cousins almost ambushed. shot and killed two innocent people. mistaking them for Indian paratroopers. Everyone in the country was united in a desire to defeat the enemy. I don' t think Pakistan had ever witnessed such unity. The nearest thing to it was perhaps when we won the World Cup in 1992.
As I grew up I developed a passion not only for my country but also for the Pakistani countryside. Every summer I would go with my parents and sisters to the hill stations to escape the oppressive heat of Punjab. I can still remember the thrill I felt as the car slowly ascended the mountain road and the air cooled. Only those who have experienced the intense heat of the Punjab summer can understand such relief. There was no air conditioning in those days. We had picnics and walks in the forest. saw monkeys. jackals. porcupines and a huge variety of birds. Occasionally we even saw the tracks of a leopard. Once. when I was about five years old. during a trip to the hill station Doonga Cali. over two hundred miles to the north-west of Lahore. a leopard killed a donkey right outside our rest house in the middle of the night. I can still recall how fascinated I was by the poor donkey's partially eaten corpse. In the winter I went partridge shooting with my uncle and male cousins in the Salt Range. a low mountain range about two and a half hours' drive west of Lahore. Some of my best childhood memories are of these trips. We stayed in colonial rest houses in the wilderness. ate sumptuous picnic lunches and returned in the evening to relax around a log fire. The Salt Range used to be teeming with wildlife: wolves. leopards. hyenas. jackals. foxes. deer and wild sheep. There are fewer animals now but the Salt Range remains my favourite place for shooting partridge because of its beautiful weather in the winter and hilly terrain. My mother also loved wildlife and the mountains and she fuelled my passion by telling me stories from her childhood. Some were set in the Indian hill stations of Simla. the summer capital of the British Raj. and the beautiful Himalayan station of Dalhousie where she would holiday with her parents. Like most small boys. I was intrigued by the more grisly tales. I particularly liked the one about how her dog was taken by a leopard while her father was posted at Skaser in the Salt Range. I also loved the family legend on my father's side about how my great uncle from Mianwali, a policeman, had fought with a leopard that had been terrorizing the local villagers and killed it with the bayonet of his gun, then spent six months in hospital from the mauling he received, He was given the highest award the police could bestow.
The 1965 war over Kashmir ended in seventeen days, but it left the military dictator President Ayub Khan in a vulnerable state, allowing room for democratic developments as his grip on power slipped, leading to the rise of a new political party - the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) , under its leader Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Bhutto had studied at university in California and Oxford before he became a lawyer in London, and he represented Pakistan at the United Nations before being appointed the country's foreign minister in 1962 when he was only thirty-four. After the war he fell out with the president and left government to form the PPP. Bhutto, like so many who come to power in Pakistan, was seen at first as someone who could lead us back to democracy - but later was to prove the opposite.
Here was a man who understood history, one with an exceptional mind, highly educated and charismatic - Bhutto could have changed Pakistan completely. He was a true Pakistani nationalist, he formed the first national grass-roots political party in Pakistan. However, he had a fatal flaw in his character that undermined all that he could have achieved - his feudal mindset couldn't tolerate dissent, and as a result his government became known for its brutality in victimizing opponents.
But his ideas, which he expressed in his 1967 book The Myth of Independence, carried great weight - and still do. It is a great shame that he himself could not live up to all of his words. He called the story of all the civilizations of the world, from ancient Egypt to the British and French empires, the story of 'greed urging domination and colliding with the struggle for equality'. And he noted that 'Domination has been justified as "the survival of the fittest"; it has been given the name of the White Man's Burden ... today that ancient struggle has been epitomized in the creed of democracy against dictatorship.' And most presciently he remarked that 'Twenty years of independence have revealed to the people of Pakistan and India the sharp difference that really exists between independence and sovereign equality. This was the beginning of neo-colonialism. It no longer became necessary to control the destinies of smaller countries by any jurisdiction over their territories.'
(The British had developed neo-colonialism in India in the previous century, in the Princely States - of which there were well over five hundred - where they didn't have to rule directly as they had puppet rulers to do their bidding. Today in Pakistan, with drone attacks and raids in our cities, our sovereignty is compromised by those who are puppets of the US and have followed US diktats against the interests of the people of Pakistan. It is this aspect of neo-colonialism that is breeding extremism in Pakistan today.)
Back then I was still young, a teenager, and in the late 1960s I trekked in the Karakoram, the mountain range spanning the borders between Pakistan, India and China. Some of my favourite holidays have been spent there. It is one of the best places for trekking in the world, with the greatest number of peaks over 24,000 feet (7,300 metres) including K2, the second-highest mountain on earth. It really is the roof of the world; I have never seen such natural beauty anywhere in the world as in the Domel valley at 9,000 feet, where the army holds its skiing competitions in the winter. The valley floor was covered in red and white flowers and crossed by a crystal-clear stream. It seemed to be the picture of paradise and every morning I was there I had to tell myself I wasn't dreaming. The people in this area of Pakistan were warm and friendly, untainted by tourism.
On one trip one of our two jeeps broke down on the Karakoram Highway. A young man passing by offered to take us to his village for the night. We zigzagged up a dirt track for about forty minutes before ending up in a tiny village on the edge of an emerald-coloured lake and surrounded by thick pine forest. The villagers served us delicious food. including the best mushrooms I have ever tasted. There was a full moon and we sat all night by the lake listening to the wind blowing through the pines. Pakistan's Northern Areas are almost twice the size of Switzerland. Who knows how many such idyllic places still exist there? We came across similar hospitality in Hunza. a stunningly beautiful valley supposedly the inspiration behind the mythical land of Shangri-La; when I first went there in 1967 locals untouched by materialism greeted us with apricots and peaches. inviting us to stay in their houses. Amongst the endangered species to be found in the Karakoram is the secretive snow leopard with its distinctive grey-green eyes and I remember seeing snow leopard cubs. found by a shepherd and presented as a gift for the Mir of Nagar. the ruler of what was until 1974 still a princely state located in the north of Gilgit-Baltistan. the most northerly point of Pakistan.
Hunza used to be so remote it could only be reached via a terrifying journey up hairpin bends overlooking thousand-foot drops in old Willys Second World War jeeps. Every so often if you dared to look down you would see the wreckage of a jeep that hadn't made it. Then came the Karakoram Highway. sometimes known as the ninth wonder of the world because of its elevation. the highest in the world for a paved road. and because of the sheer difficulty of building it. It took the Pakistanis and the Chinese twenty years to finish and cost the lives of almost nine hundred construction workers. The Karakoram is still by far the most beautiful mountain wilderness in the world and the people are still friendly but 'progress' has taken its toll. Population explosion. massive deforestation by the timber mafia and package tours are quietly threatening this paradise. Sadly. the modern world has brought unwelcome changes to many parts of Pakistan.
Among those changes is the rapid increase in the population. which has grown from 40 million in 1947 to 180 million by 2011. The beauty and wilderness of our country is fast disappearing. but it was already evident in the 1950s and 1960s that this is only one of the problems that would bedevil Pakistan. These problems began in the very fabric of the state itself. born out of our slavish adherence to the traditions and institutions of the departing British. Far from shaking off colonialism. our ruling elite slipped into its shoes. The more a Pakistani aped the British. the higher up the social ladder he was considered to be. In the Gymkhana and the Punjab Club in Lahore. Pakistanis pretended to be English. Everyone spoke English including the waiters; the men dressed in suits; we. the members' children. watched English films while the grownups danced to Western music on a Saturday night. Indeed some Pakistanis even spoke Urdu with an English accent and ate curry and chapattis with a fork rather than with their hands. While a native had to struggle to get membership of these clubs. any European could simply walk in - the waiters would not dare question whether he was a member or not. The Sind Club in Karachi. the ultimate refuge of the self-loathing brown sahib. did not allow itself to be contaminated with any native Pakistani symbols. Established by the British in 1871. it resisted even Pakistani national dress. banning it until 1974.
The small westernized elite. comprised mainly of civilian bureaucrats and military men. also inherited the colonial contempt for the natives. Far from trying to implement Iqbal's vision. they took advantage of a colonial system meant to control the people. All the colonial institutions were left intact and as a result the only change for ordinary Pakistanis was that they had a new set of rulers. the brown sahib instead of the gora (white) sahib. Often these people were even more arrogant in dealing with the masses than the colonialists. just as slave foremen were sometimes more brutal to the slaves than their masters were. (A practice that continues to this day. as we'll see in Chapter Eight. with the way Pakistani security forces acted in their treatment of Afghans.) Almost all the bureaucrats came from the elite English-language schools built by the British and modelled on their own public schools.
When my father returned after doing his postgraduate degree at Imperial College London in 1948. he was only the second person from his home town to have become an 'England returned'. and almost the entire town came to greet him at the railway station. An 'England returned' would find his social status rise dramatically and he could have his marriage arranged to a girl well above the status of his family. Then. as even now. marriage advertisements in India often state a preference for a girl with fair or 'wheatish' complexion. Centuries of invasions from the north-west meant that the ruling classes were often fairer than those ruled. leaving an ingrained colour consciousness on the Indian psyche. An 'England returned' would automatically become a VIP in Zaman Park. When any of my older cousins came back after studying at an English university. we would bombard him with questions about life there. That knowledge alone gave them status.
During their time in India. the British had embedded an inferiority complex amongst the natives with great care. Waiters and attendants were made to wear the clothes of Mughal army officers and the Mughal aristocracy. while the officers of the symbols of British power. the army. the police and the civil service. wore the dress of the colonials. The Mughal Empire. which covered most of the subcontinent from mid way through the sixteenth century. had begun its decline in the early 1700s. But when the British East India Company started to establish its power in the subcontinent halfway through the sixteenth century. the Mughal court still held sway culturally and politically over much of northern India. whose inhabitants - whether Hindu or Muslim - regarded its splendour and culture with awe and its emperor as the embodiment of political and religious power. For half a century many of the early colonialists aped the customs of the court. They spoke Farsi. wore the clothing of the Mughal aristocracy. gave up beef and pork and married local women. sometimes even taking several wives. The British historian William Dalrymple has done much to chronicle the change in attitudes as. between the mid-eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth century. the British took on and defeated all their military rivals in South Asia. With the French. the Siraj ud Daula of Bengal. Tipu Sultan of Mysore. the Marathas and the Sikhs all vanquished. the British became more confident of their grip over the region. and imperial arrogance set in. Evangelical Christianity also played a major part in breeding a culture of British superiority and a determination to unseat the Mughal emperor and humiliate the once great dynasty. As Dalrymple writes in The Last Mughal: 'No longer were Indians seen as inheritors of a body of sublime and ancient wisdom as eighteenth-century luminaries such as Sir William Jones and Warren Hastings had once believed; but instead merely "poor benighted heathen". or even "licentious pagans". who. it was hoped. were eagerly awaiting conversion.'
India had a decentralized system of education before the arrival of the British. Each village had its own schools supported by revenues generated locally. while colleges and madrassas (religious schools) of higher education were run by educational trusts. or waq! boards. (Waq! is an Islamic term for an endowment for a charitable purpose.) When Bengal was conquered by the East India Company in 1757. it was discovered that 34 per cent of the land generated no taxes because it was owned by various trusts. giving free education and healthcare. According to a survey by C. W. Leitner in 1850. some of these madrassas were of an extremely high standard - as good as Oxford and Cambridge. Thanks to the properties owned by the trusts. they could afford to pay handsome salaries to attract high-quality teachers. Leitner also surveyed the Hoshiarpur district in East Punjab and found there was 84 per cent literacy in the area - when the British left India it was down to 9 per cent. The British abolished the trusts. confiscated the waqf1and endowments. centralized the education system and set up elite English-language schools. These were meant to create a class of Indians who, in the words of the nineteenth-century administrator Lord Thomas Macaulay, would be 'Indian in blood and colour but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, in intellect ... to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.' Behind their backs, the British used to contemptuously call these brown sahibs baboons, later ' babus' - the Hindi word for 'father' , only not so in this context.
The impact of the British-implemented education system ran far deeper than the use of English and a love of cricket. Rather it had been used by the British for a century to subjugate the local culture and create a ruling native elite. The British were too few to dominate India themselves and relied on the acquiescence of a layer of natives to enforce their rule - a form of collaboration which was one of the most humiliating aspects of colonialism. I went to a school very much in the English mode, Aitchison College, the nearest Pakistan had to Eton. Like the majority of my schoolmates, I considered myself superior to those students who went to the government-run Urdu medium schools. In the English-medium schools not only were all the subjects taught in English, but everyone was required to speak in English. Boys caught speaking in Urdu during school hours were fined, despite it being the official language of Pakistan.
Our Muslim society with its traditions and rituals was left behind with our families, and felt disconcertingly old-fashioned. The message of our education was that you had to copy the ways of the superior colonialists to make progress in life. We were to be transformed into cheap imitations of English public school boys. Our role models naturally became Western, whether they were sportsmen, movie idols or pop stars. Besides, we could not help but notice that the older generation was deeply impressed by the colonials and their culture no matter how much they disliked them. It was only much later that I realized how much our education dislocated our sense of ourselves as a nation. At the time, I thought more about playing cricket on Aitchison's beautiful sports fields. Today our English-language schools produce 'Desi Americans' - young kids who, though they have never been out of Pakistan, have not only perfected the American twang but all the mannerisms (including the tilt of a baseball cap) just by watching Hollywood films. While my generation's land of milk and honey was England, today's youth from the English-language schools want to get to the United States and live the American dream.
When Pakistan became independent we should have rid ourselves of these English-medium schools. In other post-colonial countries such as Singapore, India and Malaysia they set up one core syllabus for the whole country. In Pakistan the governments allowed this unjust system to perpetuate and English-medium schools still import the British syllabus for students studying GCSEs and A-levels. Students educated in these schools had a huge advantage over the children of the masses since all the best jobs, especially in the prestigious civil service, went to those who spoke good English. And these brown sahibs in the ruling elite were conditioned to despise their own culture, and developed a self-loathing that stemmed from an ingrained inferiority complex. To show that one was educated, a stranger would immediately throw English words into the conversation to establish his credentials. At Aitchison, the more anglicized a boy was, the more he was admired. We were impressed by English history, English films, English teachers, English sports, English novels and English clothes. We laughed at someone who could not speak English properly but it was quite cool to speak Urdu with lots of English mixed in. We wore Western clothes and would feel awkward in shalwar kameezexcept on 'ethnic' occasions like Eid.
When Ijoined the Lahore cricket team at the age of sixteen, I found that because I came from an English-medium school I could barely communicate with the majority of the team as they had been to Urdu-medium schools. Most of the boys would gang up and make fun of me. I felt like an outsider, with this huge educational and cultural gap between us. wider even than that found in the British class system. Their jokes. their humour. the films they liked. their views of the world were all different to mine. It was then that I began to realize how much resentment there was amongst those from Urdu schools towards those from the English ones. I also realized why. despite having the best sports facilities at Aitchison. its boys could never compete with those from poor schools. The latter were much tougher and had a far greater hunger to succeed. Similarly in hockey and squash (other sports that Pakistan has excelled in internationally). all the stars came from the Urdu schools. However. I discovered that they were quick to learn that the way up the social ladder was to acquire Western mannerisms. So most of the cricketers loved shopping for English clothes and learning the English language. preferably with an English accent. Some of the cricketers only started drinking alcohol (which was banned in 1977) because it was a Western. and hence upper-class. thing to do.
National dress was another marker of cultural identity sabotaged by colonialism. When I was a boy I remember one of my uncles asking a cousin of mine. who was wearing shalwar kameez. why he was dressed like a servant. Another time I overheard a friend of my mother talking about someone being an upstart because he had only recently started wearing Western clothes. It was decades later. in the summer of 1988 when I was trekking with a couple of English friends in the Karakoram. that I became conscious of being dressed as a foreigner. while all the locals were in Pakistani clothes. It suddenly dawned upon me - here I was. a national icon. a role model who drew crowds wherever I went - and yet I was dressed like an outsider. Years later I was embarrassed by the Pashtun tribesmen on my first visit to Waziristan who resolutely insisted on speaking to me in Pashto despite the fact I did not speak much of their language. They made a point of it to emphasize their pride in their culture; it is only in the tribal area of Pakistan. where people are fiercely proud of the fact that they have never been conquered. that they feel no need to borrow from anybody else's culture. Colonialism only works if the colonizers are convinced of their superiority and the colonized of their inferiority.
In contrast. the legacy of British colonialism is still strong amongst older or retired army officers and bureaucrats. the Pakistani military and bureaucracy being originally colonial constructs. There is an ingrained inferiority complex. I remember a serving lieutenant-general saying to me: 'But. Imran. my dear chap. why do you insist on wearing shalwar kameez when you look so good in a suit?' I am sure a lot of people who wear Western clothes in Pakistan would like to wear shalwar kameez. especially in the heat of the summer. but they just do not have the confidence. When I had an office in the cancer hospital I founded in memory of my mother. in the early 1990s. I ran the marketing department there. I noticed that most of the regular donors were from the trader class. who wore shalwar kameez. and decided the hospital marketing team should also wear Pakistani dress. A couple of months later a member of the team asked permission to revert to Western suits as he felt that the traders and other people generally did not give him the same respect if he wore Pakistani clothes. He also felt he had less confidence wearing our national clothes when he visited businessmen' s offices. This complex worsened and since Musharraf's regime in the early part of the twenty first century and its superficial drive for westernization. even political candidates in Pakistan. particularly in Sindh and Punjab. also felt the pressure to wear Western dress. Many candidates have their publicity photographs taken in jacket and tie because they feel Western suits make them appear more sophisticated and more educated to the voters.
Retaining the language or dress of occupiers or colonizers has not been that unusual throughout history. For instance. after Sicily won independence from the Arabs in the eleventh century. Arabic remained the language of the island's courts for another fifty years. Yet in Pakistan. the cultural affinities of the English-speaking elite also distanced us from our culture and religion. While no one ever considered becoming a Christian. it was natural that most of us started considering Islam to be backward -just like our culture. After all. the masses were religious but poor. If any student prayed or talked about religion or had a beard he was ridiculed as a traditional Islamic cleric or scholar. a maulvi. Our Western education also laid emphasis on science. which based everything on the premise that what could not be proved. did not exist. This clashed straight away with religion. which wanted us to believe in the unseen. Moreover. since in the 1960s the youth in the West were in rebellion against the older generation and against religion. we too became affected by those attitudes.
By the time I finished school. I still went for Friday and Eid prayers with my father and fasted during Ramadan. yet for me - and indeed for most of my friends - God was confined to the mosque. Our young impressionable minds were convinced by English and American films that Western culture was superior. along with its vastly superior technology. Had we had better understanding of our cultural heritage. or our religion and its history. it might have helped us to resist the lure of the West. Nor could our preachers counter this great onslaught of colonial culture for they had no Western education and could not communicate with us in the language in which we had been taught. Our cultural separation from them reinforced in our minds the idea that Islam was backward - I can remember students laughing at preachers with poor English.
Even nowadays. as the ruling elite despairs of the many young men who have turned to fundamentalist Islam. few grasp how much this great educational divide exacerbates our troubles. While they quite rightly talk about reforming the madrassas. which have sprung up in their thousands and often offer many poor families their only access to education. they rarely look at the problem from the point of view of the masses. who have little reason to feel an affinity with an elite who remain the inheritors of colonialism. representatives of an alien foreign culture. They have nothing in common with these people and see them as a kind of Trojan horse for the West trying to destroy our culture. It is through developing world elites that a more potent and permanent invasion is taking place in many countries. Physical colonialism has been replaced by cultural colonialism. The writer Titus Burckhardt describes this kind of dislocation in his book Fez. City ofIslam. Burckhardt spent time in the Moroccan city in the 1930s; when he revisited it twenty-five years later. he observed:
At the time I first knew it. men who had spent their youth in an unaltered traditional world were still the heads of families. For many of them the spirit that had once created the Mosque of Cordova and the Alhambra was nearer and more real than all the innovations that European rule had brought with it. Since then however a new generation had arisen. one which from its earliest childhood must have been blinded by the glare of European might and which. in large measure. had attended European schools and henceforth bore within it the sting of an almost insuperable contradiction. For how could there be any reconciliation between the inherited traditional life which. despite all its frugalities. carried with it the treasure of an eternal meaning and the modern European world which. as it so palpably demonstrates. is a force oriented entirely to this world. towards possessions and enjoyments. and in every way contemptuous of the sacred? These splendid men of the now dying generation. whom I had once known had indeed been conquered outwardly. but inwardly they remained free; the younger generation. on the other hand. had gained an outward victory when Morocco gained independence some years ago and now ran the grave risk of succumbing inwardly.
The jolt came in 1971. In the elections of 1970, the Awami League of East Pakistan (the party demanding autonomy there) had won a majority in parliament. Yet Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the leader of the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) which had won in West Pakistan, conniving with the military dictator General Yahya, deprived the Awami League of East Pakistan of the chance to form a government. The people of East Pakistan rebelled against what they saw as their disenfranchisement by the more powerful West Pakistan. Yahya Khan, the president and army commander-in-chief, sent in the army to suppress the dissent - the same army that had held the first free elections on an adult franchise in the first place. As the troops descended on East Pakistan, Bhutto returned to Karachi from Dhaka triumphantly proclaiming that Pakistan had been saved. But the result was a terrible war in which thousands of civilians died and millions of refugees poured into India's West Bengal. I was with the West Pakistani Under-19 cricket team on the last flight out of East Pakistan before the army went in. As we played the East Pakistan team we could feel the hostility towards us, not just from the crowds in Dhaka stadium but from our sporting opponents too. The captain of the East Pakistan team, Ashraful Haque, who later became a friend of mine, told me at dinner that evening about the great antagonism felt towards West Pakistan. He told me that many like him would want to be part of Pakistan were they to be given their due rights but as things stood there was a strong movement for independence. I was shocked to hear this because we had no idea about the feelings of the people of East Pakistan, thanks to total media censorship in West Pakistan. However, it had never occurred to me or many others that there was any chance of the country breaking apart. West Pakistan made a series of blunders which allowed India to subsequently exploit the situation. India, then led by Nehru's daughter Indira Gandhi, invaded East Pakistan in support of the Bengali insurgency. Unlike the 1965 war with India, this time we were quickly defeated. Our army signed a humiliating surrender in Dhaka and the Indians took 90,000 prisoners of war. Our country was split in two and East Pakistan became the newly created Bangladesh. Indira Gandhi had achieved far more than her father had ever done in destroying Jinnah's idea of Pakistan. It was meant to be a homeland for the Muslims of the subcontinent; now after a bitter civil war and a crushing defeat, which still haunts our army, it had become a homeland only for West Pakistanis.
A few years later, in 1974, I met up with Ashraful Haque again, and I was shocked at the number of Bengali civilians he told me had been killed in the military action. The figures listed by both sides are hard to verify but it is possible that hundreds of thousands of civilians died in the civil war that lasted several months, and millions more fled into India seeking safety. I had previously argued with English and Indian contemporaries that this was all propaganda against the Pakistani army and Pakistan. After hearing Haque's side of the story, I vowed I would never again accept our government's propaganda at face value or ever back a military operation against our own people.
My career in cricket had just started - I played my first international match for Pakistan in England in the summer of 1971 - and away from the censored newspapers and the government TV channel. I was exposed to the international media. Seeing our surrender was only made worse when the massacres attributed to us were shown. The shock was greater because the government, and the military, kept telling the people that they would 'fight to the end'. Only twenty-four hours before the surrender, General Niazi from my tribe, the commander of the forces in East Pakistan, had defiantly given an interview on the BBC where he declared the army would fight to the last man. The surrender caused mass depression and a loss of faith in our country. Like everyone else in Pakistan, I had believed the propaganda of our state television, who had labelled the Bengali fighters as terrorists, militants, insurgents or Indian-backed fighters - the same terminology that is used today about those fighting in Pakistan's tribal areas and Baluchistan. Then. as now. we fought the symptoms rather than addressing the root cause of the violence - our failure to address the legitimate aspirations of Pakistan' s many ethnic groups. I also had the opportunity to see for myself how my country was perceived abroad. I had a rude awakening. for. without the protection of my family. I suddenly felt lonely and insecure. For the first time. I had to make an effort with people and found it quite difficult. After the tour I stayed back to finish my education at the Royal Grammar School in Worcester. I found it almost impossible to make friends with the British. My friendships with my cousins and a few school friends were informal and deep; we would drop in at each other's houses at all hours. and. since we had grown up together. our bonds were strong and could withstand fighting and jealousy. Now I was faced with a situation where I did not know anyone. nor did I understand British culture. which was very different to the joint family system in which I had grown up. The friendships that I had in England were never as meaningful as those I had in Pakistan - until much later.
Following the completion of my A-levels in 1972 I began my studies at Oxford. It was a huge culture shock. The youth rebellion was in full swing and the English culture we knew through our English schoolmasters. books. stories and anecdotes of my parents' generation had disappeared under a blitz of sex. drugs and rock and roll. Traditional British values - which stemmed from the Victorians' ideas on morality and had so impressed the older generation in Pakistan - were being rapidly discarded in Britain itself. dismissed as hypocritical. Films and pop stars were advocating free sex. drugs and bad manners; it was fashionable to swear and prudishness was dismissed as boring. The biggest attack was on religion and on God. In Pakistan. the English speaking elite considered the mullah backward. but even they never dared publicly attack him. Most of them would follow Islamic rituals and considered themselves religious. However. in Britain. religion became a source of ridicule. lampooned in Monty Python 's Flying Circus and in the film The Life ofBrian in the 1970s. as well as in television skits by Benny Hill portraying priests and nuns as sexual perverts. Our role models were Mick Jagger and David Bowie. while our intellectual thinking was defined by the then popular Marxist rejection of religion. From Darwin's theory of evolution to Nietzsche proclaiming the death of God. we were encouraged to believe religion belonged to a 'pre-logical' stage of human development. Freud thought God was an illusion created by man to fulfil his own needs; Jung termed religion an alternative to neurosis. If there was any spirituality at university. it was that of the hippies. The only problem was it was usually drug-induced and included free sex.
What little belief I had in God took a real beating in this atmosphere. At best I clung to my Muslim identity. though this had little to do with submitting to the tenets of Islam. I never drank alcohol. but that was because my boyhood hero and first cousin. Majid Khan. later to be captain of the national cricket team. was a teetotaller and I wanted to emulate him. The best way to describe my faith was 'no acceptance. no rejection'. My Islam was reduced to rituals like attending mosque and that too only when I was in Lahore. Similarly fasting was also something I did if at the time I happened to be home. If there was a God. then he had nothing to do with my life outside the mosque. My mother. who by this time had become deeply spiritual. was alarmed at my lack of faith and would constantly ask me to read the Quran in the hope that it would guide me. Out of love for her. several times I tried to read it and each time gave up. It was only much later that I discovered why it made no sense to me.
My first winter at Oxford made me miserable. The bleak cold and wet. dull days really made me miss home and the weather in Lahore. There is no climate in the world better than the winter of Punjab - warm. sunny days and cold nights just right for sitting by a log fire. I would never tell my mother I was unhappy. but nevertheless. in one of my letters she must have sensed I was homesick. Immediately she wrote. asking me to come back. She told me I could always return to England at some other time to resume my studies and if I did not want to study any more it did not matter anyway. It was this love and support that made me grow up with such a complete sense of security. Her total belief in me gave me self-esteem, a vital characteristic for success. This was in sharp contrast to the British students, who were under great pressure to find jobs after university. Most of them had already moved out of their parents' homes. For me, as for any Pakistani, the concept of moving out was completely alien. It was unthinkable for the eldest or only son to ever leave his parents' house, as his parents were his responsibility for the rest of their lives. Perhaps it is no surprise that my best friend at Oxford was an Indian, Vikram Mehta, who came from a similar family structure to mine, and had like me been to a private, English-language school. At that time, Benazir Bhutto, the daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Vikram and I became good friends; not only because we were from similar subcontinental backgrounds, but because we were taking the same subjects - politics and economics. Vikram and I would visit Benazir's lodgings in Lady Margaret Hall every Sunday, when she would have an open house serving cheese and snacks all afternoon as part of her lobbying to become president of the Oxford Union. Vikram and I had little interest in the union, but we would show support for Benazir. A friend of mine who played cricket for Oxford, Dave Fursdon, I discovered was the fiatmate of one Tony Blair, who later became Britain's prime minister.
After leaving university, I would spend the winter in Pakistan and the summer playing professional cricket in England. In Pakistan I kept meeting people with a strong faith in God. The common people led their lives with God. Even though they did not always obey God's commands all the time, he featured prominently in their lives. They would sin but they would know they were doing wrong and beg for forgiveness. Often, they had a fatalistic attitude to life whereby they accepted any disaster as the will of God. I considered this to fit in with Marx's idea of the 'opium of the masses'. In contrast to the ubiquity of religion and mysticism in Pakistan, the only spiritual people I remember meeting in England were Andrew Wingfield-Digby, a theology student who played with me at Oxford and was later to become a vicar, and, some years later, the English wicketkeeper Alan Knott.
(There was one incident involving Knott that struck me in particular, when we were part of a world eleven playing in Kerry Packer's world series in Australia in 1978. The team was discussing what to do with the prize money - whether to divide it up amongst the twelve of us who were sitting there or to also share it with the six others who were not present because they were playing elsewhere but were part of the squad of eighteen. We all decided that we should exclude the six, justifying it to ourselves on the grounds that only those who had performed should be rewarded. Knott was shocked by our greed and immediately condemned us, saying we were being unfair to the others. Such was his moral authority that we all felt embarrassed and meekly consented to sharing the prize money with the entire squad.)
While I was adjusting to life in England, my country too was changing. Despite his own contribution to the disaster in East Pakistan, Bhutto became president in 1971, and used all of his abundant charisma to restore some of our battered national pride. For the first time in our country's history, he told the masses that they mattered. Unlike the civilian and military elite, with their English coldness, he was a popular and populist leader. As a young Pakistani at the time I could not help but be proud when he made his famous speech over Kashmir to the UN Security Council in 1965, threatening to 'wage war for a thousand years', before storming out. His standing up to the West like that just as the country was emerging from colonialism boosted our self-esteem. Yet Bhutto's great intellect and charisma could not translate into success for Pakistan. His misdirected nationalization choked the economy and the feudal mindset that tolerated neither criticism nor opposition further damaged Pakistan's democracy, But perhaps the greatest disaster of Bhutto's years was the nationalization of the school system in 1972, an act which led to the departure of many qualified teachers without adequate teacher training programmes being put in place beforehand. From then onwards our state school structure declined and generations of Pakistanis have suffered because of his policy.
In the end it was apparent that Bhutto was just using the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) to further his personal ambitions, his promise of power to the people forgotten. Opposition to him grew, and in 1977 he was accused by political opponents of rigging the elections in the PPP's favour. Protests against the results of the elections were brutally crushed and in a last attempt to regain ground and shore up support amongst the Islamic parties Bhutto banned alcohol, nightclubs and gambling. As protests escalated into riots, the army were called out to control the streets. Martial law was declared and the country was to remain under it for eleven years. General Zia ul-Haq overthrew Bhutto, appointed himself president in 1978, and the following year had Bhutto hanged in a jail in Rawalpindi. I was playing cricket in Sri Lanka when I heard the news and felt an incredible sense of sadness. Even though I knew he had done wrong, I did not expect him to be executed. More upheaval was to come. The year 1979 was to prove a turning point for our country. In neighbouring Iran, the Shah's westernized regime was swept aside by Imam Khomeini's Islamic revolution. Later that year, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and Pakistan became a frontline state in the Cold War.
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