Memories of Quetta
Media Workers Against the War, 28 September 2001
I’m thinking today of a remarkable man I met not long ago in Quetta, a city in western Pakistan, a few hours drive from the border with Afghanistan. He was a devout and observant Sunni Muslim. He was also a community activist, who had helped establish women’s health and training programmes (including reproductive control), youth clubs in slum areas, agricultural co-operatives, literacy schemes and environmental projects. He seemed to know, and be respected by, everyone in the city.
His views on the Taliban were unequivocal. He had watched them being nurtured in the Madrassas in Quetta during the 80s and he thought the worst disaster for Pakistan would be that they or their like would ever come to power there. Knowing I was a US citizen, he made a point of telling me, in a gentle but severe voice, “You know, your government made all this possible. The fundamentalists were nothing here until America backed them in Zia’s time.” And he repeated the familiar tale of how the CIA had aided and encouraged the Pakistan ISI in funding and promoting a wide array of right-wing fundamentalist groups.
This man was not only a Sunni Muslim; he was also a proud Pukhtoon (Pashto). Quetta is the capital of Balochistan, but its population is roughly divided between Baloch and Pukhtoon speakers. There is also a huge Afghan refugee population, most of them Pukhtoon speakers.
Over a lavishly hospitable dinner at his home one night, this man – surrounded by his sons and neighbours – talked to me about Pukhtoon history, and especially about the great Khan Abdul Gaffer Khan, colloqially known as Badshah Khan, the leader of the anti-colonial ‘red shirts’ in what is today northern Pakistan. His movement was secular and non-violent, rooted in an ethic of humanistic voluntary service and a socialist vision of the future of independent India. And it was a genuinely mass movement, spread across the valleys and plateaux and hills of the region – where neither Congress nor the Muslim League counted for much.
Badshah Khan allied himself with Gandhi and Nehru but was abandoned by them – with the encouragement of the British – in the run-up to partition (which he regarded as a betrayal on all sides).
In later years he was a strong opponent of the Pakistani elite’s alliance with the United States, and a champion of devolution and democracy within Pakistan. His movement was persecuted by both Bhutto and Zia. He died in the early eighties and at his own insistence was buried over the border in Kabul – a symbol of his aspiration for a united Pukhtoonistan. It’s said that more than 100,000 people crossed the Khyber pass (from Pakistan to Afghanistan) to attend his funeral.
Badshah Khan’s memory lives on. His photograph is commonplace in shops and street stalls in Quetta. But in recent years his legacy in these parts has been under relentless pressure form the fundamentalists. Everything that has happened since the attack on the World Trade Towers has strengthened their hand.
My friend in Quetta isn’t on the net so I have no idea what’s happening to him and his community right now. It should go without saying that he will have prayed with all his heart for the victims in New York and Washington. He will also have prayed for the American rulers and their allies to forgo ‘retaliation’ – and for the American people to have some understanding of what their government had done in his country.
As we talked over cups of green tea at his home that night, I mentioned that I was Jewish. He was delighted. Apparently, according to a popular Pukhtoon origin myth, the Pukhtoon people are one of the ten lost tribes of Israel. It seemed we were brothers, in more ways than one.
So what’s the point? That fundamentalism among the Pukhtoon people – the Taliban are mostly Pukhtoon-speakers – is a relatively recent phenomenon, and that they have other, diametrically opposed traditions. And that the current sway of right-wing fundamentalism is the product not of anyone’s ‘age-old culture’ or ‘civilisation’ or lack of it but of a geopolitical history in which the United States is deeply embroiled.
My friend’s whole life in Quetta is a riposte to fundamentalists on all sides – including the Western fundamentalism currently spouted by Bush and Blair and their supporters in the media. There is no fundamental or essential Islam or Christianity, just as there is no fundamental or essential Pakistan or the USA. Religious adherents, like the populations of nation-states, contain multiple and contradictory social forces. And different forces become dominant within those religions and societies according to political and economic circumstances.
People who really want to make a difference will seek to change those circumstances.
