The Imran Khan school of Islam
Jyoti Malhotra -
Sunday, June 01, 2008 4:41 PM
Respect and humiliation, Imran Khan is telling me in his house by the canal in Lahore…in Islam we believe that you can get respect and humiliation only from Allah, no ordinary mortal can either humiliate you or give you respect.
I’ve just finished interviewing Imran (check it out on youtube) and as he tucks into a large breakfast, he talks to me about the state of Pakistan and cricket. He’s one of the most articulate politicians you can ever hope to meet this side of the Suez and probably amongst the most sincere. His playboy lifestyle, which he has averred elsewhere doesn’t really exist, so adds to the glamour. He’s turned every self-respecting convention on its head, and emerged, scathed. He’s hurt, scarred, damaged, a bit like all of us, which is why we probably warm to him. So when he reaches for the stars, even if some of them are hugely attractive women, he continues to hold our attention.
Unfortunately, the only part of his life that still hasn’t really taken off, is his politics. (He will probably continue to pay dearly for his decision not to contest the February 18 elections, a big moment in Pakistan’s history, which means that at least in the brutal present, he’s pretty much out of the political reckoning.) The Shaukat Khanum cancer hospital he started in the name of his mother, as well as the university he’s now planning (he already has land on the outskirts of Lahore), on the lines of Oxford, testify to his ability to keep trying to improve both himself as well as the lives of people around him.
It is his comments on Islam, though, which surprise me. Is this a new Imran Khan exploring new avenues in spirituality? Or has Imran’s faith always been such so personal that he never cared to broadcast it, unlike several other godmen of our time?
If respect and humiliation can only come from God, then who circumscribes those parameters? On one of my many drives through Lahore, alongside its wonderful canal that at once cools the city and intimately connects it with the other elements (fire, wind and earth, the Mughals had thought of everything), I remembered watching a young, stunningly beautiful girl sitting on the back of a moped, being driven by her husband or brother or some other male relative.
A few strands of her nicely hennaed hair had escaped the tightly wrapped dupatta around her face and as she turned her foot, idly, tight shalwar climbed halfway up her shin, revealing a slim ankle.
She looked completely bored. Her male relative, who sat inches away and drove his bike proprietorially, without a helmet I must add, had no clue about the minor revolution brewing on the back of his bike.
To allow a young girl, however unintentionally, to show part of her legs, would have by now caused more than a minor uproar in Saudi Arabia. In Riyadh, even a kaffir like me had had to wear the hijaab in public, so there was no question about god-fearing Muslim women daring to be different. So how did Pakistan, also an Islamic nation, allow its women to get away with such heresy? Which Islam was right?
It’s a question that continues to haunt the sub-continent. If Pakistan was created to provide both succour and protection to India’s Muslims, then what school of Islam should the new republic follow? Dilavar, my taxi-driver who was actually a Bollywood fiend, pointed out that religion is completely different from culture, and anyway in the Quran it doesn’t say anywhere that women have to be completely covered (only that she has to be “modestly” dressed).
Does South Asian Islam, then, have a message for the rest of the Muslim world? Can the region lay claim to a softer, truer version of the message of God, perhaps apply for a patent in these post-9/11 times, in which respect and humiliation can only be obtained from Him, and not from some wild-eyed mortals with aviation skills? Are the sub-continent’s several versions of Islam that much more creative because they have had to sharpen their swords against several, existing schools of Hinduism? Is Kashmiriyat, that cultural amalgam between Shaivite Hinduism and Islam in God’s lost heaven on earth, Kashmir, a harbinger of our times?
By now I have reached Lahore’s Allama Iqbal airport. Just past the last security check after immigration, I ask Nargis, the woman security officer, how she feels about body-searching women of different faiths. This is my duty, she says. The deeper you go into Islam, she adds, the more you’ll understand that Islam doesn’t prohibit you from dealing with other faiths.
I ask her if she’s ever been to Saudi Arabia, and what she thinks of the Islam that is practiced there. Oh that is so rigid, she answers, with a toss of her head. We are completely different.