Huma Yusuf

This article first appeared in The News in April 2007. 

The phrase ‘caped crusaders’ has taken on a new meaning as of last week. Forget about super power-infused crime fighters such as Batman and Superman – there’s a new moral police in town. In fact, after seeing the images pouring out of Islamabad, one can even imagine a scenario in which the Dark Knight and Man of Steel shudder at the sight of laathi-wielding students from the infamous Jamia Hafsa. Bearing burqas and batons, the madrasah’s finest would be comical (think dystopic Darth Vaders), if their mission and methodology were not profoundly troubling.

The fact that dozens of young women felt it was their right and duty to storm an alleged brothel, abuse and kidnap the women inhabiting the house, subsequently facilitate the detention of two law-enforcing officials, and force a confession and staged repentance from a woman they accused of being an immoral madam is horrifying in and of itself. Taking matters into one’s own hands and flouting the writ of law have long been national pastimes in Pakistan. But the blatant disregard for the law and official channels demonstrated by the madrasah students seems particularly audacious, not least because it was public and collectively enacted (and yet, General Musharraf thinks it’s a good idea to suspend Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry and further drive home the belief that the law is dispensable).

That this incident was not a freak occurrence induced by mass hysteria is even more disturbing, since it signals that there’s more to come. Jamia Hafsa students have already intimidated video store owners and staged a sit-in to prevent the demolition of an illegally constructed mosque. For his part, Jamia Hafsa’s head honcho Maulana Abdul Aziz is publicly threatening to enforce Shariat law throughout Pakistan, starting tomorrow. More scary than his foreshadowing is the authorities’ response to the student raid. By letting the women wage their crusade with little interference, law-enforcing personnel have made it clear that extremist behavior will be tolerated. Even after two of their own were held by the vigilante students, police officials were content to play a game of quid pro quo with the Jamia Hafsa administration: we’ll release your teachers if you release our policemen. Complacently negotiating with rampaging hordes hardly seems like the best official response to last Wednesday’s madness. Finally, the fact that this whole debacle unfolded in Islamabad – capital city of rose gardens in Chak Shezad and expats in Tiramisu – emphasizes that extremism in Pakistan is now officially front and center.

Of course, the fact that Jamia Hafsa’s morality police force comprises young women adds a certain je ne sais quoi to the whole matter, and not necessarily in a good way. There is something profoundly unsettling about women taking recourse in violence in the public and political sphere. As a young woman myself, I have to admit that the images of veiled vigilantes provoke both anxiety and admiration in me, and the resulting ambivalence is difficult to sort through. I am anxious because violence should never be the answer, the right to privacy should be tantamount, and moral policing is arguably the most immoral surveillance tactic out there. The admiration, on the other hand, comes from a more complicated place. Seeing a stick-wielding Pakistani woman take to the streets to make sure her point comes across is, perversely, empowering. The sight implicitly threatens the normative patriarchal structures that we are so attuned to since it allows women to transgress into spaces traditionally reserved for men. Girl-turned-goonda, I’m sorry to admit, has a nice ring to it.

Before I’m misunderstood, I’d like to clarify that I in no way think that the actions of Jamia Hafsa students are excusable. If anything, last week’s raid should remind the government that their ‘war against terror’ needs to start closer to home. I’m merely using the incident to highlight the sorry state of women in Pakistan. So deprived are we of positive role models, public representation, and opportunities for participation, that we finagle a sense of entitlement out of the extremist and violent activities of a group of misguided women. The phenomenon, unfortunately, is not new. For example, when Wafa Idris became the first female suicide bomber in the Israel-Palestine conflict about five years ago, many reinterpreted her terrorism as feminism. Wafa was hailed not only for having the courage to die ‘like a man’, but her exploit was also used as a way to taunt men who were reluctant to become suicide bombers into action. Few will argue, however, that the conflation of terrorism and feminism is anything but an indication of a sick, misogynist society that needs to treat its women better and aggressively examine the reasons why a woman would be compelled to express herself through violence.  

On a side note, Jamia Hafsa students staged their alleged brothel raid in the same week that the Council of Islamic Ideology chose to recommend to parliament that consensual sex and rape be treated as two separate crimes, with the latter no longer requiring the woman to produce four witnesses to attest to the violence enacted against her. Although a long overdue baby step towards rectifying the discriminatory laws against women in Pakistan, the council’s recommendation does take us that inch closer to providing women with legislative equality and security. Still, it is the Jamia Hafsa story that is raising eyebrows and generating headlines the world over, on some level, I’m sure, because the notion of an militant, morality-enforcing Pakistani woman is more plausible than a sexually entitled one.

And so it is that I feel a sense of achievement – however conflicted and twisted – when I hear about female students going on the rampage. After all, we’re used to taking our female role models with a grain of salt. To draw on a recent example: Mukhtar Mai, however courageous, has had to define herself in terms of her victimhood after surviving gang-rape. In light of these realities, we’ll take a display of feminine strength wherever we get it, even at the hands of madrasah students. To end on an optimistic note, though, can we imagine the possibilities if students as motivated, organized, and determined as the ones at Jamia Hafsa were exposed to a secular, high-quality education? Not only would they find more articulate ways in which to protest against prostitution, but the battle they’d go on to wage would also be an important fight for women’s emancipation, entitlement, and equality.

 This article first appeared in The News in March 2007. 

Dick Cheney’s claim that al-Qaeda is regrouping in the country’s remote border regions was not the scariest news to come out of Pakistan recently. Terrorists, after all, are openly nefarious. Mullahs railing against polio vaccination, on the other hand, pose a far more subtle, yet equally sinister problem. Up to 24,000 children were denied the polio vaccination as rumours suggesting that the drops caused infertility and impotence rippled throughout the Northern Areas. Making the most of their illegal FM radio transmitters, extremist mullahs also argued that the vaccinations were the latest incarnation of an American – in some versions Jewish, Christian, or, more generically, infidel – plot to emasculate and sterilize the next generation of Muslims. Although fatwas sanctioning the vaccine and signed by Maulana Fazlur Rehman and Qazi Hussain Ahmed helped ensure that 5.7 million children were vaccinated in the Frontier in January this year, the drops left undelivered should give us pause to worry.

Here’s why: Pakistan, along with India, Nigeria, and Afghanistan, is a nation in which polio remains endemic. According to the World Health Organisation, there were 40 confirmed cases of polio in the country in 2006, up from 28 in 2005. A similar situation in Nigeria in 2003 led to the spread of polio to twelve nearby countries, stemming the global health movement to eradicate polio. There too, Muslim clerics halted the immunization programme in three states, primarily Kano, claiming that polio vaccinations were contaminated with contraceptives. As a result, polio reappeared in several African countries, including Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Ghana, and Togo. The last thing we need in the north of Pakistan, especially so soon after the devastating earthquake of 2005, is a polio outbreak. And politically speaking, we probably shouldn’t add a dreadful disease, along with nuclear know-how and terrorism, to our nation’s list of illustrious exports. Rather than turn the clock back on the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, we should be concentrating on eradicating extremism and ignorance along with the disease.

Unfortunately, the rumblings have already begun. Some Indian doctors and activists have tentatively begun to suggest that a portion of the 672 confirmed cases of polio in the country could be attributed to the paranoia of Muslim clerics who took the lead from their counterparts across the border and discouraged the administration of the polio vaccine. Meanwhile, Dr Abdul Majid Katme, head of the Islamic Medical Association in Britain, has urged British Muslims to refrain from vaccinating their children against diseases such as measles, mumps, and rubella because he believes that vaccines contain haram derivatives of animal tissue. Instead of vaccines, Dr Katme recommends breastfeeding babies and rearing them on a Quranic diet of olives and black seeds to boost immunity. Hopefully, the irony of the fact the Saudi Arabian government requires all Hajj pilgrims to be immunized against polio as a condition for entry will not be lost on many.

Interestingly, misguided Muslim clerics are not the only ones taking vaccines to task. Across the Atlantic, a debate is raging regarding the relative merits and demerits of Gardasil, a vaccine that protects against human papillomavirus (HPV), a sexually transmitted disease that can cause cervical cancer. In June last year, the Food and Drug Administration approved Gardasil for girls ages nine and up, making it the first vaccine marketed to prevent a cancer.

Experts argue that girls should be vaccinated with Gardasil before they become sexually activate so as to save them from a cancer that annually strikes 10,000 American women, killing about 3,700 of them. But as it happens with most too-good-to-be-true scenarios, Gardasil has riled the skeptics. Some parents and pediatricians point out that the vaccine is too expensive at US$120 a dose, and are waiting to see if insurance companies choose to reimburse them for the cost of the vaccination. Others admit that they’d like to wait a while and see if the HPV vaccine is safe and its effects long lasting (the vaccine has been tested on thousands of women over a five-year period, but its long-term effectiveness cannot yet be definitively ascertained).

Public health officials have been responding to such concerns by hailing Gardasil as one of the most important advances in women’s health in decades. Many states are advocating to make the administration of the vaccine mandatory in pre-teen girls. So far, only one state, Texas, has stipulated that girls aged eleven and twelve will be required to receive the HPV immunization effective September 2008. The notion of mandatory protection against HPV, however, has offended many American parents. And here’s where the fun begins.

Many public health officials, parents, and media pundits will tell you that the real issue surrounding the administration of Gardasil is an implicit conversation about America’s views on sex. Cost and long-term effectiveness may be genuine causes of concern, but most parents are horrified by the notion of discussing sexually transmitted diseases with their young daughters. At a policy level, the HPV vaccine is being adamantly resisted by those who think that it will encourage promiscuity in girls who will mistakenly think that protection from one venereal disease means an immunity against all venereal diseases. Health activists who dare to suggest that parents may not know when their daughters become sexually active are being silenced by unprecedented middle-class morality. The reigning argument seems to be: let the threat of cervical cancer loom large so that girls continue to opt for abstinence.

My point here is not to draw an unfair comparison between Muslim extremists who denounce polio vaccination and the denizens of Middle America who oppose the HPV vaccination. I simply want to point out that a public’s health should never fall victim to an ideological battle. When mullahs take pot shots at polio drops, they’re essentially articulating anti-American ideals. Similarly, when American activists oppose state legislature that would make Gardasil mandatory, they are trying to discourage promiscuity and uphold a value system that has long been threatened by evolving understandings of sexuality.

But is public health the best arena in which to hash out a political battle? I’d venture to say no. No doubt, some skepticism should be reserved when dealing with the big bad pharmaceutical companies (after all, there’s a reason The Constant Gardner was such a popular and critical success). But it’s high time we learnt how to distinguish between doctoring and spin doctoring.

This article first appeared in The News in February 2007.

           Since presidential candidates began announcing their White House bids about two weeks ago, America’s core values have been stuck between a rock and a hard place, or should I say, between a Muslim and a Mormon. Thanks to Illinois Senator Barack Obama and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, conversations about American hypocrisy have shifted from the realm of foreign policy to faith, and the guarantees of the First Amendment have been appropriately pummeled out of public discourse by some righteously thumping fists. Never mind that old spiel about Congress facilitating the free exercise of religion – the god their president believes in is far more important to Americans than their cherished democratic ideals. After all, it’s no secret Americans are a religious people: 90 per cent of them believe in God, 70 per cent affiliate themselves with an organized religion, 38 per cent describe themselves as committed Christians, and, to borrow a phrase from Obama himself, “substantially more people in America believe in angels than they do in evolution.” It’s just too bad that Protestants seem to have little time for pluralism. As a result, the fact that Obama is allegedly Muslim and Romney assuredly Mormon matters more to Americans than the candidates’ respective polices on the Iraq war, oil dependence, gay marriage, abortion, stem cell research, universal health care, and fiscal deficits.

            President Bush’s unwavering Methodist belief has kept commentaries about the role of religion in politics out of the mainstream media for several years. But that doesn’t mean that Americans ever stopped worrying about which deity presided over the Oval Office. John F. Kennedy’s charm and charisma may have trumped his Catholicism, but Senator Joe Lieberman was teased about campaigning on the Sabbath in 2000, while John Kerry was regularly photographed at mass by journalists hoping to get a snapshot of the Roman Catholic senator partaking of the Eucharist. But how can a Jew and a Catholic ever hope to compete with a purported Muslim and a Mormon in terms of bad press?

            First, the facts: Barack Hussein Obama is a church-going Christian, the son of an agnostic Kenyan father and atheist Kansan mother. His paternal grandfather and Indonesian stepfather were Muslims, while his maternal grandparents, who essentially raised him, were Christian. Although he spent part of his childhood in Indonesia, Obama was never educated at a madrasah. He is currently a member of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ, described on its website as a “congregation which is unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian.” Still, the whiff of Islam that lingers over his lineage has caused Obama to be written off as a Muslim by middle America (and I don’t need to tell you that, if you’re running for US president, that’s a bad thing).

Indeed, a disruptive media campaign initiated by the conservative Insight magazine reconfigures the African-American Democrat as nothing short of a terrorist sympathizer. Just as jokes about Obama’s name rhyming with that of Osama were getting old, conservatives began obsessing about the presidential candidate’s middle name Hussein. In late November last year, Republican strategist Ed Rogers repeatedly referred to him using all three names, making sure to rhyme Barack with ‘I-raq’ and slither through his pronunciation of Hussein, during an interview on MSNBC’s Hardball. During the December 11, 2006, edition of CNN’s Situation Room, correspondent Jeanne Moos noted that only one consonant differentiates Obama and Osama before adding that it was ironic that Obama shared a middle name with the world’s most notorious former dictator. Later that month, political analyst Jeff Greenfield, also speaking on CNN’s Situation Room, compared Obama’s preference for ‘business casual’ attire to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s “jacket-and-no-tie look”, thus managing to parallel Obama with the entire unholy trinity of Muslims comprising the axis of evil. Not surprisingly then, despite Obama’s repeated declarations of Christianity, conservative commentators continue to point out that the son of a Muslim man is necessarily a Muslim.

As right-wing pundit Debbie Schlussel put it in a recent column, “Is a man who Muslims think is a Muslim, who feels some sort of psychological need to prove himself to his absent Muslim father, and who is now moving in the direction of his father’s heritage, a man we want as president when we are fighting the war of our lives against Islam?” Clearly, the best way to undermine a hopeful in the US when there’s no real mud to sling is to denounce him as Muslim.

Lucky for Obama, though, that he’s not Mormon. In fact, Romney’s probably wishing about now that his name rhymed with Mullah Omar or Muqtada al-Sadr, for as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Romney is guaranteed to earn the horror and hatred of American evangelicals who believe that Mormons aren’t really Christians. Unfortunately for his presidential bid, these evangelicals comprise a voting bloc that makes up 30 per cent of the Republican electorate.

Some more facts: Mormons believe that they are the fully realized strain of Christianity, acknowledge extra-biblical scriptures such as the Book of Mormon, and believe that their god inhabits an actual physical body. For these reasons, conservative organizations claim that Mormonism and Christianity are theologically incompatible, and view the former as, at best, a false religion and, at worst, a nefarious cult. In December 2006, a Washington Post-ABC News poll revealed that 35 per cent of all respondents (and 39 per cent of Republicans) would be less likely to vote for a Mormon candidate. While the number of Americans who say they would not vote for a Jewish or Catholic presidential candidate fell from the double digits to approximately 5 per cent between the 1960s and 1999, the number of Americans who are uncomfortable with a Mormon elect has remained steady at about 17 per cent of the population. No wonder then, in a recent interview with the Atlantic Monthly, Romney was asked “How Mormon are you?”, a question the former governor dodged by citing a privacy violation.

But as long as that question looms large in the minds of Americans who for the most part have shown no affinity for religious diversity, the US remains open to charges of hypocrisy, intolerance, xenophobia, and discrimination. Ironically, Obama and Romney are probably their respective parties’ best shot at the presidency. They’re articulate and informed, partisan yet politically correct, and willing to toe a compelling middle line. Unfortunately, religious prejudice, which is bound to escalate until November 2008, might just keep these worthy candidates out of office. Moreover, mudslinging campaigns focused on Obama’s Muslimness and Romney’s Mormonism will eventually irk the rest of the world by revealing the extent of America’s deep-rooted prejudices. The US is expected to weigh in on sectarian conflict in Iraq, the Middle East conflict, the Iranian theocracy’s nuclear pretensions, the ghettoization of Muslim immigrants throughout the European Union, populism in South America, and more. No government that represents a people who cannot respect and celebrate diverse religions can contribute in such discussions in any meaningful way.

This op-ed first appeared in The News in February 2007.

At this point, I think most people would agree that we live in a mad, mad, mad world. Candle-lit vigils were held to mourn the death of Saddam Hussein, the gruesome twosome Bush and Blair are still daring to hint that they will invade Iran to stem further uranium enrichment, and the citizens of the world’s only superpower seem to think that a presidential candidacy should hinge on the fact that the name Obama rhymes with Osama. That said, there can be no better indication of just how topsy-turvy things have become than the pandemonium that paralyzed Boston last week.

Those who know the city would describe it as picturesque and charming, an urban testament to all that is good about unapologetic liberalism and intellectualism. But last Wednesday, the city was transformed into a dystopic version of itself as the discovery by the authorities of up to 38 electronic light boards – replete with straggly wires, batteries, and ticking noises – led to the suspension of all public transport services, the closure of most bridges as well as part of the Charles River. Apparently, police officials who discovered the flashy devices believed them to be bombs cunningly planted across the city in order to paralyze the mass transit system. Only after exploding one of the “bomb-like” devices, deploying bomb squads throughout the suburbs, alerting federal authorities, and diverting interstate traffic did police officials realize what they were dealing with: Lite Brites, children’s toys that allow users to create pictures by arranging translucent pegs into an opaque board.

Even better, as darkness fell on that chaotic Wednesday eve, it became clear that the suspect implosives were in fact images of ‘mooninites’ – delinquent travelers from outer space who appear in a popular cartoon – impolitely flashing a raised middle finger at passing motorists. The Boston authorities’ top-notch anti-terror investigation later revealed that the devices were artistic installation pieces mounted throughout major US cities – including Seattle, New York, Chicago, Atlanta, LA, Austin, and Philadelphia – as part of a “guerilla marketing strategy” deployed by the Turner Broadcasting System. The profane mooninites, it so happens, are recurring characters on Turner’s late-night, ‘adult-swim’ cult cartoon “Aqua Teen Hunger Force”, a surreal piece of social commentary – one can only presume – featuring a talking milkshake, sarcastic French fries, and a meatball. 

Soon after the art attack had been decoded, two young installation artists were arrested on the charges of placing a hoax device in a way that results in panic as well as a count of disorderly conduct. Sean Stevens and Peter Berdovsky are freelance video artists. In an apt twist to this zany tale, Berdovsky, who goes by the nickname Zebbler, is a Massachusetts College of Art graduate and Belarusian immigrant who sings in a band called Superfiction and is currently seeking asylum in the US.

Having thus snagged the attention of the media, the two trouble-making bohemians – in an echo of their fine artistic installations – went on to raise a metaphorical middle finger at the authorities in a manner that would make rebels of yore, from the impressionists to the anarchists, proud. Speaking at a press conference after being released on bail, Stevens and Berdovsky refused to apologize for their art, and instead made a mockery of the proceedings by insisting that they would only take questions regarding the most “pressing” of modern-day problems—1970s hairstyles. Seriously. I’ll hazard a guess that the logic behind this decision was that a conversation pitting the mullet against the mop-top would probably be more productive than one analyzing the irresponsibility of their art and the need to further curtail free expression in any medium. Unfortunately, Boston Mayor Thomas Menino was not amused and still plans on suing Turner for the hundreds of thousands of dollars it cost the city to mobilize national security forces and deploy local police on a 12-hour-long wild goose chase for trinkets rather than real terrorists.

In another “only in America” moment, the contentious devices were on sale within 18 odd hours of their discovery at the online auction website eBay, going for a top bid of 625 dollars. Meanwhile, conservative bloggers and commentators took the opportunity to remind America that Islamic fundamentalists with nefarious plans and nuclear warheads were lurking around every corner, ready to destroy the very fabric of American society. They argued that if the devices had indeed been bombs, rather than crass cartoon characters, that Boston had been saved in the nick of time, which just wasn’t good enough to let Middle America sleep easy. Some online conspiracy theorists even began to speculate whether or not Osama bin Laden had relocated to Belarus.

A week on from the mooninite-induced mayhem, and Boston is just beginning to settle down. But the incident will long rankle with sharp-thinking Americans for whom this incident serves as a reminder that six years after 9/11, their compatriots are still scared, inconvenienced by their own terror. After all, it can’t be comforting to know that the authorities have replaced commonsense with caution and a sense of humour with security protocol, to the extent that well-trained policemen can no longer recognize a boorish and badly assembled toy for what it is.

Meanwhile, one can’t help but regret the fact that the most contentious, provocative, and subversive work of art to have shaken citizens of their complacency and garnered endless public attention in the past few years has been the result of a clever advertising campaign by one of the biggest broadcasters, Turner, a bastion of all that is corporate, codified, and capitalist. So much for the struggles of self-respecting bohemians. And so much for the US government’s assertion that the ‘war on terror’ is a battle half won.

This article first appeared in The News in January 2007 and was, incidentally, my first op-ed in a Pakistani newspaper!

Thanks to Channel 4’s “Celebrity Big Brother”, television is back in the news. In a recent episode of the English reality show, Jade Goody accused Shilpa Shetty of being a princess and a “poppadom” with a permanent pait kharab, and the world is beginning to wonder whether Prime Minister Tony Blair watches enough television. Goody’s alleged racism will be debated in Parliament and has even drawn comments from the Archbishop of York. In pubs and classrooms from Manchester to Madras, television is being celebrated as the popular medium that reveals the “ugly underbelly in society”. In a perverse Warhol-ian warp, telly is enjoying its fifteen minutes of fame.

Indeed, the “Big Brother” debacle serves as a good reminder that television cannot yet be written off as oh-so-last-century. This almost comes as a surprise after 2006, the year in which Time magazine declared the video sharing website YouTube to be the Invention of the Year. (Incidentally, among nominees that the site beat out were an eco-friendly, solar-powered catamaran, a vaccine that prevents a cancer-causing STD, and a shirt that can simulate a hug.) But it’s safe to assume that once the Goody-Shetty race-fest subsides, the connected world’s entertainment-hungry eye will revert from the boob tube back to You Tube.

And that’s why Pakistanis on the right side of the digital divide should be curious about how their nation and its people and culture are reflected on the world’s allegedly coolest website. Granted, bite-sized video clips from the Land of the Pure are not up against much thoughtful content. You Tube – which owes its popularity in part to the fact that it is free and allows users to upload, view and share videos without downloading any cumbersome software or plug-ins – hit the big time by broadcasting Saturday Night Live shorts, Star Wars spoofs, home movies of sprightly kittens and farting babies, clips by horny boys from Hong Kong lip-syncing to the Backstreet Boys, David Hasselhoff music videos, and obsessively well-documented teenage angst. Still, trust us Pakistanis to spice up the mix with our unique smattering of amusing, absurd, and atrocious footage.    

A simple search for “Pakistan” on the You Tube engine yields over 6,400 videos, a number of which have scored more than 30,000 views. Not surprisingly, a majority of clips are highlights from cricket matches of yesteryear followed by gushing praise for great catches and scathing commentary on controversial LBWs. Also not surprising is the amount of air time the Pakistan Army gets on You Tube. Innumerable videos comprise of heroic snap shots of saluting jawans, the flag, choppers and Hercules C30s cobbled together and set to dramatic soundtracks—when Junoon, Madam Noor Jehan and Amanat Ali Khan don’t do the trick, amateur filmmakers are happy to revive Mohammad Ali Sheikhi’s invigorating “Beri Fauj Kay Sepahi”. Those who can’t imagine watching audio-visual paeans to the nation and its armed forces for fun should log on to You Tube for the intriguing nuggets of archival footage that are hard to come by otherwise. For example, Generation X-ers (and Y-ers, for that matter) might enjoy watching then foreign minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s legendary 1971 temper tantrum at the UN Security Council along with several speeches by Mohammad Ali Jinnah that have been uploaded almost in their entirety.

            Luckily, guns and wickets are not the only Pakistani contributions to You Tube. We are, after all, a musically inclined bunch. And so, a search for “Pakistani culture” renders naats in every pitch and tone as well as more recent music videos from Aaroh, Call, Mizraab, and, of course, Alamgir. And let’s not forget the titillating excerpts of dance sequences from Lollywood past, present, and future along with more disturbing footage from Lahore’s Heera Mandi (kotha, mujra, and nautch are popular tags used by Pakistani YouTubers to describe the videos they have posted). A slightly more imaginative search also yields disconcerting clips from Pushto-language films: while the dance numbers may be palatable, scenes from a vintage horror flick that include shots of a “hairy she beast” attacking a virile Pathan youth are not recommended viewing. Amusingly, some enterprising videowallahs from Lahore are advertising their shops – located, if anyone’s wondering, around Fortress Stadium – via You Tube by posting badly edited collages of buxom women as they bust a move.

Of course, as in real life, Pakistan’s culture on the website flits between tawdry and touristy as many patriotic Pakistanis have posted well-edited shorts about Pakistan’s topography, artistic and architectural heritage, and indigenous and tribal cultures to the site. Romanticised images of minarets silhouetted against multihued sunsets and Chitrali women carrying water are thankfully interspersed with well-researched, informative clips on diverse aspects of our culture such as woodcutting and Islamic miniatures (check out Javaid A. Malik’s series of films collectively titled “A Look at Pakistani Culture”, produced by Jam-Productions.com for Muslim Round Table Television).

And then there’s that touchy subject of Pakistani politics. Although few and far between, some locally-produced clips do aim to grapple with our tumultuous history and, interestingly, are generating a fairly lively discourse amongst younger Pakistanis who regularly log onto You Tube. Adil Najam’s personal testament to the nation, inspired by Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s “Hum Daikhain Gay”, for example, is a provocative video montage that has sparked off a vibrant online discussion. The film collates images of the Quaid-e-Azam, politicians and policemen, generals and gang-rape victims, crying children and dancing youths, protest rallies gone wrong and magnificent mosques to articulate Najam’s understanding of his nation’s predicament. Through an endless stream of both profound and profane comments about the film, youngsters are debating the merits and demerits of martial law, democracy, Zia’s Islamisation policies, and tentative democracy.

Yet, something’s missing. Hours spent trawling through You Tube videos from Pakistan did not yield a single compelling videoblog (regular diary-style entries that are filmed and subsequently posted to the internet). One or two testaments from anonymous young men in sparse bedrooms calling for peace between India and Pakistan are the only clips that acknowledge the videoblogging phenomenon that has taken the western world by storm. Are we still technologically ill-equipped to videoblog, or are we merely too timid? Do Pakistanis still find safety in anonymity? Are we still too scared to speak up, afraid that an honest commentary may lead to a late-night knock on the door?

If so, we’re not entirely to blame for our reticence. On December 3, 2006, the Iranian government banned You Tube claiming that the site was promoting anti-official content (in this case, that means Iranian pop music videos and clips posted by various opposition groups). Well, that’s one way to do it. As Pakistanis experiment more with the freedom and flexibility that online forums such as You Tube provide, they’ll begin to feel increasingly entitled to say something, anything, whatever comes to mind, about the things that matter to them. The question is, who will, and who won’t, let you tube?

Home of the surreptitious find, Karachi’s infamously amorphous, infinitely anachronistic market is commonly known as Lunda Bazaar. But for those who live and work in this shopper’s El Dorado…

Nilaja Sun’s one-woman play “No Child,” currently being staged at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, is a phenomenal mix of storytelling, journalism, activism, and civic engagement. The 70-minute performance isn’t bogged down by intricate sets, costume changes, or dazzling lighting design. Instead, Sun uses three chairs, a broom, and her ability to embody and humorously animate a dozen characters to start a meaningful conversation about education reform. The fact that it is as tech-free as a theater performance can get without leaving the audience literally sitting in the dark should serve as a lesson for everyone aiming to use new technologies to facilitate social justice.

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“I think it’s sensational to perform in front of a live audience despite the fear of making a mistake without the benefit of a retake.”

Karachi, Pakistan
THE SHOCK and confusion I feel after learning about former prime minister Benazir Bhutto’s assassination is strangely familiar. One incarnation of Benazir, a woman I thought I knew and wanted to be, died on Sept. 19, 1996, when she was implicated in the death of her estranged brother, Mir Murtaza Bhutto, who was brutally shot, allegedly by police officials in a planned attack outside his home.
More stories like this:

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Karachi, Pakistan - When Tourism Minister Nilofer Bakhtiar came under attack from hard-line clerics after she was photographed embracing a man in public, Benazir Bhutto was quick to defend her.

"Benazir and I grew close when she issued a strong statement from Dubai in my favor. Her words were very encouraging because at that time, even my own party was not giving me any support and was, instead, asking for me to step down."

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