A holy fuck

by night, i might be a blogger, but by day i slog through the hours at a shia channel in the UK, where i produce two shows covering politics.

i had tweeted a while back about callers who would shout "youse all are kuffar" before hanging up, but recently something new has started happening.

one of my shows has the blessedly generic name 'behind the headlines' where i round up a week's worth of stories relating to islam and muslims and then three hosts discuss them while taking calls.

last week, we did a show discussing the comments of Jack Straw, a former Labour cabinet minister, that Pakistani men "are preying on white women." the hosts then asked the audience if the statement was a valid one. they also made mention of the fact that Straw's own brother had been put on the sexual offenders list.

now the response was beyond anything our show had seen. pakistani callers of both genders nearly melted the phone lines as they chimed in with their vitriolic responses. but they weren't only concerned with Straw's comments, they were mega pissed that the channel had even brought up the question. in fact, days after the show we were still receiving emails literally bursting at the seams with venom over how our show sought to repeatedly bring up anti-pakistan stories.

now this was something i have long held disdain for. back in pakistan journalists would forever get pillored for promoting a 'negative' image of the country. in a month where pakistan remained in the news for blasphemy rows ranging over issues such as water glasses, business cards and posters, culminating in a brutal murder which was roundly appreciated by all and sundry, it's really not my fucking fault if pakistan is 'looking' bad.

and as my forays into both news and non-news media have blatantly illustrated, everyone loves the controversial, shocking, 'negative' stories far more over any uplifting, positive ones. moreover, i am sick to death of this refrain because if these problems do exist, the worst thing possible would be to start pushing them under the rug.

take the Jack Straw story again. he made his comments a week or so after pakistani gangs who ran prostitution rings got busted. now the stories in all the papers were about how they were using white women. no one bothered mentioning that there were a lot of asian women involved as well. why?

because for people like Jack Straw, the question is one of an event reconfirming a bias brought about their own anxieties. the bias being that pakis are up to no good. the anxiety being that these good-for-nothing pakis are ruining our beloved Blighty.

its not like Straw is alone on this.

for starters, without resorting to anything more than anecdotal evidence and personal experience, there is a impulse, nay a raging desire, amongst pakistani men to fuck white women. its not that they are the most obvious cultural marker of beauty of our globalised society, although its that also, but because of something simpler.

men like to play out their politics on women's bodies.

for the colonised brown man, the pain of being politically subjugated seeks relief through the physical conquering of the coloniser's woman. for the downtrodden minority, doing someone from the majority is meant to alleviate all other miseries.

of course, in actuality this far too often leads to self-hate and eventual acting out etc.

but that never subverts the desire to play out your ideology via a vagina.

take the partition for example. for so long, i have tried to rationalise or attempt to understand why the announcement of a homeland being broken led to a mass explosion of unrestrained sexual violence. i mean we all know about looting, plundering and raping hanging out in the same crowd. but widespread lopping of breasts and collecting them in sacks? forced circumcisions by the dozens? rape at such magnitudes that the governments for both the new nations actually had to develop policies of how to deal with rape-concieved-children-of-the-wrong-faith?

the only answer that makes sense is that the helplessness felt at being uprooted and having your home torn apart was alleviated by forcibly imposing a grotesque level of control through rape.

and its not like this, as we so often like to delude ourselves, was a one-off.

even now, our allums (you know, the big-ass flags you carry in war) are adorned with women. when the woman is aasia, her feminity and humanity are torn off and she is presented simply as evil incarnate. when it comes to aafia, her feminity is ramped up through the selective lens of mehramness, and she ascends as the daughter of the nation. no one has any clue about who they were as people, or even as women, yet deranged fanatics continue to projects their beliefs amidst their breasts.

because when women can be objectified, as a hole to put your dick into, an image to spill your semen on, a symbol for your desire to crawl back up the uterus, a standard bearer for all your morality and anxieties, it allows you to cloak yourself from the actual responsibility of dealing with them.

what do i mean by "dealing with them?"

well, i mean realising they are human.

now, i know you know that. but let's take this conversation down to a basic level. let's take it down to sex.

because you can say whatever the fuck you feel like, and your brain can make as many logical and rational and intellectual arguments as it wants, but your body and its urges always act in what you truly feel. and so its one thing to say platitudes about women, quite another to make love to her in a way which is equitable and enjoyable.

its an idea i have thought about often, even making a short film about this.

and i returned to it in quite a staggering manner. a person i interviewed told me about how in iran, the middle class families would snap up the books by the Imams on jurisprudence and the hijab, but no one would buy the books on sexual advice. and by that, i don't mean stuff about chastity and what not. i mean details on how to find the g-spot, on techniques of love making.

holy fuck, emphasis on holy.

and if you think that this is just khatmal mythology typical of this kuffar sect, check out what the Prophet had to say on this matter.

The Prophet said, "Three people are cruel: . ..a person who has sex with his wife before foreplay.'' (Wasa'il, vol. 14, p. 40) Another hadith equates sex without foreplay to animal behavior: "When anyone of you has sex with his wife, then he should not go to them like birds; instead he should be slow and delaying." (Wasa'il, vol. 14, p. 82) The Prophet said, "No one among you should have sex with his wife like animals; rather there should be a messenger between them." When asked about the messenger, he said, "It means kissing and talking." (Tahzibu'l-Ihya, vol. 3, p. 110)

as i was saying, holy fuck.

because it got me thinking, do all these doyens of religion, and those champions of equality and rationality, ever allow these thoughts into their bedroom? do they ignore the imperatives of their raging hard ons to try and get their wimmin hot and spicy? do all those millions who massed for upholding the Prophet's sanctity and protecting the daughter of the nation, do they try and see if their tongues and their thumbs can locate clitorises (or is it clitori?) does maulana fazlur rehman consider that reverse cow-girl might not be as fun for him, but it could be more fun for his zoja? or do our chest-thumping, equality now bloggeratis pause their impending premature ejaculations in an attempt to at least try and ensure that the match doesn't end with the female orgasm stranded on a golden duck?

cause eventually, all this talk of politics and rights and ideals are smokescreens obfuscating your own agendas, insecurities and beliefs. stop the talking, let your actions (and i mean this in the most colloquial sense of the word) prove your worth.

Phallic Phallacies

AMpakistanis who have lived abroad, or more likely studied abroad, always carry a hang up of having been there. they love making endless comparisons, using it perpetually in arguments, talking about the best quiche they ever had, the most stunning concert they heard, the most fun they had, the best drink they ever tasted - while they were abroad.
i should know - i am one of them.

my stories inevitably begin with "when i was in america..."

so this is one of them stories. *these*

when i was in america, at my college, we would have a weekly assembly, where people from various countries would mark their country's independence day with a presentation about their country, they would play their music and dress in their native clothes, and talk about their country in general.

now firstly 14th august fell during the summer vacations, so i didn't have an option for that. but in my second year me and my first year country mate did do something for 23rd march.

back in 2002, pakistan was a country not many people knew about, and almost no one gave a shit about. in essence, the good old days.we forsook the talking about our country for a two minute video. the first slide began with the claim that pakistan was a country that was the bomb.

that was followed by a montage of pictures of beautiful pakistani women, and those of our nuclear missiles, played over salman ahmed's version of the national anthem.

as i recalled that incident now, the first thing that struck me was how incredibly misogynist it was. but i also recalled it as a deliberate attempt by us about making people know where and what pakistan was by making obvious the two most shocking things about our country - that we had women who were not wearing burkhas, and that we had a far more naked nuclear obsession.

my friends were genuinely surprised, perhaps because at age 16-18 kids are not as politically inclined.

regardless, the prinicpal was aghast - she summoned us and lectured us about the inappropriateness of the message we were putting out about our country. she was almost weeping when she spoke about how much she would hate someone portraying her native Colombia in such a manner.

thinking about it now, i wonder why i decided to present pakistan in such a manner. instinctively, the first response i recall was wanting people to realise what and where pakistan was - i mean before the epicenter of terrorism stuff most people thought of us as somewhere between saddam and apu.i also remember that at that time i found our nuclear pride a bit hilarious - i didn't know whether to laugh or cry when the people of our bum fucked nation were distributing sweets in public to celebrate the nuclear tests.yet, i am still not sure if my eventual message was as genuinely satirical as i recall. because eventually, i was projecting the two things pakistan the nation, the construct and the state love doing - brandying off our nuclear power, and exploiting our women.


essentially, both impulses arise out of the strenuously patriarchal nature of our society. the phallic missiles aside, the nuclear bomb is a blatant display of geopolitical machismo.
it is perhaps the IR equivalent of wearing one of these.
as for women, i don't know if i really need to qualify anything here. women in pakistan exist in a surreal reality.
they are upheld as the barometer of our morality and values, and are hence punished barbarically if they stray even in the slightest from the standards we uphold for ourselves...
...yet at the same time, it is a national pastime to ogle at women, to fantasize about women, to poke women's private parts in public places, to fornicate with women with or without their consent.

for many young pakistani males, getting together to bang a hooker is an acceptable weekend activity. if my former driver is to be believed, in rural areas getting together to gang bang any woman is acceptable weekend activity.
we have found ways to make sleeping with nine year olds religiously acceptable, and if we feel that we must protect their honor, we have found justifications for marrying them off to the Holy Book.

essentially then, the interplay between women and nukes was so vital in my presentation (even though i didn't realise it) because it represents the pakistani psyche, with both elements representing integral parts of our masculinity - with the nukes being the national penis, and the women being the national penis receptacle.

put in such a context one can understand why just about every problem in pakistan is inevitably attributed to a foreign ploy designed to steal our nukes. in essence, we are afraid of being castrated by the big white man. we are afraid they will take away our penises.
so even though we are largely poor and illiterate as a nation, and remarkably fucking corrupt and lest we forget, in the eye of the global shitstorm, our primary obsession is the nukes and their planned theft.
because, as i just said, without the nukes we would be chakkay, heejray, na-mard.
so imagine the delightful irony of this delightful situation, described here in the words of my colleague

"The entire national security doctrine is based on the revenge of a lover..."

it appears that a couple of pakistani nuke scientists - oh those epitomes of our nation's valor - were willing to fucking sell out the nation's grassy diet for a little bit of cash. if we extend our analogy here in, some pakistani males were willing to castrate our national lun to buy some rolexes or what not. to make these guys even more scum of the earth, one of these fuckers had an office romance (which i find abhorrent) and then decided to jilt his lover.

motha-fucka.

in essence, the pakistani male is willing to chop off his own cock for the sake of some money, which he would probably spend on getting a hooker upon which he would realise that he no longer has a dick and thus the money and his penis would both go to waste.
now, as my fiance reminded me, it was a woman however, who helped us retain our luns, and thus through perverted pakistani logic, our murdangi.
and what makes this woman, who was also a nuclear scientist by the way, even more impressive, is that she did not do it for the national cock, but rather out of the fury generated by a love betrayed.
now if there is one thing we can do right, it's love. love is a good enough reason to do anything, and if someone fucks with your love, being delivered to the ISI is a pretty easy let off.

so next time you bitch and moan about the fact that the foreigners are looking to castrate the nation and run off with the nukes, remind yourself that those who rule, those who obsess about their phalluses the most, are the ones that are most willing to sell them off for some money.

like every other problem in pakistan, it seems that only those who are getting fucked will be around to save the country (and it's penis) when it needs them.