Humanizing the Demons

when i was first introduced to the history of colonialism, it struck a well-spring of thoughts i had harbored but was never sure of how to ever articulate.

one thing i often wondered about was how did the colonials act the way they did. didn't they realise how they were acting?

of late though, i have started having a sneaking suspicion that when history is written, i may end up on the wrong side of it - intellectually speaking. i eventually came to the conclusion that it wouldn't really matter what side of history one resides at, as long as i can end my life trying to be true to myself.
so in an attempt to be true to one's self, i started thinking about the militants currently running rampage in our country, who are a bit hard to notice for most of us since the sand our heads are buried in stings if we open our eyes.

then, one of my favorite blogs did a piece on the taliban. i left a long, rambling and largely incoherent comment on my own take on the matter, which went as so:

i don't think that there is a difference between their religious goals and their political goals. its just how they understand islam,

i think one reason muslims countries and cultures were so taken aback by colonialism/modernism etc was that islam stopped being the basis of the whole universe, and became something that could be analysed and looked at separately.

and in the reality of the modern world, the ideas muslim had about the world were incompatible and unworkable, so religious thought continued to stagnate and fester, and modernity and science took the place of islam as the basis of the universe.

the taliban, who were themselves seemingly out of the midst of modernity, embarked on a campaign that aligned religious and political goals as one.

unfortunately, the taliban are very much a product of post-modernity/post-colonialism. and so, their ideas of islam are subservient to their political goals, which i think are to expand their culture of extreme patriarchy.

islam is just a banner. but before we make that comment, i think it is important to realize that just because they are wrong, it doesn't mean anyone else has the right idea about islam's place in the contemporary world. mainly because people try desperately hard to align islam to modern thought, or copy+paste islamic ideals from times long past.

the important thing for those who say "the taliban don't follow 'real' islam" is that there is no real islam. there is no orthodox islam, as even sunni beliefs are split within their own schools of thought. therefore, islam is only meant to be interpreted. as you can see with the taliban, their interpretations are through the prism of their patriarchal set of views.

the taliban can only be ideologically defeated if there is an islamic reawakening, which robs them off their stranglehold over islamic interpretation. while that may sound stupid, it staggers the mind that in the 30s iqbal was explaining interpreting existentialism through an islamic reasoning. now most muslims can't spell existentialism.

(finally, before the secular types get offended, i mean islam and muslim in the same sense as the term islamic art. that is to say islam in not just a religious sense, but cultural, hereditary sense. so my conceptualization is meant to include oxymorons like secular muslims.)

only minutes after that comment, i came across this video.



and its fascinating on two levels. firstly, when i saw it, and read slate's description of the photos showing the taliban in "effeminate" poses, i laughed, and thought to myself, "you goras just don't get it"

i mean, long hair, kohl-laden eyes and men holding hands, come on - that's been going on in this sexually stifled society for so long. and i had addressed the issue before as well, after a trip to peshawer.

but slowly, as the video progressed, something started to bite at me. which side of the divide was i on? the native who was able to see the limits and confusions of the foreigner's perceptions? or the foreigner, unable to understand and comprehend what i was seeing outside the sphere of my own perceptions, which were markedly different from the people in the pictures?

its a thought that sometimes gnaws at me. are we not demonising the militants? don't get me wrong, they perform monstrous acts. but they are human as well, aren't they?

you may retort, what sort of 'humans' chop off heads with wanton abandon, kill entire families for wardrobe malfunctions, skin people alive, bomb educational institutions etc etc...

but none of that removes us from the fact that they are human, and worse yet, our compatriots, our countrymen.

let's pause for a second.

a friend of mine wrote this great piece for The News today.

it echoed thoughts several of us had been having in the aftermath of gaza. and perhaps i have finally understood the answer to the question HYD is posing.

yes, we protest the gaza atrocities because it allows us to jump on the bandwagon. yes, we protest the gaza atrocities because more than anything else israel bashing unites us all. yes, we protest the gaza atrocities because it gives us a sense of purpose.

but here is why we don't protest swat. or fata.

its because we genuinely don't understand. for us, the militants are like the ebola virus, or aids, or the plague. one doesn't really get how to tackle something like that. we can't understand the militants as human - for us they are the stuff of nightmares, the azaab of Allah, ravenous beasts that only know how to kill.

some might trot out the excuse of "well if your family was killed by a drone strike then you would become like this as well."

whatta load of bullshit.

you do not unleash brutal violence on entire populations relentlessly just because you are just like bruce lee avenging his brother's/father's/lover's death at the hands of the villain at the beginning of the movie.

no.

there has to be something else that causes such grotesque brutality. that gives rise to such an unabashed lust for violence.

the answer is our society, our people, us - bereft of an identity, of an ideology, of coherent thought, we have hobbled together empty slogans to hide our need to obey our id.

and its not just the militants alone who are like this. just because their violence is more immediate, more graphic does not make it different from ours.