Pakistan

The Wall Street Journal Asia

A PEEK INTO PAKISTAN

A new novel offers a worm’s-eye view of the kinds of lives that rarely make their way to the pages of a newspaper.

By SADANAND DHUME

On the face of it, few countries are in as dire need of a public image makeover as Pakistan. Its best-known exports are the Taliban and contraband nukes. Its airspace commands more attention from Predator drones than from commercial airlines. Its immediate future rests more in the hands of NATO than in those of the WTO. In recent years, the permanently enraged Pakistani mob—protesting Danish cartoons, rumors of Koran desecration, obscure references to Byzantine history by the Pope—has become almost emblematic of the ongoing culture war between radical Islam and the West.

Somewhat paradoxically, Pakistan also happens to be home to some of Asia’s most vibrant new writing in English. Indeed, the country now churns out brilliant novelists the way its cricket team could once be counted on to produce a stream of the world’s best fast bowlers. The most recent addition to an already glittering roster is 25-year-old Ali Sethi, a precocious Harvard graduate who resides in Lahore.

In “The Wish Maker,” his first novel, Mr. Sethi explores modern Pakistan through the lives of Zaki and Samar, near-siblings who come of age together in 1990s Lahore before circumstances launch their lives on sharply divergent paths. Zaki, the book’s narrator, is a sensitive fatherless boy raised in a home bursting with strong-willed women. Samar, though technically Zaki’s aunt once removed, is for all intents and purposes an older sister. Their lives become shorthand for the decisive role family and gender play in shaping the landscape of life’s possibilities for even relatively privileged Pakistanis.

The book’s sharpest insights are reserved for matters of the heart. Mr. Sethi is especially alive to the emotional contours of young love, its modes of courtship, its methods of subterfuge. Samar, hopelessly smitten, seeks to win the affections of her love interest by gifting him imported cologne (Blue Jeans by Versace) and an audiotape filled with love songs (Meat Loaf, Mariah Carey, Bally Sagoo). Ostensible trips to the beauty salon to have her upper lip threaded, and to private classes to sharpen her math skills, serve as cover for trysts forbidden by a deeply conservative society. As detail piles upon detail, the reader cannot help but feel a mounting sense of dread, heightened by Samar’s conscription of the hapless Zaki as a co-conspirator.

Less convincing is the book’s historical reach. Though most of the action takes place in the 1990s, the story spans 60 years of Pakistani history. At times this makes the book groan under the burden of trying to include too much—the poetry of the iconic communist Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s famous promise to give the poor “food, clothing and shelter,” the importance to Pakistan of the three A’s, Army, Allah and America.

As though to make up for this less than rigorous plotting, Mr. Sethi’s prose, always lucid, often soars to illuminate the quotidian. A pre-wedding party dissolves into a “democracy of dance.” A well-groomed hotel manager has the manner of someone “who seemed to reside permanently in morning.” In its heyday in the 1950s, the cosmopolitan port city of Karachi, its cabarets filled with dancers from the Levant and Eastern Europe, appears poised to have the “vision of its successes become its totality.” The city’s subsequent decline is captured by a picture of black, swampy water stinking of fish in the afternoon, and surrounded by “territorial seagulls that were always in a panic.”

Throughout the book, Mr. Sethi is at pains to debunk the idea, not entirely uncommon in America, that Pakistan belongs to the Middle East. Lahore may boast a stadium named for Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi; the math teacher at Zaki’s elite public school may venerate the Arab contribution to his subject; the ban on alcohol in public places may drive the trendy to sheesha bars; the evening news may be read in Arabic in addition to Urdu. But culturally, Zaki and Samar’s Pakistan continues to cleave to idol-worshipping India. At the Lahore store where the duo borrows pirated Bollywood videos, the selection ranges from “Abhimaan” near the entrance to “Zanjeer” on the opposite wall. Spying the Indian actor Amrish Puri in an Indiana Jones movie evokes an instant gasp of recognition.

Mr. Sethi’s narrative may be at times forced, but all in all this remains a novel worth reading, a worm’s eye view of the kinds of lives that rarely make their way to the pages of a newspaper or magazine.

Mr. Dhume is a Washington, D.C. based writer and the author of “My Friend the Fanatic: Travels with a Radical Islamist” (Skyhorse Publishing, 2009).

The Wall Street Journal Asia 

Cultural Cartographer

Novelist Kamila Shamsie maps extremism from Kyoto to Karachi.

Burnt Shadows
By Kamila Shamsie
(Picador, 384 pages, $14)

By SADANAND DHUME

dhumejihadinsouthasia

Far Eastern Economic Review

by Ayesha Jalal, Harvard University Press, 400 pages, $29.95

The November assault on Mumbai by ten heavily-armed members of the Pakistan-based terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba came as a reminder, if one was needed, of South Asia’s trouble with radical Islam. Home to about a third of the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims, the region also houses a plethora of violent groups committed to imposing an austere interpretation of their faith on believers and non-believers alike. Many of these—including the L-e-T and its occasional partner-in arms, Jaish-e-Mohammed—sprung up only in the 1990s. But as Ayesha Jalal, a Pakistan-born historian who teaches at Tufts University in Massachusetts, points out in her new book, in South Asia the intellectual pedigree for violence committed in the name of faith stretches back not decades but centuries.

At the heart of Partisans of Allah is an earnest attempt to understand the concept of jihad. In common parlance it means holy war against non-Muslims, but the word itself—as Ms. Jalal takes great pains to stress—simply signifies striving for a worthy or ennobling cause. Indeed, according to Ms. Jalal, jihad is the core principle of Islamic ethics. At least in theory, it encompasses more than suicide attacks on Indian troops in Kashmir or truck bombs targeting luxury hotels. A student’s endeavor to read a book, a patient’s suffering in a hospital, or a farmer’s effort to increase his crop yield may all be construed as types of jihad.

Usually, this sort of sophistry is the province of apologists for radical Islamic violence eager to explain it away as antithetical to the spirit of the faith. At times Ms. Jalal tilts in this direction—the word “infidel” is used without irony, and a tinge of hagiography enters her description of a group of 19th-century jihadists who fought the Sikhs in the Northwest Frontier. However, to her credit, Ms. Jalal is not concerned with whitewashing the less savory interpretations of jihad, but with ensuring that the term is understood with all its nuance, and in a proper historical context.

Toward this effort, a parade of theologians, scholars and legists pass across the book’s pages. In the 16th century, the liberal policies of the Mughal emperor Akbar—who abolished discriminatory taxes on non-Muslims and strove to treat all faiths equally—earned the ire of Ahmad Sirhindi (1564-1624). Sirhindi claimed that Islam and Hinduism were fundamentally incompatible, and that one could flourish only at the expense of the other. A prolific letter writer and a widely respected Sufi scholar, Sirhindi is credited with the revival of orthodox Islamic practice in India after Akbar’s death.

Of a similar cast of mind was Delhi’s Shah Waliullah (1703-62), the most influential Islamic scholar of his time. His blueprint to extend Islamic law outwards from the family to the local polity to (eventually) the world resonates with radical Muslims to this day. Waliullah shared teachers in what is today Saudi Arabia with Abdul Wahhab, the founder of the austere strain of Islam that bears his name. Waliullah believed in a vast Hindu and Shia conspiracy against Sunni orthodoxy, and sought to ban both the Hindu festival of color, Holi, and Muharram, the Shia commemoration of the martyrdom of the prophet Mohammed’s grandson, Imam Hussein. Waliullah popularized a saying of the prophet according to which participating in jihad was superior to fasting or praying for a month. In a similar vein, extrapolating from the history of seventh-century Arabia, Waliullah declared war booty legitimate for Muslims.

The cleric’s influence outlived him by centuries. Between 1826 and 1831, Waliullah’s most famous disciple, Sayyid Ahmad of Rae Bareilly in north India, led a bloody, though ultimately unsuccessful, jihad in the Northwest frontier against the Sikhs. Even today, Ahmad’s grave is a sacred site visited regularly by modern day jihadists, who have declared war on, among other things, film, music and education for girls.

It was only under British colonial rule—under attack from both Western scholars and Christian missionaries—that prominent Indian Muslims began to reinterpret jihad in less violent terms. Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817-98), the erudite founder of Aligarh’s famous Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental college, argued that Muslims owed their loyalty to the Raj as long as their religious practices were not interfered with. Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835-1908), the founder of the Ahmadiyya sect, felt that jihad as warfare against non-believers had lost its relevance in the modern world, and only contributed toward tarnishing the image of Islam. The Ahmadiyyas instead channeled their efforts toward good works, especially education.

At the outset, Ms. Jalal sets out to breach what she calls the “artificial walls” separating an academic and a general readership. In this, unfortunately, she fails. A potentially gripping read is turned into drudgery by a prose style both dry and somewhat discombobulated. The exception is Ms. Jalal’s examination of the Jamaat-e-Islami’s Abul Ala Maududi (1903-79), who—along with the Egyptians Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb of the Muslim Brotherhood—is widely regarded as the 20th century’s preeminent radical Islamic ideologue.

An admirer of Waliullah, Maududi too believed that warfare for Islam was an exalted form of piety—that fighting resolutely on the battlefield was superior to staying home and praying for 60 years. He saw Islam as a “revolutionary ideology,” which seeks to “alter the social order of the whole world and rebuild it in conformity with its own tenets and ideals.” The faith’s violent history was nothing to be apologetic about. Indeed Islam’s strength lay in the sword’s ability to tear away the veil of misunderstanding that characterizes non-Muslims. For Maududi, art, painting and music belong to jahiliyya, the state of barbarism Muslims ascribe to pre-Islamic Arabs. Apostasy from Islam was akin to treason and therefore punishable by death.

Like Islamic radicals everywhere, Maududi was obsessed with keeping women in their proper place. They were to be respected, but only in the role of nurturing mother, doting sister, devoted wife or dutiful daughter. He believed that menstruation made women physically and mentally infirm, and that they must be excluded from the public sphere altogether. Non-Muslims, inherently unreliable, had no place in the administration of the Islamic state.

In 1953, barely six years after the creation of Pakistan, Maududi joined an agitation to have Ahmadiyyas declared non-Muslim. Their alleged crimes: the veneration of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad as a prophet, albeit a lesser one than Mohammed, and the rejection of armed jihad. In 1974, five years before he died, Maududi witnessed the government of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, eager to co-opt the radical Islamic element in Pakistani society, finally accede to his demands.

As a work of scholarship, Partisans of Allah is not meant to be prescriptive, but its subject matter places it squarely at the heart of the policy debate on how best to handle the rise of radical Islam. For one, it debunks the notion—especially popular on the left—that radical Islamic violence can be explained entirely in the secular language of historical injustice, territorial boundaries and political aspirations. In fact, religious ideas, as attested to by the continuing influence of Waliullah and Maududi, matter profoundly.

Second, and again contrary to conventional wisdom, criticism and firmness will do more than praise and concessions on points of principle to ensure that a modern, good neighborly interpretation of Islam triumphs over the radical Islamic alternative. It’s no coincidence that British rule fostered the relatively moderate Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, whereas 60 years of Pakistani independence have thrown up the likes of Mullah Omar of the Taliban, Hafiz Mohammed Saeed of the L-e-T and Masood Azhar of the J-e-M.

Sadanand Dhume is the author of My Friend the Fanatic: Travels with an Indonesian Islamist. His next book will examine the impact of globalization on India.

YaleGlobal

Global economic integration depends largely on how India and the world deal with Pakistan and its radical Islam.

Sadanand Dhume

	The face of nihilism: Mumbai’s iconic Taj hotel burns after terror attack: captured attacker (inset), alleged Pakistani member of Lashkar-e-Taiba, Ajmal Amir Kasab

NEW DELHI: Even for India, which typically loses many more lives to terrorism in a year than most countries do in a decade, the November 26-28 attacks on Mumbai marked a watershed. For the first time, foreigners – Americans, Japanese, Israelis and Germans, among others – were among the nearly 200 dead and 295 wounded. The scale of the attacks, carried out in 10 places by 10 heavily armed jihadists, made the 2001 terrorist assault on India’s parliament appear almost trivial by comparison. In its audacity and ruthlessness, as well as in the wall-to-wall international coverage it attracted, the assault on Mumbai brought to mind 9/11 in New York and Washington, the bloody Chechen takeover of a school in Beslan in 2004 and the 2005 London suicide bombings.

In many ways, the victims of the carnage in Mumbai represent the integration of markets, peoples and ideas captured by that catchall word – globalization. Both the hotels attacked, the Taj and the Oberoi, are mainstays of high-end business travel. If a global icon – say Bono or Bill Gates or Bill Clinton – has spent a night in India’s financial capital, odds are that he stayed in one or the other. The nearby Nariman House, home to the local branch of the Chabad-Lubavitch orthodox Jewish movement, served as an informal way station for young Israelis, familiar figures on the tourist trails of Asia. Leopold Cafe, where jihadists lobbed a hand grenade and sprayed diners with automatic weapon fire, has long been a backpacker favorite. All in all, the odds of the victims having multiple entry stamps in their passports, friends from more than one country on Facebook and a credit card welcome across borders in their wallets were incomparably higher than in any previous terrorist attack in India.

If the city of Mumbai symbolizes the hopeful face of globalization in South Asia – standing for pluralism, enterprise and openness to ideas and investment – then the Pakistan-trained jihadists responsible for the carnage represent its darker twin. Carved out of British India in 1947 as a homeland for South Asian Muslims, Pakistan has long been a magnet for pan-Islamic radicals from around the world, among them Abdullah Azzam (1941-89), the ideological father of the anti-Soviet Afghan jihad, Al Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, and their comrade in arms Mullah Omar of the Taliban. A plethora of local groups, among them Lashkar-e-Taiba, suspected to be behind the Mumbai attacks, one of whose alleged operatives, Ajmal Amir Kasab, was captured by Indian authorities, and Jaish-e-Mohammed, though organizationally distinct from Al Qaeda, share the same toxic ideology. The L-e-T was among the jihadist groups that banded together in 1998 under the umbrella of bin Laden’s Islamic Front for Jihad against Jews and Crusaders.

Along with Saudi Arabia, Pakistan is the world’s pre-eminent exporter of radical Sunni fervor. The country’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), part of the army, in a sense pioneered the yoking together of modern-weapons training with pan-Islamic religious brainwashing, albeit initially with help from the Central Intelligence Agency. Many Pakistanis are moderate; nonetheless sympathy for radical Islam runs deep. A 2007 poll showed bin Laden with an approval rating of 46 percent, higher than that of many of Pakistani politicians. The radical Islamic outlook – obsessed with the glories of Islamic civilization, hostile toward non-Muslims and non-conformist women, and convinced that Jews and Americans are perpetually plotting against their faith – is shared by many who may formally disapprove of Al Qaeda’s tactics.

Until the most recent incidents in Mumbai, the consensus view in both New Delhi and Washington was that India – with its robust democracy, large middle class and world-beating companies – could sprint toward development despite its dysfunctional neighbor. But the capacity of a handful of terrorists to paralyze life in Mumbai and inflict several billion dollars worth of damage raise profound questions about the basic premise underlying India’s reach for great power status. It should give pause to even the hardiest optimist. Put simply, the world can no longer be certain that a failing Pakistan won’t take India down with it or, at the very least, hobble its efforts to catch up with East Asia.

For India, then, the challenge is not merely to do a better job of combating terrorism within its borders, or to attempt to assuage public anger through a token diplomatic tit-for-tat. New Delhi must also find a way to work with the international community to change the very nature of the Pakistani state. A good neighborly Pakistan will be one that does more than make appropriate noises after every fresh terrorist outrage. It will be a country that holds itself responsible for acts of violence originating on its soil, renounces grandiose extra-territorial ambitions in Indian Kashmir and Afghanistan, and focuses its energies on improving the abysmal levels of health care and education that rank it 136th of 177 countries in the United Nations Human Development Index.

A minimal first step will be to show good faith in what Islamabad now calls a shared fight against terrorism by handing over to Indian authorities Pakistan residents with civilian blood on their hands. Heading the list: the L-e-T leader Hafiz Mohammed Saeed and the Indian mafia don Dawood Ibrahim, a Karachi resident who orchestrated the 1993 Mumbai bombings that killed more than 250 people. Ibrahim is also suspected of using his underworld network to aid the most recent attacks. Terrorist camps on Pakistan territory, including those in the Pakistan-administered portion of Kashmir, must be closed in a way that is verifiable by the international community. Madrassas that have long stoked radicalism in the region – including Jamia Binoria in Karachi and Darul Uloom Haqqania outside Peshawar – must be given a credible ultimatum to either reform or be shuttered.

None of this is possible without dollops of international aid. But aid alone, however well-intentioned, cannot alleviate the problem unless properly directed. More pressing than the need for health clinics and new schools, or even support for Pakistan’s shaky democratic institutions, is military and educational reform. Over the medium to long term, Pakistan must cease to be what the Singaporean scholar Tan Tai Yong has called a “garrison state.” Though the country spends a relatively modest 3.2 percent of gross domestic product on defense, according to Ayesha Siddiqua, an expert on the Pakistan military, its budget, official and unofficial, accounts for as much as 30 percent of government spending. Its army is beyond the control of its putative civilian masters, and reforming or re-orienting the ISI will be impossible as long as Pakistan’s generals continue to wield the kind of clout and wealth that would make a 1970s Latin American strongman blush.

Education reform will have to go much deeper than providing sorely needed infrastructure and boosting enrollment, especially among girls – only about one in three Pakistani women can read and write. The world needs to understand how Pakistanis view history, and find a way to strike a balance between a justified pride in Islam and a celebration of militarism and conquest. Madrassa students ought to be exposed to art, music and literature to see a world beyond the black and white of Koranic injunctions.

Needless to say, none of these measures are easy to implement. But as the carnage in Mumbai shows, and as jihadists the world over appear to instinctively grasp, our rapidly shrinking planet is not large enough for global capitalism and global radical Islam to exist side by side indefinitely.

Sadanand Dhume, a fellow at the Asia Society in Washington, DC, and the author of “My Friend the Fanatic,” a travelogue about radical Islam. Click here to read an excerpt. His next book will examine the impact of globalization on India.

 

 

 

http://globalasia.org/pdf/issue7/v3n3_Dhume.pdf

THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST

By Mohsin Hamid

Harcourt, 192 pages, $22.00

THE ISLAMIST

By Ed Husain

Penguin Global, 304 pages, $18.00

YaleGlobal

Islamists, even when not in power, wield fear and faith to pressure their societies in conservative directions

	Power and faith: Indonesian Muslims pray at a mosque. Outside Islamists wage war on liberalism

Sadanand Dhume

WASHINGTON: In the years since 9/11 two broad narratives have emerged in the West to explain the nature of the so-called War on Terror. On the right it has become commonplace to equate Islamism – the ideology that seeks to order 21st century societies by the medieval norms enshrined in Islamic sharia law – with a long line of totalitarian threats to liberal democracy. Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution, for instance, calls it a “foul apparition that has succeeded fascism, Nazism, and communism as the world’s next bane.” The left, not surprisingly, sees the issue as a product of poverty or flawed policies toward the Middle East. Robert Fisk of The Independent blames Islamist terrorism on “political situations and injustice in various parts of the world.”

Both views are flawed. Conservatives rightly emphasize the power of Islamism as an idea and the global ambitions of its adherents, but fail to acknowledge the movement’s lack of military and intellectual heft, or its limited global appeal compared to communism in its heyday. Liberals correctly point out that talk of a Muslim takeover of Europe is delusional, or at the very least premature. But they fail to see that in the Muslim-majority societies of Asia and the Middle East Islamism remains a powerful and growing force. Better organized, better motivated, backed by the threat of violence and protected by cultural norms that prohibit any criticism of Islam, Islamists are able to alter the nature of society even where they don’t hold formal power. Unless beleaguered moderates from Iraq to Indonesia can find a way to stand down the mob and broaden the war of ideas they’ll continue to lose ground to a tenacious movement that believes it has both God and history on its side.

At first glance the familiar comparison of the War on Terror with the Cold War appears reasonable enough. Like communists, Islamists value the group over the individual, justify the use of violence for political ends and nurture an almost visceral antipathy to a world order dominated by wealthy liberal democracies. Moreover, in this new Cold War Moscow and Beijing can easily be swapped with Riyadh and Tehran, Karl Marx with Al Jazeera’s equally hirsute Yusuf al-Qaradawi, and the Soviet’s World Federation of Democratic Youth with the Saudi-funded World Assembly of Muslim Youth. The threat within – once symbolized by Western communist parties and their sympathizers – is now represented by such Islamist-friendly groups as the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Muslim Council of Britain. Moreover, the argument goes, whereas communist and capitalist proxies skirmished in such remote corners as Angola and Afghanistan, Islamists have brought their battle to the heart of the West. Suddenly New York, London and Madrid are as much battlegrounds as Beirut and Baghdad.

Plausible though it appears, this formulation exaggerates Islamist strength and underestimates the effectiveness of the West’s institutions and the resilience of its societies. True, Islamist intimidation has curbed free speech in some places: the Dutch and the Danes must tread lightly when criticizing Islam or contemplate a life of bodyguards and safe houses. But it has also spawned a generation of bold Muslim thinkers in the West – Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Irshad Manji and Asra Nomani to name just three – who are willing to ask the uncomfortable questions that tend not to be asked in their countries of origin. Terrorism has been contained; only foiled plots make the front pages these days. Moreover, Islamism, steeped in a joyless literal reading of Islam, cannot hope to extend its appeal in the West beyond a minority of a minority – those Muslims drawn to its stark utopian vision. Osama bin Laden’s visage will never grace nearly as many T-Shirts as Che Guevara’s.

The weakness of Islamists in the West is matched by the backwardness of the Muslim world. In its prime the Soviet Union could reasonably claim to match the United States in such varied fields as chess, ballet, mathematics, Olympic sports, aviation technology and space exploration. Strip away the accident of oil wealth from Muslim lands and we’re left with societies that cumulatively boast fewer achievements than a single mid-sized Asian power, albeit an exceptional one, such as Korea.

This reality makes it easy to dismiss the Islamist threat, as do most Western liberals, or to shrink its dimensions to the activities of a handful of terrorist groups – al Qaeda or Southeast Asia’s Jemaah Islamiyah. Yet, paradoxically, it’s precisely the sorry state of Muslim societies that makes Islamism such a formidable force. Reminded daily that they are recipients of God’s final revelation, a large minority of Muslims – perhaps between 10 and 15 percent – embrace the Islamist idea that the cause of their backwardness lies not in a failure to embrace modernity but in a failure to fully embrace their faith. Many more, while not Islamists themselves, are broadly sympathetic to a worldview that’s steeped in conspiracy theories and compulsively blames Muslim failures on outsiders. Jews, Americans and Freemasons are favorite bogeymen.

Of course, neither religious obscurantism nor a lack of self-criticism is a Muslim monopoly. India has its Hindu fundamentalists who riot against Muslims and attack painters and scholars, America its Christians waging war against Darwin in the classroom. Nonetheless the danger to liberal democracy that Islamists pose in Muslim countries is of an entirely different order.

Islamists – although almost always a minority – tend to be better motivated and better organized than their opponents. Weak or sympathetic courts and police allow them to use violence or the threat of violence to control the public square – whether by driving the local edition of Playboy out of Jakarta or by capturing the road to the airport in Beirut. Cultural norms – even in relatively open countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia – put any public criticism of Islam out of bounds. The Spaniard who supports contraception and gay rights can flatly declare that he doesn’t care what the Bible says or what the Pope thinks. An Indonesian or Pakistani who says the same about the Koran and the Prophet Mohammed invites charges of “Islamophobia” and threats of violence.

The influence Islamists exert on the streets and on public discourse has had consequences. Even where they have not claimed formal power – as in Egypt or Pakistan or Indonesia – Islamists have led their societies in an illiberal direction. In Egypt, female university students come under greater pressure to wear the headscarf today than they did a generation ago. In parts of Pakistan, Islamists have declared war on music and soap operas. In Indonesia Christians and heterodox Muslims such as the Ahmadiyya often find their churches and mosques under siege.

In each of these countries those who reject the Islamist message – who believe that gender equity, freedom of speech and freedom of conscience are universal values and not merely Western ones – must do so with one hand tied behind their backs.

So while talk of Islam’s inroads in Washington, London and Paris may indeed be overblown, the special conditions in the Muslim world ensure that the threat to liberal democracy in Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur and Islamabad is not about to disappear any time soon.

dhumeakbarahmed

Far Eastern Economic Review

by Akbar Ahmed, Brookings Institution Press, 323 pages, $28.95

Reviewed by SADANAND DHUME

At a time when a British teacher in Sudan barely escaped a prison term for allowing seven-year-olds to name a teddy bear Muhammad; a Saudi Arabian rape victim needed a royal pardon to evade the prospect of 200 lashes for the crime of being alone with an unrelated man; and Islamists from Gaza to Waziristan step up their war against video stores and barber shops, a book that seeks to explain what exactly is roiling the Muslim world is more than welcome. On the face of it, few people are better qualified to write it than Akbar Ahmed, a Pakistani professor of Islamic studies at American University in Washington, D.C., and, since 9/11, a familiar face on television.

In Journey Into Islam, Mr. Ahmed, accompanied by a clutch of students, travels across much of the Muslim world. In Damascus he dines with mystic sheikhs. In Lahore he rubs shoulders with politicians beneath portraits of Mughal emperors. In Kuala Lumpur he chats with female professionals. In Jakarta he consorts with besieged moderates and militant students. Everywhere he and his students hand out questionnaires to gauge the attitudes and aspirations of the proverbial street. But, unusually for a book of this kind, it is in India that the narrative dwells the longest, and India that provides the analytical prism through which Mr. Ahmed views present-day Islam.

For Mr. Ahmed, three towns in north India—Ajmer in Rajasthan, and Deoband and Aligarh in Uttar Pradesh—capture the range of Muslim responses to globalization and the West. Ajmer, which houses a shrine to the 12th century Sufi saint Moinuddin Chishti, represents a retreat toward a mystical union with the divine. Deoband, birthplace of an ultra orthodox brand of Islam that is the subcontinent’s version of Wahhabism, symbolizes an attempt to defend the faith by adhering strictly to Islam’s core texts. Aligarh, home since 1875 to the famous Mohammedan Anglo-Indian College (now Aligarh Muslim University), stands for the attempt to engage Western ideas while preserving Islamic belief and practice.

Each of these models can claim its share of famous adherents. For the Sufis, there’s the Persian poet Rumi and the female Arab saint Rabia. The modernizers dominate the first half of the 20th century, among them the founder of Pakistan, Mohammed Ali Jinnah and former Iranian Shah Reza Pahlavi. In the literalist Deoband tradition, Mr. Ahmed includes not just the Wahhabis but also such founders of modern Islamism—the drive to impose Shariah law on peoples and governments—as Abul Ala Maududi of the subcontinent’s Jamaat-e-Islami and the Muslim Brotherhood ideologue Sayyid Qutb.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Ahmed finds the Sufis on the defensive, the modernizers in disarray and the Islamists, though he prefers not to use the term, on the ascendant. A popular Deoband writer in India announces that the Taliban and Osama bin Laden are the true champions of Islam. In Indonesia, one in four people surveyed calls bin Laden a role model. In Malaysia the majority profess admiration for such Islamist icons as Qutb and Maududi.

This book makes several important points. It stresses that the Islamic world is not monolithic, and that most Muslims are not on some kind of crazed jihad against the West. It explains that many Muslim women—including many of an Islamist bent—hold responsible jobs and are animated by ideas. It elegantly collapses the crux of Muslim anger into the so-called Taj Syndrome—the Islamic world’s glittering past juxtaposed against its wretched present. It identifi es the inherent tension between the American emphasis on individualism and traditional Muslim attitudes that place greater emphasis on family and community. Mr. Ahmed also deserves to be commended for wearing his erudition lightly; you don’t need to be an expert on Islam or Islamism to grasp his arguments.

And yet, on the whole this is a disappointing book. Nobody expects Mr. Ahmed to be unsympathetic to his faith, but his habit of simply dismissing any Muslim actions he disagrees with as “un-Islamic” is puzzling.

Thus attacks on (Christian and Buddhist) ethnic Chinese in Indonesia are “quite alien to the Islamic values of justice and compassion.” The death sentence (by stoning) handed down by a Shariah court to a Nigerian woman who had a child out of wedlock has “more to do with tribal honor codes and response to globalization than with Islam itself.” The doctrine of armed jihad is defined away as merely “defense of one’s family and community in the face of attack.”

Unwilling or unable to take a hard look at Islam, Mr. Ahmed, predictably enough, turns to America and the West. The usual parade of villains soon surfaces: vengeful American foreign-policy hawks, insensitive Danish cartoonists, chief executive officers of multinational corporations, Christian creators of violent video games and a media “always on the lookout for some controversial issues surrounding Islam.” Globalization, we are informed with lofty certainty, lacks a moral core. Muslims hope to redeem their “honor and dignity” by turning to Mr. bin Laden. Of course, Mr. Ahmed quickly reassures us that this is not quite as alarming as it appears. He has somehow deduced that “many Muslims who sympathize with bin Laden in a broad and general sense would by no means support his more murderous or violent activity.”

When it comes to those who approach Islam and Islamism differently from him, Mr. Ahmed chooses to veil his attacks. Thus it is “scholars of Islam” who consider the distinguished Princeton historian Bernard Lewis to be “the quintessential ‘Orientalist.’” And it falls on unnamed critics to make the somewhat inflammatory allegation that the attacks of 9/11 “would almost be welcome” to Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld because they “would give a new momentum to their neocon worldview.” In a similar vein, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Irshad Manji and Asra Nomani, three of the most outspoken critics of Islam’s treatment of women, are dismissed as appearing “deliberately provocative” to ordinary Muslims.

This failure to grapple with uncomfortable ideas precludes a deeper analysis of what has gone so profoundly wrong. After all, Muslims, as any Vietnamese or Korean can tell you, can hardly claim a monopoly on recent suffering. Nor are they the only people whose past appears superior to their present. Many Indians and Chinese share similar sentiments. And all societies are struggling in their own way with the rapid change, for good and for ill, wrought by the closer integration of peoples and markets.

The trouble, then, is not globalization as such, but that an organized and tenacious minority of Muslims (the Islamists), believes that the cure for economic and political backwardness lies in embracing barbarism. To these true believers, the palpable failure of their project in Iran, Sudan and Taliban-era Afghanistan offers little discouragement.

To suggest, as Mr. Ahmed does, that Islamists must be engaged, rather than unflinchingly opposed, reveals a curious blindness to this fact. For proof he need not look further than his native Pakistan where, as the assassination of Benazir Bhutto shows, an unchecked Islamist movement now threatens the state itself.

Mr. Ahmed believes that reform—though he prefers the term renaissance—must come from within an Islamic framework, and that it must be introduced by those considered credible by fellow Muslims. This appears plausible enough on the face of it. In practice, however, those calling for meaningful change—for the Islamic world to embrace minority rights, women’s rights, freedom of conscience and freedom of inquiry—seem to immediately lose credibility, and those who have credibility appear more interested in obfuscation and apologetics than in change. Unfortunately, unless Muslims can find a way to solve this conundrum, the odds of any kind of renaissance will remain exceedingly slim.

dhumefrontlinepakistan

Far Eastern Economic Review

by Zahid Hussain

Columbia University Press, 232 pages, $24.95

Reviewed by SADANAND DHUME

Even for a nation not exactly synonymous with calm, Pakistan’s turbulence over the past several months has been striking. The ham-handed sacking and subsequent reinstatement of the country’s chief justice, a bloody showdown with armed militants in Islamabad’s sprawling Red Mosque complex, and a spate of suicide bombings have all added to the impression that President Pervez Musharraf’s eight-year rule is sputtering to its inevitable end. To add to his troubles, both Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif—who between them played musical chairs with the prime ministership for much of the 1990s—are gearing up for elections later this year.

Meanwhile, six years after Gen. Musharraf ostensibly abandoned his Taliban allies and threw in his lot with Washington, the international community appears no closer to achieving its goals in the region. Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri remain at large. A resurgent Taliban continues to use sanctuaries in Pakistan to attack NATO forces in Afghanistan and hamper Hamid Karzai’s attempts to put his battered nation back on its feet. Despite billions of dollars in aid and debt relief, anti-Americanism in Pakistan remains rampant. According to a recent survey by the Pew Global Attitudes Project, fewer than two in 10 Pakistanis hold a favorable view of the United States.

Against this backdrop, two more or less opposite views have emerged on Gen. Musharraf and the struggle against militant Islam, or Islamism, the often violent drive to impose Shariah law on society and the state. Those chafing for change argue that only genuine democracy—absent since Gen. Musharraf’s ascent to power in a bloodless coup—can tamp down public anger and produce a government with the legitimacy to crack down on violent local Islamists and their Taliban and al Qaeda allies. Their opponents counter that, like it or not, the army remains the only institution in Pakistan with the wherewithal to take on the Islamists. The solution lies not in abandoning Gen. Musharraf, but in pressuring him to live up to his countless assurances to modernize Pakistan’s society and end terrorism emanating from its soil.

Those seeking a more nuanced view ought to pick up a copy of Frontline Pakistan by veteran Pakistani journalist Zahid Hussain. Mr. Hussain, who writes for The Wall Street Journal and the Times of London among others, traces Pakistan’s present troubles to a series of blunders dating back to the 1970s. Since then both democrats and dictators have nurtured violent Islamism out of political expediency, misplaced piety or geopolitical ambition. One statistic sums up the scale of the problem. When Pakistan gained independence in 1947 it housed 137 madrassas. That number has since swelled to 13,000, between 10% and 15% of which are linked to sectarian militancy (Sunni vs. Shia) or international terrorism. The government has failed to act against even the handful of madrassas that make up a kind of Ivy League of jihadism. In Mr. Hussain’s sobering assessment, “Jihadists have as much if not more power over Pakistan society than Musharraf himself.”

For Muslim-majority countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia, and to a lesser degree for those with large, and in places restive, Muslim minorities such as India and Thailand, Pakistan presents several cautionary lessons. First, that Islamists must be opposed since appeasement only emboldens them. Second, that Islamists do not need to hold formal power, as in Iran or Saudi Arabia, to alter the nature of both society and the state. And finally, that if the West is to have any success in rolling back the Islamist tide it will have to pay less attention to promises made during White House visits, and more to the nitty-gritty of school curricula, public broadcasting and penal codes. He who controls the text books is at least as important as he who controls the tanks.

In Mr. Hussain’s estimation, Pakistan’s slide began during the prime ministership of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, the debonair, Scotch-swilling feudal from Sindh first elected in 1970. Believing that he could coopt the then relatively marginal Islamists, Bhutto banned alcohol and gambling and shuttered night clubs. He replaced the traditional Sunday holiday with Friday and declared the tiny Ahmadiyya sect to be non-Muslim.

Bhutto promoted the pious, unctuous and ultimately treacherous Zia ul-Haq to head the army, and it was after Zia seized power in a coup in 1977 that the Islamization of Pakistan began in earnest. The general established Shariah courts, instituted government collection of zakat (an alms tax), stripped libraries of books deemed un-Islamic, and mandated compulsory prayer for civil servants and marks in their confidential reports for piety. The Quranic Concept of War—which argues that “terror struck in the hearts of the enemies is not only a means, it is the end in itself”—was made mandatory reading for army officers. Many of them subsequently rotated through Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, whose links to violent Islamism, while focused on Afghanistan and India, stretch from Chechnya to the southern Philippines.

Mr. Hussain describes the ISI’s links with Masood Azhar, the militant leader sprung from an Indian jail in 1999 after the hijacking of an Indian Airlines aircraft, with Omar Saeed Sheikh, the London School of Economics dropout implicated in the murder of The Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, and with Dawood Ibrahim, the Indian underworld don who lives in comfortable exile in Karachi after masterminding the 1993 bomb blasts in Mumbai that killed more than 250 people. He recounts public support for bin Laden by senior retired Pakistani generals Aslam Beg and Hamid Gul, who describe the Saudi billionaire as a “great Muslim warrior.”

Perhaps most damningly, Mr. Hussain reveals how A.Q. Khan’s freewheeling nuclear bazaar was anything but the rogue operation claimed by the Pakistani government. Libya had agreed to fund Pakistan’s “Islamic bomb” as early as 1973, and Islamabad’s nuclear cooperation with Iran dates back to the late 1980s. It was under Benazir Bhutto’s democratically elected government in the early 1990s that Mr. Khan first began using military planes to ferry nuclear materials to North Korea.

In the end, however, it is Gen. Musharraf’s vaunted “enlightened moderation” that draws the most trenchant criticism. Mr. Hussain acknowledges that despite its failure—deliberate or otherwise—to nab bin Laden, al-Zawahiri or the Taliban’s Mullah Omar, Pakistan has handed over such al Qaeda stalwarts as 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Yemeni plotter Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and the organization’s alleged No. 3, the Libyan Abu Faraj al-Libbi. But these arrests, which Gen. Musharraf boasts in his autobiography earned Pakistan millions of dollars in bounties, have never been part of a sustained effort against extremism.

Groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, ostensibly banned, have simply changed their names and continued business as usual. Taking a page from Hamas and Hezbollah, they have reinvented themselves as social-welfare organizations. Militants rounded up under international pressure, such as those held after London’s 7/7 bombings, are usually released quietly after a few weeks. The country’s most powerful jihadist madrassas—Jamia Binoria in Karachi and Darul Uloom Haqqania near Peshawar to name just two—remain unmolested.

This is a brave and unflinchingly honest book that’s a must-read for anyone interested in contemporary Pakistan. Unfortunately, Mr. Hussain fails to probe the deeper historical and cultural roots of Pakistan’s present malaise. With hindsight, it’s easy to see why a country created purely on the basis of Islam was always going to have trouble warding off Islamism. As Abul Ala Maududi, the Islamist ideologue and founder of the Jamaat-e-Islami (oddly absent from the pages of this book) asked: what was the point of creating a separate homeland for Muslims if not to implement Islamic law? It’s a question successive generations of Pakistanis will continue to grapple with.

dhume_musharraf

Far Eastern Economic Review

by Pervez Musharraf

Free Press, 368 pages, $28

Reviewed by SADANAND DHUME

On Sept. 19, 2001, as the ashes of the World Trade Center still smoldered, a shaken Gen. Pervez Musharraf went on national television and radio to explain an unpopular decision to his countrymen. He had agreed, under intense American pressure, to throw Pakistan’s support behind the effort to crush the Taliban, al Qaeda’s Afghan host.

The decision was understandably painful given the Taliban’s birth in Pakistan’s fundamentalist madrassas, its nurture by the country’s premier intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, and Islamabad’s long and lonely effort to win international recognition for the bearded rulers of Kabul. Gen. Musharraf sold it by drawing a parallel with an event obscure to non-Muslims but rich with meaning for the faithful: the Treaty of Hudaibiya (628 A.D.), a 10-year truce between the Prophet Muhammad and the then infidel but powerful tribe of Mecca, the Quraish. Two years later a much stronger Mohammed found a pretext to break the pact, leading the Quraish to surrender Mecca without a fight. In the Muslim imagination, Hudaibiya stands as an example of a tactical compromise with an enemy in the interests of a broader strategic gain.

This detail would be merely academic if not for the fact that five years after Gen. Musharraf’s speech his commitment to the war on terror remains questionable to say the least. From last year’s suicide bombings in London, to this summer’s Heathrow Airport bomb plot, to stepped-up attacks on NATO forces in Afghanistan, the trail invariably leads back to Pakistan. Add to that evidence of Islamabad’s complicity in the July train blasts in Mumbai and in supplying nuclear technology to North Korea, and it’s easy to see why historian Niall Ferguson sees the danger of another Sept. 11 style attack coming less from the so-called “axis of evil” than from the “axis of allies”: the Saudis who fund terrorism; the Pakistanis who provide the training; and the British, whose laissez-faire approach to radical Islam has helped create the plotter’s haven known as Londonistan.

Those expecting In the Line of Fire, the general’s much hyped memoir, to show evidence that Pakistan is grappling with its problems will be disappointed. Instead we’re treated to an unintentionally amusing portrait of a man who lends new meaning to the old saw about a book only a mother could love. No detail is too small for the pistol-packing (Glock 17) Gen. Musharraf to boast about. Thus we learn that at college in Lahore he was the fourth-best cross-country runner, stood third in the “Mr. Forman Christian College” bodybuilding competition, and that one Muhammad Iqbal Butt, a former Mr. Universe contestant no less, complimented the future leader on his “most muscular physique.”

Mr. Butt ought to feel honored, for most of Gen. Musharraf’s encomiums are self-generated. At the Pakistan Military Academy, his physical bearing and drill are “so good” that he passes his saluting test on the first try. In short order he becomes “an exceptionally good shot with a rifle and a submachine gun.” His men, of course, love him for being “just and compassionate.” Years later, after the general has seized power from the country’s elected prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, in what he imaginatively calls a countercoup, he even manages to claim credit for allowing the army’s powerful corps commanders to have their say at a meeting to discuss the possible imposition of martial law. For the general this is “normal practice,” we are informed, though such enlightenment is apparently “new to the army.”

The barrage of self-congratulation is laced with an unctuous effort to ingratiate himself with the Western reader, or perhaps prove he is no fundamentalist. We learn, for example, that as a child the general owned a brown dog named Whiskey, and that while his father was posted at the Pakistani embassy in Ankara in the 1950s his parents won first prize in a ballroom dancing competition to celebrate the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.

The attempts to incorporate American metaphors are especially strained. Gen. Musharraf the boy is “something of a Tom Sawyer.” Nazimabad, the low rent neighborhood where the family alights as refugees from Delhi in 1947, is not “the Harlem of Karachi,” but perhaps “the South Bronx.” The mullahs who keep Pakistan on the cutting edge of obscurantism are called “the religious right.” Not to be outdone, his wife-to-be, Sehba, miraculously prefigures today’s People magazine terminology in 1960s Karachi: At first she is appalled by the “fashion disaster” who seeks her hand.

Unintentional humor aside, In the Line of Fire reveals two disquieting aspects of Gen. Musharraf’s personality. The first is a kind of back-alley cunning easily recognizable to anyone who has lived in a country where bribing the meter reader is an acceptable alternative to paying the power company. Gen. Musharraf boasts of “outsmarting” hazers as a young cadet by hiding in the bathroom while his classmates balance tubs of ice cold water on their heads or crawl on all fours. Later he risks expulsion from the academy when caught taking a shortcut during a nine-mile punishment run. As army chief in the summer of 1999, Gen. Musharraf surreptitiously sends soldiers across the line of control that divides Indian and Pakistani Kashmir to capture a clutch of strategic heights. He describes the resulting miniwar, by most accounts a diplomatic and military debacle for Pakistan, as “a tactical marvel of military professionalism.”

More disturbing is his ambivalence toward combating fundamentalism. Gen. Musharraf criticizes former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto not for appeasing “the religious right” by banning liquor and gambling and declaring Friday a holiday instead of Sunday, but for doing so without really believing in it. He comes to the decision to join the war on terror only after “wargaming the U.S. as an adversary.” Only then Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage’s alleged threat to bomb Pakistan “back into the Stone Age” prompts him to abandon the Taliban. “Why should we put our national interest on the line for a primitive regime that would be defeated?”

This ambivalence shows up in other ways as well. On the one hand Gen. Musharraf boasts of handing over 369 al Qaeda operatives to America and earning millions of dollars in bounties. On the other, rather than ask uncomfortable questions about his own society, he casually blames murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl for being careless. He also displays a grudging admiration for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed: “One cannot say that KSM did not have big plans, the biggest of which, 9/11, was carried out with clockwork precision.”

In a similar vein, the book offers an apologetic for Osama bin Laden by referring to the jihad consortium he established in 1998 as the “Islamic World Front” rather than using its rather less innocuous formal name, the “Islamic World Front for the Struggle against Jews and Crusaders.” In Gen. Musharraf’s formulation, the Front is formed merely to “struggle against the occupation of Palestine by Israel.” He repeatedly blames the West for terrorism, arguing that it will only end when “injustices against Muslims are removed,” and claiming that since the July 7 bombers in London were not politically deprived, uneducated or poor, “clearly, their motivation came from the socioeconomic deprivation of their community.”

Ever since Sept. 11, Gen. Musharraf has successfully packaged himself as Pakistan’s last line of defense against radical Islam, a no-nonsense, straight-shooting military man who can be relied on to get the job done. But with attacks on NATO troops in Afghanistan from their Pakistani sanctuaries mounting, and bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Mullah Omar still at large, he will need to do more to prove his sincerity than plucking the occasional unfortunate off his country’s endless terrorist assembly line.

Shedding the odd blend of victimhood and triumphalism that marks much of the Muslim world, and shuttin down the madrassas that fuel jihads in Afghanistan and India would be as good a place to start as any. Until then skeptics will continue to argue that Pakistan’s half-hearted effort in the war on terror is marked by do-the-minimum convenience rather than any real commitment.

Little India

Reflections of an overseas Indian cricket fan.

By Sadanand Dhume

All the plastic chairs are taken, but I haven’t stayed an extra day in Singapore just to stand for eight hours with the baking sun on my neck. The ticket seller, a stern looking woman with a blood-red bindi, has warned me not to enter the cordoned off section of the Ceylon Sports Club marked “members only.” But as soon as she resumes plucking tickets out of a small green booklet I grab my chance and part the crowd with a few well placed excuse-me’s.

I settle into a chair with faded pink upholstery and chipped varnish. Though I’m a little worried about impending humiliation-a tap on the shoulder and a nod toward the exit-it seems worth the risk. From here I have a clear view of a rolled down television screen on which eleven men in green and two in blue have entered a packed stadium in distant Karachi, Pakistan.

On screen, Sachin Tendulkar lashes the ball to the fence. On my right, six rows of men on molded plastic chairs erupt: “HOI, HOI, HOI, HOI.”

“They are Indian workers,” explains the man next to me, a retired Singapore-Indian civil servant with two-day stubble and a rolled up newspaper with a picture of a Chinese girl in an orange lollipop-swirl bikini. “They come whenever there’s a match.”

There are about 350 of them, migrant construction workers from Tamil Nadu, India’s southern-most state; small, gaunt men with toes poking out of scuffed sandals or rubber flip-flops. The lucky ones have claimed the white plastic chairs behind a red tape barrier. The rest stand knitted together at the back or spill out cross-legged on the floor, squeezed against the bar to my left and several rows deep in the space between the screen and the first faded pink chairs.

This is not the first time I’ve hunted down a cricket match in a city not my own. Almost exactly a year ago, I was on the edge of my seat in a stranger’s darkened apartment in New York as India and Pakistan clashed in South Africa in the World Cup. I’ve lingered over matches in hotel rooms in Kuala Lumpur, smoke-filled sports bars in Jakarta, messy dorm rooms in Princeton.

But this match is special. India are playing in Pakistan for the first time in seven years. A lot has happened in the interim: nuclear weapons tests, a mini-war in Kashmir, an Indian plane hijacked to Afghanistan, a terrorist attack on India’s parliament, more than a million soldiers eyeball to eyeball on the border for the better part of a year.

India get off to the kind of start television commentators like to call explosive. Or the kind they might call explosive if I could hear them. Where I sit you can watch, but you can’t listen. The speakers are positioned somewhere in the sea of white plastic chairs, as though to reward the ears of those whose eyes must strain the most, though I’m not sure that anyone can hear a word above the clapping, whistling and hooting.

Of all of India’s defeats, none is seared as deeply in our collective memory as the one in Sharjah in 1986. After that day Sharjah was no longer a place-an Arab city where they sometimes import cricketers to entertain the Indians and Pakistanis who do all the work-but a byword for India’s infinite capacity to lose.

One man in the crowd stands out. A coarse green shirt hangs on his narrow shoulders and his eyes look like he awakes to nightmares.

“Boundary-aa!” he exhorts the Indian batsmen to pummel Pakistan some more. “Boundary-aa, Six-aa! Boundary-aa, Six-aa! Boundary-aa, Six-aa!”

The man charged with meeting his demand is Sachin Tendulkar, perhaps the most iconic figure in India. If you were to combine the popularity of Babe Ruth and Michael Jordan at the height of their powers you might get an approximation of what Tendulkar means to about a billion Indians. It has been 14 years since he first appeared on our TV screens, a scrawny 16-year-old with golliwog hair who could already wield a bat like an executioner’s axe or an opera conductor’s baton.

Pitted against him is Shoaib Akhtar, nicknamed the Rawalpindi Express, the latest in a long line of marauding Pakistani quicks. Akhtar shakes his movie star mane and steams in to bowl-to hurl a white ball across 22 yards at almost 100 miles per hour.

“BOUNDARY-AA, SIX-AA!” screams the man in the green shirt.

Tendulkar smashes the ball and it soars into the Karachi stands. 350 Indians in Singapore are on their feet, their arms outstretched skywards.

“WHOA, WHOA, WHOA, WHOA,” I bark, pumping my clenched right fist.

My first memories of cricket go back to 1978. Another contest between India and Pakistan, this one after a 17-year hiatus in which the two countries had done their fighting on the battlefield rather than the cricket field. I was almost ten-years-old in 1978. My brother had just been born, and my mother was on maternity leave from her government job. I have this picture in my head of walking from the black and white Philips TV in the living room-we called it the drawing room- and coming to a stop outside a bathroom door with peeling white paint to ask my mother a question. I can’t quite remember what it was-maybe the meaning of LBW or the difference between off spin and leg spin-but I’m pretty sure that she knew the answer.

Apart from a girl in third grade, whose name I wrote over and over in a narrow school diary covered with blue plastic, cricket first revealed my obsessive side. I memorized nicknames of West Indians who had played before I was born and batting averages of South Africans whose careers were short-circuited by apartheid. I collected little black and white photos of cricketers in floppy caps and gambled (only with duplicates) with the neighborhood urchins, throwing a picture in the air and shouting “chit” or “photo” as it spiraled to the ground. I lacquered my bat with too much linseed oil and spent scorching summer afternoons thwacking it with a cricket ball in an old sock to improve its “stroke.” I discovered that my mother really didn’t know that much.

Tendulkar gets out. There’s a moment of stunned silence, then another player walks in to wild applause. This time the loss does nothing to slow India’s momentum. Another Indian batsman slams the ball across the ropes and the man in the green shirt is on his feet slicing the air with his arm as he mimics the umpire’s signal for four. “No single! Only four and six!” The camera cuts to a pair of commentators-an Australian and a Pakistani. “Manjrekar coming! Manjrekar coming!” shouts the man in the green shirt invoking the name of an Indian commentator.

You can tell a lot about an overseas Indian by his relationship with cricket. There are those who give up their Indian passports but never give up on the team. To them I ascribe qualities like self-awareness and self-confidence. The other type is personified by the Indian who lands up in Silicon Valley, wipes his mind clean of cricket as though he’s rebooting a hard drive, and starts cheering for the San Francisco Giants or the 49ers. He embodies the slavish side of the Indian personality, the capacity to be dazzled by toilet paper and Burger King.

India lose a few wickets and the tempo slows. The man has slipped off his sandals and unbuttoned his green shirt. He slouches in his plastic chair sipping a large brown bottle of Baron’s beer with a yellow straw. He says something out loud in Tamil. A man with neatly combed hair sitting behind me leans forward.

“You see even an illiterate fellow like this has good knowledge about the game,” he says.

“He’s probably not illiterate. Most South Indians are literate these days,” I respond.

“Okay, but I mean he’s not educated but he still knows a lot about the game. What he is saying is absolutely correct.”

You can tell a lot about an overseas Indian by his relationship with cricket. There are those who give up their Indian passports but never give up on the team. To them I ascribe qualities like self-awareness and self-confidence. The other type is personified by the Indian who lands up in Silicon Valley, wipes his mind clean of cricket as though he’s rebooting a hard drive, and starts cheering for the San Francisco Giants or the 49ers. He embodies the slavish side of the Indian personality, the capacity to be dazzled by toilet paper and Burger King.

The arbiter of correctness is named Keerthi and works as a software manager for the Singapore branch of Halliburton, Dick Cheney’s Halliburton.

By now I’m quite sure that the stern lady with the red bindi is not going to kick me out. I get up to find something to eat and the cross-legged men on the floor pull up their bony knees to let me pass. In a shaded corner just outside the viewing area, large bowls of food sit in a glass cabinet. I pay five Singapore dollars for a paper plate piled with steaming rice, a yellow daal with small pieces of eggplant, shredded cabbage with onions and cumin seeds, and curried mutton ribs. I ask the girl behind the counter to halve the mountain of rice on my plate and she repeats this to the man who had scooped it out from a hot box with an urgency that says she approves of such forbearance.

The Indian batsmen fail to step things up in the last five overs but, thanks to the electric start, they still manage to pile up 349. To overhaul it, Pakistan will have to make the highest score ever for a team batting second. The players file off the field and the screen fills with a commercial for Molty Multifoam Mattress, apparently the best guarantor of a good night’s rest in Pakistan. The man in green has rebuttoned his shirt. He smokes a cigarette, drained, as though a battery in the back of his head has died.

*     *     *

It has been more than four hours since the match began, but the crowd’s enthusiasm shows no signs of flagging. An Indian bowler, Zaheer Khan, strides halfway down the pitch to glare at a Pakistani batsman in the exaggerated way the hero in a Hindi movie glares at the villain. The construction workers titter like schoolgirls. A little later, L. Balaji, a new boy from Tamil Nadu, claims the first Pakistani wicket, sending a batsman’s off stump cartwheeling. We stand up and roar.

“Tamil Nadu Singhamda,” screams the man in green.

“That means Lion of Tamil Nadu,” explains Keerthi.

Another wicket falls, the scoring rate remains tepid, and it begins to look like this match will be one-sided. The Pakistani batsmen are wading into quicksand. They must score quickly to have any hope of reaching the target, but the more they hurry the more likely they are to lose wickets. I’m happy. I haven’t come seeking a cliffhanger.

My throat feels sore so I step outside again for something to drink. When I return, clutching a Styrofoam cup filled with tea, I see a white plastic chair being passed down a row of workers.

I reach out and pass it on as well before settling down to sip my tea, sweet, milky and especially satisfying for having cost only one dollar. It’s only a few minutes later that I notice that the man in the green shirt has disappeared.

“Where’s he gone?” I ask Keerthi, pointing with my eyes to where he had been, to my right, in the first row behind the tape barrier.

We’ve grown so accustomed to failure that some of India’s most cherished sporting accomplishments are defeats–Milkha Singh edged out of the 400 meters bronze at the Rome Olympics, P.T. Usha breasting the tape fourth at the 1984 Los Angeles games. People still talk about almost winning that game against England at the Oval in 1979. Long ago, I concluded that as a nation we actually prefer the sweet sorrow of the near miss to the unfamiliar tang of victory.

“He said something unsportsmanlike so they decided to punish him. That was his chair they were passing around.”

“What did he say?”

“He said something like ‘You Pakistanis, learn to play.’”

“That doesn’t sound that terrible.”

“It’s not sportsmanlike. His friends are the ones who decided to punish him by taking away his chair.”

Keerthi says this with pride. I can’t see what the fuss is about. In my book as long as you cheer the Indian players equally, as long as you cheer the Muslims as you cheer the Hindus, and Tamils and Punjabis as you cheer Maharashtrians and Kannadigas and even the slacker Bengali captain, it doesn’t really matter what you say about the other side. I wish the man in green would come back.

The game is comfortably headed India’s way and then suddenly it isn’t. The quicksand that ought to have reached the Pakistani batsmen’s thighs by now is still below their knees. They plunder India’s captain for 14 runs in one over. We can see Pakistanis dancing in the stands in Karachi. The Ceylon Sports Club is hushed.

Being an Indian is probably easier than being a Pakistani, especially now that we’re known for software and their biggest exports are nukes and terrorists. But being an Indian cricket fan has always been a tribulation, and there isn’t a single one out there who doesn’t have scars on his soul. We lost that series in 1978, going down 2-0 in three matches. In the third, at the same stadium in Karachi as today’s game, two cocky Pakistanis-Imran Khan and Javed Miandad-mauled the Indian captain Bishen Singh Bedi’s lazy, loopy bowling, effectively ending his career. Bedi’s son was in my school at the time. He was a quiet boy, maybe six or seven years old, probably dealing in his own way with being the only person on the planet named Gavasinder. I remember him being pushed around in the schoolyard by a couple of my classmates.

The disappointments kept coming. A year after that tour to Pakistan, I sat up late in the kitchen one night, a crackly transistor radio glued to my ear as India came up nine short of an improbable 438 for victory against England. A quarter century later, I can still hear a Hindi commentator repeating over and over that “India’s position is rather fragile,” words that would etch themselves deeper in my brain with each passing year. In 1983 India pulled off one of cricket’s storied upsets by winning the World Cup.

Yet, though I rejoiced with the rest, in my heart it always felt like a fluke, God’s private joke allowing a group of mild-mannered trundlers to put a spoke in the mighty West Indies machine.

At last, the man in green returns. He has recovered his chair and moved it a little to improve his view. He stretches his legs and smokes a bidi.

“Sachin coming four wickets,” he declares. “No six, only wicket! No chance four, no chance six. Only wicket. Wicket! No six, no chance pa. Confirmed wicket.”

As though by magic, Sachin Tendulkar is handed the ball. He’s a pedestrian bowler, but the man in green has acted as an oracle before and our spines stiffen with anticipation. Tendulkar ambles in and bowls. Yousuf Youhana lifts the ball into the air. It lands in the stands-six runs! The man in green slams his hand on his chair so hard that I worry the plastic may crack.

“SACHIN WICKET!” he screams.

The prayer goes unanswered. Tendulkar continues to take a pounding. After a while, Keerthi leans forward again.

When a match goes down to the wire like this, Indians smell defeat. “Indians lack killer instinct,” someone in the audience will inevitably say, or “Pakistanis are fighters.”
I’ve heard these words as a graduate student in America, where cricket was all that filled the silence on the rare occasion that I found myself at a dinner table with Indian engineers or physicists. I’ve heard it in Jakarta, at the restaurant with lace curtains and too much green chili in the saag where I sometimes watch matches. I’ve probably said it a few times myself, and I’ve always believed it.

“Tendulkar is going for good-length balls and Inzy is hooking them off,” he says. “Instead he should go for a short delivery.”

Keerthi not only knows a lot about cricket; apparently he also knows a lot of cricketers. He used to live in Madras and can reel off names of friends in the Tamil Nadu side. There’s a V. Sivaramakrishnan, who once toured Sri Lanka with the Indian team. He’s not related to L. Sivaramakrishnan, the famous leg-spinner. There’s someone name Girish, who I haven’t heard of either. I ask Keerthi if he knows Sadagoppan Ramesh, a classy left-hand batsman in and out of the national squad. He says they’re good friends.

Balaji returns to bowl again. “Tamil Nadu Singham,” shouts the man in green. But this time Balaji is bludgeoned. A Pakistani slaps the ball for the second four of the over. “Good shot,” says Keerthi. The British packed their bags 54 years ago, but he’s still bent on watching the gentleman’s sport like a gentleman. I wish he would go home.

The camera turns to the Karachi crowd. They’re waving green and white Pakistani flags. A man in a loose salwar kameez whirls like a dervish. I read the lips of a little boy mouthing “Pak-is-tan, Pak-is-tan.”

Of all of India’s defeats, none is seared as deeply in our collective memory as the one in Sharjah in 1986. After that day Sharjah was no longer a place-an Arab city where they sometimes import cricketers to entertain the Indians and Pakistanis who do all the work-but a byword for India’s infinite capacity to lose.

It was a tournament final and for much of the day India looked the better team. But Pakistan fought back until finally they needed four runs off the last ball, not impossible but far from easy. India’s captain pushed his fielders to the boundary ropes in a defensive ring. Chetan Sharma, an innocuous striver, the only kind of fast bowler India seems capable of producing, ran up to bowl to Javed Miandad, the same Miandad who had thrashed the Indian bowlers in that series in Pakistan eight years earlier.

Miandad calmly lifted the ball over midwicket for six. In India, the next day’s papers reported people dying of heart failure brought on by the excitement, though maybe it was really grief that killed them.

It was around that time that I stopped playing cricket. I was never terribly good at it-the bottom always dropped out of my stomach when I faced pace-and then one summer I discovered, of all things, table tennis. You could play TT, as we called it, no matter the weather, and the room with the lopsided table where I whiled away evenings smashing forehands and slicing backhands was right next to the mud-floored court where the neighborhood girls played badminton.

Someone bowls a good over. Keerthi says, “Come on guys. Conserve the next four overs exactly like this. Don’t give runs.” This redeems him a little in my eyes, but then a Pakistani batsman cracks a four and Keerthi says “very good shot.”

Javed Miandad has long retired, but he refuses to go away. The Indian newspapers I read online every morning are full of stories about him in his new incarnation as Pakistan’s coach. Just the other day, Miandad mocked one of India’s promising new fast bowlers as the sort of kid you can find in every back alley in Pakistan. It hurts because it’s probably true. The camera zooms to the Pakistani dressing room balcony. Miandad waves his arms wildly at the batsmen in the middle.

“Oyeh, oyeh,” hiss the construction workers. Their loathing is mixed with fear. It’s as though Miandad is a cricketing version of Freddy Kruger, back to preside over a new generation of our nightmares.

Pakistan need 34 of 24 balls. A comparison chart comes on screen and you can see the Pakistani worm stabbing upwards toward India’s. When a match goes down to the wire like this, Indians smell defeat. “Indians lack killer instinct,” someone in the audience will inevitably say, or “Pakistanis are fighters.”

I’ve heard these words as a graduate student in America, where cricket was all that filled the silence on the rare occasion that I found myself at a dinner table with Indian engineers or physicists. I’ve heard it in Jakarta, at the restaurant with lace curtains and too much green chili in the saag where I sometimes watch matches. I’ve probably said it a few times myself, and I’ve always believed it.

A Pakistani wicket falls. We get up and scream. I shake hands with the man in front of me, an older man in ironed blue jeans and laundered white Nikes. “I think we’ve just broken the sound barrier,” he jokes. But he’s not smiling. It’s pitch dark outside now and pouring. The workers who had started the day with the sun on their backs have inched deeper into the clubhouse.

We’ve grown so accustomed to failure that some of India’s most cherished sporting accomplishments are defeats–Milkha Singh edged out of the 400 meters bronze at the Rome Olympics, P.T. Usha breasting the tape fourth at the 1984 Los Angeles games. People still talk about almost winning that game against England at the Oval in 1979. Long ago, I concluded that as a nation we actually prefer the sweet sorrow of the near miss to the unfamiliar tang of victory.

Yet, I can’t help but notice that something might have changed. Even as Pakistan lope toward the target the Indians refuse to give up. For the first time I can count half a dozen players in the Indian team whose shoulders never droop, who don’t look defeated. They form the core of a side that has notched up a few big wins: beating England in England two years ago, pulverizing Pakistan in last year’s World Cup, squaring a test series against mighty Australia.

Perhaps it’s economic reform that has instilled this new self-confidence. When I was growing up, in Indira Gandhi’s socialist India, we were somehow aware that Pakistanis drove better cars and ate real ketchup. Our only consolation was that we made our own cars and our own crappy ketchup-so what if it tasted like pumpkin.

But India now has beauty pageants and coffee bars. The average Indian has become wealthier than the average Pakistani, or at least less poor. India still makes cars and ketchup, but real cars and real ketchup. Judging by the commercials, across the border they sleep on Molty foam mattresses and wash their hair with English Anti-lice shampoo.

Pakistan need 17 runs off 12 balls with four wickets in hand. Keerthi’s phone rings. “Hello…Ayo, very neck to neck now. India can lose… Ayo, bad.”

Ten runs needed off eight balls. The batsman hits the ball hard and high. Two Indian fielders race toward it. One slides away at the last minute and Mohammad Kaif, the safest pair of hands in the Indian side, pounces on the ball. Out! The Pakistanis in the stadium are silent. So are we, too tense to celebrate. The man in green sits squashed against a corner of his chair, fingers locked.

Nine needed off the last six balls. They get three and then it’s Sharjah all over again. Pakistan need six runs off the last ball. A pace bowler from Delhi (Ashish Nehra) will bowl to an experienced Pakistani batsman (Moin Khan). Nehra bowls. Moin swings. The ball soars into the sky-and straight into an Indian fielder’s hands.

My eyes linger on the screen for a few second to make sure that it’s really over. Then I look for the man in the green shirt and open my arms. His head barely reaches my shoulder, but he lifts me below the waist and whirls me in the air — round and round and round.