by Kim Ghattas
Behind the scenes, Dawalibi was in fact very busy putting pen to paper and turning this nebulous vision into a reality. He helped the Council of Islamic Ideology frame the new Islamic laws, writing them in Arabic at the council’s offices. The laws were then translated into English and Urdu by a team of fifteen. By early 1979, everything was ready.
In Iran, the government of Bakhtiar had fallen on February 11, 1979, and the Islamic revolution had been declared victorious. But just a day earlier, on February 10, Zia had made a forty-eight-minute speech and announced he was imposing Nizam-i-Islam on Pakistan, effective immediately—in other words, Pakistan would now be governed by shari’a (Islamic) law. Nizam, the Arabic word for “system,” is also often used to mean a regime, and so, appropriately, Zia’s dictatorial regime would now rule with an Islamic system of government. This meant changing the country’s legal code and introducing harsh punishments for offenses that violated the boundaries of behavior set by God in the Quran: intoxication, fornication, false allegations of fornication, and theft. The ordinances, known as hudood, Arabic for “boundaries,” were very detailed and took up whole pages in the Pakistani newspapers. From then on, drinkers would be flogged, adulterers would be stoned to death, thieves would have their hands chopped off. More was coming: Zia wanted to Islamize the entire economy, the legal system, society, everything.
The announcement stunned Mehtab, the young television anchor. She had seen the incremental changes around her, she had sensed the fear, she knew there had been public floggings, but it all felt temporary, like an unpleasant dream. And though most of the country was probably equally stunned, it appeared as though Pakistan was celebrating because Zia, an expert stage master and manipulator, had chosen the joyous occasion of the prophet’s birthday to make his announcement. Eid-e-milad-ul-nabi in Urdu, or mawled al-nabi in Arabic, the occasion was just as colorful in Pakistan as it was in Morocco or Indonesia. In big cities and small villages of Pakistan, green flags and bunting hung on the streets, which were lined with food stalls and cultural events. Garlands of bright lights lit up the walls of mosques. The preparations for the celebrations had started days before. On the day itself, the prayers, processions, and children playing on the streets distracted Pakistanis and filled the silence as the nation slipped further into darkness. King Khaled of Saudi Arabia sent a cable to congratulate Zia, saying he was moved and looked forward to “seeing the application of Islamic laws in all Muslim countries.”
Despite the press coverage of Dawalibi’s visits to Pakistan, the extent of his involvement in writing the laws was not made public. There was much secrecy around his role, and only years later would a Pakistani jurist doing a review of the work of the Council of Islamic Ideology uncover what he described as the “revolting” details of what had happened in its offices as Saudi Arabia imposed itself on Pakistan, effectively writing a defining chapter of the country’s history. On February 11, the day after Zia’s announcement of Nizam-i-Islam, the same day that Khomeini declared his victory in Iran, bars, brothels, and breweries were officially shut down in Pakistan. Murree Brewery in Rawalpindi, founded in 1860, had to close its doors, its stock confiscated. Until then, foreigners and non-Muslims had been allowed to consume or produce alcohol, and hotels still served it. But in a flash, ten thousand licenses were revoked across the country. In Khomeini’s Iran, there was still chaos and street battles, but there, too, zealots were destroying bottles of champagne and fine wine.
On February 14, Zia spoke to CBS television and was asked if there were parallels between what he was trying to achieve and what was happening in Iran. “Yes,” replied the general, “there were parallels in that we were first off.” Pakistan had even managed to impose Islamic law with less violence and upheaval than Iran, he added proudly. From Egypt to Pakistan, there seemed to be a desire to emulate or outdo Iran. Perhaps Mawdudi had even accelerated the push for Islamizing Pakistan’s laws when he had seen Khomeini’s revolution picking up steam at the end of 1978 and the ayatollah becoming a media star in Paris. Had he quickened the pace even further after Khomeini had returned to Iran on February 1? After all, Mawdudi had known of the ayatollah’s grand ambitions ever since they had met in 1963 and had inspired some of Khomeini’s vision.
A week later, Mawdudi received the first King Faisal International Award for services to Islam, a prize that carried a cash gift of $200,000, which the Saudis went on to award every year, often to scholars and clerics with radical views. Dawalibi paid Mawdudi a home visit in Lahore to congratulate him on his work. The Saudis would never really acknowledge their role in the transformation of Pakistan, one that they had helped to start before 1979. This was in line with their own worldview, which had nothing whatsoever to do with Iran or Khomeini’s movements. But Iran’s revolution meant that trends that had been simmering, separately but simultaneously, across the Muslim world were now being celebrated and turbocharged, and would start to become entrenched. The ramparts were falling away.
For Pakistan, the impact of the events of 1979, especially the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, meant that Zia was becoming an indispensable ally of Saudi Arabia and the United States and would be able to withstand the repeated challenges by his own people to his oppressive zealot rule.
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Mawdudi died in September 1979. He did not get to see the result of what he had ignited in Pakistan, but his work was done. Since independence, Pakistanis had debated the role of Islam in their country, their government, and their daily life. That debate was over, and the Islamists had won—even though they were still a minority. Within a year, Islamic scholars would be bickering over the gruesome details of punishments to be meted out: should the young thief of a mosque clock have his whole hand amputated or just his fingers? Would the amputated limb be the property of the thief or the state? A bus driver sentenced to be stoned to death for adultery was languishing in jail while the background of the four required witnesses was being reviewed—were they pious enough?
In the early spring of 1979, Mehtab was still hopeful. She was back to presenting a television program on local Sindhi television, interviewing singers, philosophers, poets. The show was lively and popular, a reflection of millennia of Sindhi culture, born in the Indus valley, still alive and thriving in modern Pakistan. She loved those encounters, she drank every word of her guests, her heart swelled with pride. She felt that the soul of Pakistan, born on the same day as she was, was stronger than the dictator. She was still on television.
But on the morning of April 4, 1979, Mehtab wept for her country. At 2:04 a.m., former prime minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was hanged in the courtyard of the Rawalpindi District Jail. Bhutto had been put on trial for allegedly ordering the murder of a political opponent. The verdict at the end of a controversial trial was split, yet he was still sentenced to death. Despite appeals through the courts and pleas for clemency from leaders around the world, Zia sent his opponent to the gallows. There were clashes with the police as Bhutto’s supporters came out to protest in Liaqat Park in Rawalpindi. Women screamed “Death to Zia, death to Zia’s children.” In government offices in Islamabad, men wept. “We are just like Iran now,” said one.
There was something so extraordinary about 1979, with its cascade of events from the ayatollah in Tehran to the fake messiah in Mecca, from massacres in Aleppo to executions in Islamabad, that to some it felt as if the sky were falling to earth. Bizarrely, in a way, it did. That summer marked the demise of NASA’s Skylab space station, in orbit since 1973. On the afternoon on July 12, the 77-ton station crashed through the atmosphere, disintegrating in a blaze of fireworks and scattering its debris over the remote Australian desert. Meanwhile, on earth, whole systems of thought were being altered: in the UK, in May 1979, Margaret Thatcher, leader of the Conservative Party, became the first woman to serve as prime minister. In China, Deng Xiaoping was consolidating his rule and opening up Communist China. They introduced a market revolution on opposite sides of the planet. In the United States, Republican
Ronald Reagan would become president in 1981, ushering in a decade of social conservatism in the United States and marking the end of America’s own era of leftist revolutionary fervor. Big events, like the Zia coup and the Bhutto hanging, obscured the smaller ways in which life was being transformed. Over time, imperceptibly, people’s memories of their own culture and history would be altered. Looking back, they would struggle to pinpoint the exact moment when everything had changed.
But Mehtab would never forget: it was when she was first told she had to wear a veil on television. She felt a chill in her bones. She had been naive and wrong. Not only was Zia staying, but he really was changing the country. The instructions had come from Islamabad in the early months of 1980 and were slowly filtering down to the provinces: the traditional dupatta had to be wrapped tightly around the head as a veil. Mehtab was Muslim and pious but secular: in the world she had grown up in, religion was one’s private business. Her relationship with Islam was suffused with Sufi traditions: visits to the shrine of the eighteenth-century saint Shah Abdullatif Bhittai, evenings spent listening to the poetry of Rumi. Since it was launched in 1964, Pakistani television had shown ballet performances and folk dances, women wore everything from saris to bell-bottoms and sleeveless tops. Mehtab wore a traditional salwar kameez, her dupatta draped around her neck, the two ends hanging down her back. She told her co-presenter, “I’m not going to cover my head because some dictator wants me to cover. He has his own idea of what Pakistani women should look like, he wants to tell the world: ‘Look, our women are so modest, they cover their head.’” Like Khomeini, Zia wanted a visible expression of the country’s alleged newfound piety, what he thought was its true identity. But Mehtab felt strongly: this was not who she was, nor who her family or her friends were, and her dupatta would stay right where it was, on her shoulders. Far from the capital, on provincial Sindhi programs, broadcast after prime time, she got away with it for a while.
She was a rising star, her smile was infectious, her manner easy, and one day she was asked to present an evening program from Karachi on national television. She warned the producer: “I am not veiling.” He agreed. Fear had not yet become pervasive in Pakistan; there were still acts of defiance everywhere, small and big, and there was much eye-rolling at some of the instructions from Islamabad. When Zia banned makeup for female newscasters, they refused to read the news for a week until the rules were eased. Now, in front of an audience in a studio, Mehtab was asking about the hopes and dreams of young Pakistanis: the young journalists with their aspiration for the truth, the architects with their visions for better urban planning, the poets with their verses about freedom. The program was a national sensation, and somehow she got away with it again.
By the fall of 1980 she was anchoring alone, reading and answering letters from viewers on national television. She dominated the screen. With her high cheekbones, her hair pulled up in a tight bun, her delicate earrings, and her barely-there makeup, Mehtab had an Audrey Hepburn quality. For a few months, she presented her show undisturbed by any remonstrations about the dupatta. She never found out whether her bosses had been stalling Islamabad or whether the instructions from the capital were slow to arrive to Karachi. One day, a call came from the presidential office: Mehtab should veil now or be removed. Her producer called her at home in Hyderabad ahead of the next show taping. “We are in trouble,” he told her. “These are the instructions. Please help us.” She didn’t need to think very long. “Okay, I will help you,” she said. “I will not come anymore.”
The producer was so relieved, he thanked her profusely. No one had the heart to fire her, but no one could refuse direct instructions from the dictator any longer. There was no explanation about her sudden departure. For weeks, television viewers wondered what had happened to their favorite presenter. One day, a journalist friend called on Mehtab at her home in Hyderabad. He had traveled three hours from Karachi just to see her. She gave him a cup of tea and told him her story. The following day, the Evening Times printed a front-page story about her with a picture and the headline LA DUPATTA—no dupatta. (Although la is an Arabic word, which was perhaps a mischievous nod to the Arab influence that was introducing these changes.) Mehtab became known in Pakistan as “the woman who said no.” Her family, especially her father, was proud of her. For months, outraged viewers wrote letters: they wanted Mehtab back. One of them complained that the “best lady compere ever produced by Pakistan TV” had been removed for a “very frivolous and petty matter.” Another complained that the television authorities clearly had no regard for the thousands of “viewers young and old, children and women, educated and non-educated who wish to see Mehtab.” The letters were not signed, that would be too dangerous. But they were printed—a small act of defiance by the paper. Mehtab was replaced by a woman who dutifully put on the veil. Who was this mediocre man, Mehtab thought, telling women how they should behave as Muslims? What did he really know about Islam? She hated Zia and promised herself she’d never meet him. She continued to teach. The university also tried to force her to veil but she refused. She told her superiors that her students listened to her and respected her with or without a piece of cloth on her head. She had guts and she knew her religion, her culture. But she was also lucky: she was not the breadwinner for her family and could afford to lose her television job. The university let her stay.
In 1981, the woman who had said no to Zia said yes to the love of her life, Akbar Rashdi, from a well-established Sindhi family from Larkana. The wedding was a big event, and everyone who was anyone in Sindh province came to the celebration in Hyderabad, including the area’s most famous family: the Bhuttos, who lived in near-seclusion under the dictatorship. The evening paper the Star ran a four-page special in full color about the wedding, headlined MEHTAB GETS MARRIED. Mehtab Channa was now Mehtab Rashdi, and she bowed to tradition—not to Zia’s Islam—by lightly placing her red, embroidered dupatta on her head for the ceremony. Pakistanis still had a sense of humor, and the caption for her picture read “Mehtab, don’t let the dupatta slip!” Under another picture of Mehtab and a woman dressed in green with uncovered hair, the caption was “Mehtab and her guest.” The mystery guest was Benazir Bhutto, daughter of Zulfiqar, who carried the political mantle of her family but whose name was not allowed in print in the papers. Though he’d had his former boss killed, Zia still feared the Bhutto name. Benazir and her mother lived under virtual house arrest in Karachi, their 1930s house in the Clifton area surrounded by barbed wire.
Copies of the Star sold like hotcakes. People wanted to know all about the life of their favorite television anchor. But they were also hungry for any news about the Bhuttos, a glimpse of Benazir’s face, a confirmation she was still there, still alive. All criticism of her father—his excesses and mistakes in power—had been forgotten now that he had been made a martyr by Zia. Under the yoke of dictatorship, Pakistanis yearned for the Bhutto days. The authorities were apoplectic. They sent orders to the provincial government to buy up all the copies of the paper and arrest the editor. He went underground for a while, and the paper stopped publishing for some days.
Pakistanis were starting to suffocate. Darkness was enveloping the country, but also silence. The silence was hard to penetrate from the outside world. Fear kept people from speaking, the local press was muzzled, and news coverage of Pakistan was dominated not by the abuses of Zia’s regime but by laudatory reporting of his role in promoting and supporting the war against the Soviets next door in Afghanistan—America’s war. Decades later, when they thought back to the 1980s, the memory of that time would make Pakistanis shudder. Censorship was intensifying; journalists were being lashed, some were hanged. People started to disappear, picked up in the dead of night by the police, their relatives and friends left with no recourse under martial law. There were no more cafés, no more clubs, only deepening fear. Save for the occasional folkloric performance, most stage dancing was banned. Scores of performers left the country, taking with them parts of the coun
try’s memory and heritage. Under the weight of censorship, the vibrant Pakistani movie industry was shrinking and cinemas were shutting down. No new ones were built for decades. Life retreated indoors.
Invisible walls were also rising among communities, between neighbors, and even within families. The seeds of intolerance had been there at the outset of Pakistan’s creation, though they’d been kept mostly buried. Now, Zia was watering them generously, and the Saudis were adding fertilizer. Mehtab had grown up with Hindu neighbors; they visited each other and played together. Soon, some Sunni Pakistanis refused to even have a Hindu cook in their house, because they considered the food impure. As more Pakistanis started to adhere to the puritanical ideas spread under Zia, tensions grew within families. Sons criticized their mothers, grandchildren chided their grandparents and refused to join the centuries-old tradition of religious celebrations infused with local folkloric customs, like visits to shrines of saints, or the Shab-e-Barat, known in Arabic as Laylat al Bara’a, the night of salvation, when prayers are believed to be especially fruitful. Children had always set off firecrackers at dusk on the occasion, and candles stayed lit for the nightlong prayers. This was now heresy for those who were being wooed by hundreds of ultraconservative orthodox clerics, fanning across the country, newly empowered by Zia. They were a mix of local revivalists, like the Jamaat-trained clerics and preachers from the Deobandi school of thought, the subcontinent equivalent of Wahhabism. And there were, of course, constant winds blowing from Saudi Arabia.
