by Kim Ghattas
Clerics were gaining influence everywhere: In the bureaucracy, civil servants sought promotions with overt expressions of religiousness; the army now held Quran study groups. Women were banned from playing sports in public; the national women’s hockey team, one of the world’s best, was forbidden from leaving the country. History was also being rewritten. Jinnah, the secular father of the nation, had a makeover: he was no longer shown in Western clothes in official portraits, only in traditional dress. References to pluralism and freedom of faith in Jinnah’s 1947 speech were scrubbed from the record. The methodical, relentless, systemwide changes were akin to a cultural revolution, unparalleled in the history of Islam in the subcontinent but cleaving closely to what was happening in Iran and Saudi Arabia. Although the Jamaat had been in awe of the Iranian Revolution, its leader saw Saudi Arabia as the more perfect model to emulate, with full segregation, banishment of women from the workplace, a ban on women driving, and the male guardianship system.
Zia had caused worldwide consternation when he had Bhutto hanged. He drew rebukes from the West over the abuse of human rights in his first years in power. But once the war against the Soviets began, none of it mattered anymore. Zia was now an essential partner to America and money flowed into the country—official aid from the West and covert assistance from the Gulf funded the Afghan mujahedeen. The survival of Zia’s regime was ensured, its longevity a sin helped by the outside world—a sin that Pakistanis would struggle to forgive, especially its women. Mehtab had perhaps been right—Zia would not have lasted in feisty, boisterous Pakistan had it not been for the geopolitics that dictated his survival.
No one really knows how many thieves had their hands amputated, perhaps none; or how many people were flogged during those years—many, too many. Information was scarce. In the first years of Zia’s regime, floggings and hangings were a public affair in the village square or city stadiums, but within a couple of years, the national outcry forced the authorities to conduct this grim business out of the public view. One thing was certain and documented: women were the biggest losers under Zia. During the 1960s and early 1970s, Pakistan had adopted very progressive laws ensuring a woman’s right to divorce, restricting polygamy, and even prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex. National literacy rates were still low, even more so for women, but they were rising steadily for everyone. Enrollment of girls in schools and universities was skyrocketing in cities. Women were beginning to participate in politics, they were rising as judges. This is why, despite the long road ahead for a deeply conservative society, Mehtab had believed she was part of a forward-looking country, where the future of women looked brighter. Neither she nor her friends had been looking for Western-style women’s rights; they did not speak in the radical terms of American feminists. “We have to exist with men,” Mehtab would tell those around her—with men and within their own society and its conventions. The uncompromising attitudes of the “women’s libbers” she had met in America was “an extreme position, confrontation was no good.” Gradual change had paid off. Now Zia was threatening to yank women back into purdah.
* * *
The women fought back. They started organizing, early and often. Activism was driven mostly by urban elites, but women of all classes soon joined as they chafed under the weight of the hudood ordinances that were being abused by men to settle scores and send defenseless daughters, wives, or sisters to jail on bogus allegations of adultery or other sins. In 1983, Zia and the Council of Islamic Ideology worked to introduce a number of laws that would reduce women to half citizens based on the shari’a: their testimony was equal to only half a man’s in court; their lives were worth half a man’s in blood money. The protests started, small at first, then swelling all year long, spreading across the country, bringing together women of all classes: peasants and teachers, activists and housewives.
On March 3, 1983, two hundred women protested in Lahore. They faced off with the police in a huge melee that lasted hours. Some of the women seized clubs from the hands of the police and beat them back. In another protest, which would produce an iconic picture, women burned their dupattas. Men joined too, like Mehtab’s husband, or Salmaan Taseer, a rising star in Bhutto’s People’s Party of Pakistan and a confidant of his daughter Benazir. He had been thrown in jail by Zia in 1977 and then gone into exile for a few years. But he was back in Lahore with his young wife, Aamna, and he would end up back in a prison repeatedly, for months at a time. In three decades, he would become governor of Punjab, and his continued resistance to the insanity unleashed by Islamization would get him killed, not by Zia but by the monstrous forces the dictator had created. For now, Taseer protested, with almost naive hope that the dictatorship could be toppled.
There were more demonstrations throughout the year. Thousands of women and men, Pakistanis of all classes and faiths, set fire to government buildings, disrupted rail lines, and clashed with police endlessly. By October, four thousand people had been arrested across the country. The tale of how Pakistanis tried to resist Zia barely made international headlines, drowned out by the war in Afghanistan. One day the world would awaken to a changed country and believe it had always been like that. But Zia barely survived the relentless pressure of protests and had to use every stratagem not only to remain in power but to make colorful, vibrant, diverse Pakistan conform to the monochrome image of the perfect Islamic society he had envisioned with the likes of Mawdudi.
Zia promised he would finally organize elections in 1985, but first the cunning dictator held a quickly organized referendum with a convoluted question: in summary, he asked Pakistanis whether they wanted Zia to continue making Pakistan a model Muslim country, in accordance with the Quran. This was a trick question. There was no one else but Zia on the ballot to carry out this task, but who could really cast a ballot and say no to Islam? The opposition was not even allowed to run a no campaign. In saying yes, voters were asking Zia to stay on. The result, on December 20, 1984, was a resounding 97.2 percent yes vote. But the polling stations had been deserted all day. Zia claimed a turnout of 62 percent; the opposition put the number at 10 percent, with multiple irregularities.
One of Pakistan’s greatest Urdu poets of the twentieth century, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, had spent the first few years of Zia’s time in power in prison and then in exile in Beirut, preferring the chaos of Lebanon’s civil war to the darkness of repression. An uncle and mentor of Taseer, the leftist poet of love and revolution had embraced the intellectual effervescence of Lebanon and found kindred spirits among the Palestinian revolutionaries sitting on café terraces during cease-fires. But the Palestinians kept attracting worse and worse Israeli retaliation and, in the summer of 1982, Israeli tanks reached Beirut. Faiz and his wife were forced to flee and return to Pakistan. He died in his home country a month before Zia’s referendum, perhaps in anticipation of the unbearable realization that the general had found a way, yet again, to stay in power. Faiz’s revolutionary poetry was still banned by the regime, but one woman, a singer, defied Zia. It was always the women of Pakistan who gave the dictator the most grief.
A year after the poet’s death, Iqbal Bano, a national icon, obtained rare permission to hold a concert in Lahore. There were some things even Zia couldn’t refuse. And there was a way of getting around the ban of singing and dancing: asking for permission to hold a “cultural event.” Bano wore a sari, a dress forbidden under Zia both because it was associated with enemy India and because it showed a woman’s midriff. And then she lent her voice, powerful but melodious, controlled but emotional, to the most defiant of all of Faiz’s verses, written in 1979 in protest at Zia’s authoritarian Islam. Hum dekhenge, she sang, we shall witness. For ten long minutes she sang the verses as the emotions of the crowd of fifty thousand Pakistanis rose and swelled with her, applause punctuating every pause.
We shall witness
It is certain that we too, shall witness
the day that has been promised
of which has been written on the
slate of eternity
When the enormous mountains of tyranny blow away like cotton.
Under our feet—the feet of the oppressed—when the earth will pulsate deafeningly
and on the heads of our rulers when lightning will strike.
From the abode of God
When icons of falsehood will be taken out,
When we—the faithful—who have been barred out of sacred places
will be seated on high cushions,
When the crowns will be tossed,
When the thrones will be brought down,
Only Thy name will survive.
Faiz’s verses were deeply subversive. And they seemed directed not only at Zia the oppressor but also at those who proclaimed themselves the guardians of sacred places: the Saudis. There were screams of Inqilab zindabad at the concert: long live the revolution, in Urdu, long live the fight against Zia. A live recording of the song was smuggled out, and copies made on cassette tapes were passed around secretly and copied again until they had traveled well beyond the country’s borders. The Pakistan that Faiz had known was dying. So was the Beirut he had loved and left. The Lebanon of Musa Sadr and Hussein al-Husseini was no more.
7
KARBALA IN BEIRUT
LEBANON
1982–88
We are from Beirut, alas, we were born
With borrowed faces and with borrowed minds
Our thoughts are born whores in the marketplaces
Then spend their lives pretending to be virgins.
—Khalil Hawi, River of Ashes
In the summer of 1982, Beirut witnessed an invasion, a massacre, an evacuation. Ideas and ideologies died. And then came a black wave. But first, the Beirut of old had to perish. That summer, before he was forced to leave, Faiz wrote a farewell ode to the city that had sheltered him for five years from the wrath of Zia. The Pakistani poet had arrived in 1978, three years into Lebanon’s civil war. He had preferred it to the strangulating darkness descending on his home country. The darkness in Beirut was mostly made of gunfights and power cuts, which felt like mere interruptions to morning walks on the seaside corniche or coffee- and cigarette-smoke-filled evenings in the cafés of Hamra Street, on the western side in Ras Beirut—literally, Head of Beirut—the tip of the city jutting into the sea. Often likened to the Champs-Élysées, Hamra was more of a Greenwich Village, a place of intellectual and artistic experimentation since the 1950s, where each political or artistic trend had its café.
With the arrival of the Cold War’s proxy wars to the shores of the Levant, ripping open Lebanon’s internal cleavages, Beirut was slowly being torn apart, the ravaged downtown splitting it into east and west, Muslim and Christian. Despite the deadly daily fireworks, the city had so far maintained its status as the capital of Arab modernity, a shelter for exiles and émigrés like Faiz, a platform for debate. On Hamra Street, vendors still sold newspapers and magazines printed by every single possible party or ideological camp in the region: pro-Iraqi, pro-Syrian, Nasserist, atheist or pro-Khomeini, communist or pro-American. The displays were a testament to an Arab world that still bubbled up ideas and dreams in a city that provided the liberty to think them, offering enlightenment at the crossroads between modernity and tradition. In a region that was now an authoritarian wasteland, Beirut, even at war, still offered freedom and ferment for intellectuals from Egypt to Pakistan. Faiz was deeply engaged in the Third World and revolutionary politics, and he became immersed in the Palestinian cause, writing odes to Palestinian guerrilla fighters and dedicating one of his final collections to Yasser Arafat himself, whose freedom fighters were murderous terrorists in the eyes of the United States, Israel, and others. In Beirut, Faiz became editor of Lotus magazine, a trilingual quarterly of international literature funded by the Soviet Union, Egypt, East Germany, and the PLO. With his Arabic degree, Faiz was the first non-Arab editor of the magazine. He and his adventurous British wife, Alys, settled into a city that allowed them to defy Zia from a distance. For decades, Lebanon had lured not just revolutionaries but also poets, ideologues, artists, and all types of opposition figures and plotters. A weak state was both a blessing and a curse. In Beirut, there was no dictatorship to muzzle opinions—or your guns. The war had made the small Mediterranean country even more of a haven, a live training ground with a casino and restaurants that still served smoked salmon and caviar during cease-fires. There were breadlines and economic hardship, massacres and literary conferences. Every spy agency was in town: the CIA, the KGB, the Mossad.
Arafat, his men, and a plethora of Palestinian splinter factions were still running around like they owned half the country, the tentacles of their presence extending well beyond their staging post in the south on the border with Israel. Supporters of their cause in Lebanon were oblivious to this abuse of the country’s sovereignty. Their foes were many, ruthless and bloodthirsty in brutal massacres to eliminate the Palestinian banner from Lebanon.
But first, in the summer of 1982, Beirut died, emptied of its soul, losing its shine and whatever innocence had survived five years of fratricidal war. Husseini, the Shia politician, had already quit the leadership of Amal, unable to accept that the party he had founded with Imam Sadr was a party to such killings. At eleven in the morning on June 6, hundreds of Israeli Merkava tanks and armored personnel carriers rumbled into Lebanon. Operation Peace for Galilee had begun. The Israelis had tried a clean-up operation before in 1978, invading Lebanon during a weeklong incursion that displaced tens of thousands and killed hundreds on the Lebanese side of the border. The Israelis left behind a border zone controlled by an allied, mostly Christian, militia. They tried to engage with the Shias of the area by allowing them to work in Israel, organizing Ashura celebrations, and arranging for several thousand Shias to visit a shrine located in Israel. The villagers resented the Israelis but they hated the Palestinians more. The Palestinian guerrillas remained undaunted, launching rocket attacks and even crossing into Israel for deadly operations against Israeli civilians. In the summer of 1981, a cease-fire had been declared, which held for many months. The trigger for Operation Peace for Galilee was the assassination of the Israeli ambassador in London, which Israel considered a breach of the cease-fire agreement on the border with Lebanon.
Ostensibly, the goal was to push the Palestinians back twenty-five miles from the border. In reality, the invasion would end up going all the way to Beirut with the goal of helping to shore up Israel’s Christian allies in the country. The capital of Lebanon would be besieged, bombed, starved, and parched for weeks until Arafat and his men agreed to leave the country where they had provoked a civil war, splitting nationalists against revolutionaries, left against right, Muslims against Christians. They were evacuated through northern Lebanon and eventually landed in Tunis where the PLO set up its headquarters. In southern Lebanon, Shias greeted the Israelis with handfuls of rice and cheers, relieved to be rid of Arafat and his men. Amal had initially instructed its fighters in the south not to resist and to hand over their weapons if requested. For a while, Israeli soldiers would walk around, shop, and go to the cinema in the southern cities of Tyre and Sidon. Israeli businessmen would drive up across the border to explore business opportunities in Lebanon. None of it would last. The liberators would become hated occupiers very quickly.
But first, at 10:30 on that evening of June 6, one of Lebanon’s greatest poets, Khalil Hawi, took a hunting rifle and shot himself in the head on his balcony in his home in West Beirut, near the sprawling green campus of the American University of Beirut, where he was a professor. In the cacophony of war, no one heard the shot. A Greek Orthodox Christian, born in 1919 in Shweir, a small village in the Lebanese mountains, Hawi had written about love and desire but mostly about the yearning for political and cultural change in a region struggling to find a path out of setbacks and despair. The Arab renaissance, cultural and political, of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had faded into the distance. A reaction against the intellectual stagnation under
the Ottoman Empire, a call for reform in the face of European military superiority, the renaissance, known as al-Nahda (the awakening), had produced endless literature and poetry, cinema and music, media, new approaches to education, as well as modernist thinkers, secular and religious scholars, including modernist Salafists like Muhammad Abduh. From Cairo, intellectual effervescence had moved to Beirut in the second half of the twentieth century. But no new, better order had emerged. There were many reasons why the period of enlightenment ultimately faltered, including colonial repression but also repeated American-instigated coups that helped bring strongmen to power across the Middle East. The political and cultural maturing of the region was thwarted. Hawi’s generation of al-Nahda luminaries was still hoping to provide a bridge to the younger generation to find their way forward when he wrote, in his 1957 poem “The Bridge”:
They cross the bridge blithely in the morning
My ribs are stretched out as a firm bridge for them
From the caves of the East, from the swamps of the East
To the New East
My ribs are stretched out as a firm bridge for them.
But on that June evening, with Israeli tanks rumbling toward Beirut, Hawi had either concluded he could not be that bridge or accepted that there was no New East. A deeply sensitive and brooding man, consumed by his poetry, he had embraced Arab nationalism and was crushed by its failures. From disappointed grand Arab dreams to the torment eating his own country, Hawi was growing old and somber. At sixty-two, his heavy shoulders could not carry the final affront that was the idleness and powerlessness of Arab leaders in the face of an Israeli invasion. “Where are the Arabs?” he had asked his colleagues that morning on the campus of the university. “Who shall remove the stain of shame from my forehead?” Hawi was found the next morning, on his balcony.
