by Sanam Maher
Few Pakistanis would ever have seen a cleric shamed on national television in this way, and even fewer would have seen a woman like Qandeel praised over a cleric.
“Even now,” Ismail continued, addressing Mufti Qavi, whose face remained fixed with that grin, “you have a smile on your face and there is no trace of shame for what you have done.”
Today, to me, Mufti Qavi explains why he did not appear worried, angry or ashamed during that interview. He did not raise his voice or attempt to silence his critics. He was serene and for the most part smiled pleasantly as if he could not hear the things that were being said about him. He says he knew Qandeel had been paid to appear on Lucman’s show and how the host wanted him to behave. He was supposed to shout and argue and lose his temper. He had expected the things that were said about him. He was prepared. “I wanted to show that none of it affected me,” he explains, chuckling. “Those people on the show just wanted to create hatred for men of religion. They wanted to show, and may Allah forgive me for saying this, that I am some kind of—” he lowers his voice “—sexy man of God.”
The day after the Lucman interview aired, Mufti Qavi was removed from the Ruet-e-Hilal committee. The PTI issued a notice saying he had been stripped of his membership of the party. Once more he was just another maulvi who ran a madrassa in Multan.
Qandeel tweeted the news and mocked people with “fake faces.”
Mufti Qavi headed back home from Karachi and wondered what he would say to his wife and sisters when he saw them. He felt embarrassed. He had lost everything that he valued. Everything he had achieved in the last six years had been erased by two or three minutes of video and a few questionable photographs. He felt forsaken.
His car pulled up to his house. As he got out, he recounts to me, he felt his phone vibrate in his pocket. Once, twice, three times. In the space of three minutes, a string of five text messages arrived. They were from Qandeel. Even today he can recite the messages he says she sent him.
“I am sorry Mufti sahib, what happened was bad it should not have happened.”
“It’s all my fault.”
“Please forgive me if you can.”
“Whatever happened to you was not right I’m really sorry.”
“The one who forgives has a big heart.”
He walked into his home with a great big grin on his face. This was Allah’s grace. Just when his faith had been tested and he had wondered why such misfortune had come his way, Allah had sent him a small sign as if to say, You will be victorious.
After all, if he had really kissed and hugged Qandeel and said he wanted to marry her, if he had really done something wrong, then why was she the one apologizing? Even today Mufti Qavi keeps photocopies of those text messages—blurry pictures taken of the phone—to show to journalists, friends and family. He says he has lost the phone he originally received the messages on.
In the days after the Lucman interview aired, Mufti Qavi received dozens of phone calls from admirers and well-wishers all over the world. They told him not to worry; they would always support him. They said terrible things about Qandeel. The names they called her are too terrible to repeat. They made his heart tremble. Mufti Qavi will utter those names if you ask him to, but only if you also accept the sin of saying such words. “Gushti,” he says, spitting out the word. Whore. They knew the names of the men she visited at night, his followers said. We’ll have her picked up, they promised Mufti Qavi, and then just see what we do to her. Some of them told him exactly what they planned to do to her.
The police later told him that thousands—yes, thousands; he has many followers, you see—of phone numbers that showed up on his call records matched the ones on Qandeel’s records.
“Now what can you say to these followers, these passionate men?” Mufti Qavi asks. “If Imran Khan can have followers—” he thumps his desk in indignation at the suggestion that clerics might not have thousands of zealous followers who promise murder “—then why can’t Mufti Qavi?” Thump. “After all,” he asks, “aren’t you my follower now that you have come here to meet me? Now that I’ve told you everything about myself and how I care deeply for women?”
The day Mufti Qavi is lowered into the ground, thousands of those followers—especially women—will come to his home, he promises. They will tell his wife and sisters, Your brother was our brother and our father. He knows it. And to those who say he should not behave inappropriately with female followers, “There are two kinds of people in this world. One will dig a well in the middle of the road so that any traveller who drinks from it will send him their blessings. But another man would close up that well because he fears someone could fall into it in the dead of night. Now, both those men will get Allah’s blessings.” So, if Mufti Qavi calls a woman his daughter and she kisses his hand and feels some relief or if she whispers her problems in his ear, what is wrong with that? It may not be what another cleric would do, but that doesn’t make it wrong, does it? “It’s just a form of worship for me,” he explains.
* * *
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Mufti Qavi walks at a quick trot to his home. He crosses the courtyard outside his office and enters a dark, narrow lane with pools of water from leaking pipes. The lane opens on to another courtyard, and Mufti Qavi strides to the far right corner and calls out for his wife. He wants a quick bite to eat. Inside his home, his sisters sit in a room where charpoys heaped with bedding are wedged in close to each other. His wife is in the kitchen heating naan bought from the shop next door. She is small and squat and her eyes are limpid and bulbous, one darting to the side while the other fixes you with its gaze. “Did you know that one channel ran a piece of news saying that my wife was going to have a press conference to speak out against me?” Mufti Qavi says, chortling. “I told them, ‘Go to my home and find my wife. She will either be cleaning my home, cooking my food or washing my clothes.’ ”
His sisters received text messages in the days after the photos with Qandeel went viral. “We are going to reveal the truth about you,” one said. “You pretend to be so good. Go and look at what your brother is doing.”
Ordinarily, Ramzaan is a happy month in this household. The family gathers for the night prayers, breaks their fast together and then meets before dawn for the start of the fast the next day. That year the women of the house wept and prayed together and asked God to help the careless Mufti Qavi out of his bind. Did Qandeel have another video? they wondered. Did she have more to show? Now they hear that a documentary is being made on Qandeel, and they worry that Mufti Qavi will be given a “lifelong negative role.” God forbid someone suggests that he had a hand in her murder. There were stories in the newspapers about Mufti Qavi’s connections with a man named Abdul Basit who drove Qandeel’s murderer away from her house in Multan that night. While some allege that Basit is Mufti Qavi’s nephew, others report that they are cousins.7 But Mufti Qavi’s sisters say this is a case of mistaken identity. They marvel at the sheer coincidence of the fact that one of their nephews is also named Abdul Basit.
They wonder about what happened between Qandeel and their brother. “When Allah will call us to his court on the Day of Judgement, then all will become clear,” his sister Hina says. But Mufti Qavi is impatient to end the conversation. He has another court to attend to—what he calls the “Islamic court” he rules over in his office.
He hurries back to his office. Several men and a woman sit inside. The men to the left, the woman on the right. She holds a squirming infant in her arms. Her husband uttered the words “I divorce thee” three times during a fight, and under Islam a marriage can be annulled by doing just that. He wants to take it back. The baby whimpers and wriggles as the woman answers Mufti Qavi’s questions about her marriage: Does her husband beat her? Has he ever told her to get out of their home and never come back? The matter is dealt with swiftly. The divorce is annulled and the couple reunited with Mufti Qavi’s blessing. It’s time for the
next petitioner.
A man comes into the office with a little boy bundled up in a shawl. A stray dog, likely rabid, bit the child. The man carries something in a paper bag. He spreads a newspaper before Mufti Qavi and the contents of the bag spill out in a dusty heap. It looks like white sand but is gritty rice flour. Mufti Qavi mutters a prayer. He then takes the child’s hands, places them gently on the surface of the flour and covers them with his own hands. We sit in silence as he whispers prayers. He lifts the child’s hands and brushes the flour off his palms. The man scoops the flour back into the paper bag. He will take it home and ask his wife to make dough with this flour. Then he will pinch some dough between his fingers and pull it apart. He will see hair in the dough the colour of the rabid dog’s fur. He will know then that Mufti Qavi’s prayers have worked and the dog’s poison has been drawn from his child and transferred into that flour. Sometimes there are two or three short hairs in the dough; other times people have reportedly found a dozen or more bristly sand-coloured hairs. The man is instructed to bury the dough in the ground. His child will be cured. If there is no hair in the dough, the child was never at risk.
The child’s father presses a box of mithai into Mufti Qavi’s hands. The cleric is pleased. He pries open the box. “Have something sweet,” he offers as he plucks out a yolk-coloured laddu (sweet).
For now at least this “court” brings him joy while he waits for the world to forgive him and forget whatever happened with Qandeel Baloch. He wants to write a book about the practice of honour killing. He wants the world to know that he believes a woman like Qandeel, killed for honour by her brother, is a shaheed, a martyr. His sisters tell him he should stop talking about this book.
There are no more TV appearances these days. The invitations dried up shortly after the Lucman interview. A reporter who came to interview him claimed that Mufti Qavi was furious with Lucman. “You never know where a bullet can come from any day,” the mufti said. He did not realise he was being recorded. The reporter says he sent the tape to Lucman in order to warn him. Mufti Qavi’s journalist friends don’t suggest his name to producers any more.
Sometimes his friends say that his name has been ruined and his reputation irretrievably lost; other times they tell him to have faith. They assure him that the entire episode with Qandeel was in fact a struggle between two powerful media companies. Mufti Qavi was a regular guest on a popular religious show on one channel, and the other channel wanted to bring that show down. Qandeel was planted. She had been told exactly what to say and do.
When news broke of Qandeel’s murder, Mufti Qavi had been invited to talk about her on the same channel where he had first been introduced to Qandeel on the talk show Ajeeb Sa. “We belong to Allah and to him we shall return,” he said in the interview. “But I also have a message for those who are watching and listening right now. In the future, before you falsely accuse a man of doing something, for God’s sake think about the consequences. And when a man has been accused, it is a blow to the hearts of all his followers, and their every sigh is an appeal to Allah. He may grant their wish.”
“I’M TELLING YOU THAT MY LIFE IS IN DANGER”
The idea for the show is simple: in each episode the host gives viewers a peek into the lives of well-known Pakistanis. Political leaders, musicians, former and current prime ministers, lawyers, actors, models, dancers, athletes and filmmakers let the cameras into their homes and introduce their friends and family members to the host—a man named Sohail, who puts on a slow, sing-song voice for the interviews and likes to say that in fifteen years he has interviewed practically every Pakistani worth interviewing, and those he hasn’t will also eventually make their way on to the show.
Episodes have previously featured Benazir Bhutto and her husband Asif Ali Zardari, Imran Khan, the actresses Meera and Reema and musician Shahzad Roy, and the show has been shot in other countries including Spain, Sweden, China, Norway, and the US. Budding politicians like Benazir Bhutto’s son have promised Sohail that his first local talkshow interview will be with him.
For the show’s annual Eid special, the producers could have any guest they want, but that year they want Qandeel. She has thousands of followers online—her Facebook page has been restored after briefly being taken offline following a deluge of complaints—she has been mentioned in the National Assembly (as the butt of a joke, but even so her name has been spoken there), and it is impossible to count how many people have watched her videos as they are copied and shared on multiple platforms the minute she uploads them. And the whole business with Mufti Qavi is even more of a reason to feature her on the Eid special, which always attracts a significant audience. She is the talk of the town, as Sohail says. Although he does not reveal exactly how many people tuned in to that episode, he knows that it was in the millions. Yes, millions. More than any of his other 500-plus interviews.
Qandeel demurs when the producers ask if they can shoot the interview at her home in Karachi. She insists on doing it in Lahore, where Sohail is based. They guess that her home isn’t like some of the others that have been featured on the show and she is embarrassed by it. She wants a ticket to Lahore, accommodation at a five-star hotel and plenty of time for outfit changes to show off the wardrobe she wants to bring with her. And she has requested a pair of swimming goggles. She would like to be filmed in a pool, just like in the BBC interview with Amber, and she doesn’t own a pair of goggles.
On the day of the shoot Sohail is nervous about how irritable Qandeel seems to be. She is on edge, quick with a comeback or an argument. He overhears her on the phone, talking gently to her father, and asks if he would like to be featured on the show. Does he live in Lahore? But she refuses. Sohail will realise later when he sees that the man is lame and old, wears a dhoti and a kameez and mumbles why Qandeel did not want him to appear on the show.
Between takes she scrolls through messages on her phone and shows them to the crew. When she shows Sohail a text message from a man who is accusing her of not being Baloch, he cautions her, “The higher you fly, the more people will try and yank you down towards earth.” She mentions to Sohail that she has quarrelled with her brothers. They are threatening her and she isn’t sure if she will go back to Multan to see her parents over Eid. Later he wishes he had asked her more about this, but she mentioned it so casually that he hadn’t thought it was a big deal. It certainly isn’t an uncommon complaint from women in show business in Pakistan.
Sohail concludes that she is just another attention-seeking woman who likes to talk about her problems. She wants sympathy. He knows what some of the actresses he has interviewed think about Qandeel. They gossip about her and raise their eyebrows at some of her photos and complain that what she is doing isn’t right. She is “low,” they say, by which they mean common. When Qandeel tells Sohail that she is going to star on Bigg Boss—but don’t mention it to anyone—he thinks that if this is true, it is very likely she will make a name for herself, and the offers for films or Bollywood projects will inevitably follow. And then those actresses will stop saying horrible things about her—in public at least.
The episode opens with Sohail walking up a driveway towards a sprawling farmhouse with lush green gardens, miniature bridges over gurgling streams, a swimming pool and a lone horse which wanders into the frame. He introduces Qandeel as Pakistan’s “social media queen,” and as he puts his hand out to shake hers and greets her with a salaam, she throws her arms wide open as if to give him a big hug. He baulks. She cackles. “What? Did that scare you?”
As they walk to some chairs in the garden, Qandeel’s stiletto heels sink into the grass and she stumbles. She is wearing a wig—a sleek chestnut-brown bob parted on the side so it covers much of her face—and large tinted sunglasses. She is not in the Western clothes her followers are used to, but wearing a shalwar kameez with a dupatta. After all, the episode is scheduled to air on Eid.
She changes into a wetsuit for the swim, and is handed
a large towel the minute she gets out of the water, and then they drive to a hotel in the city, where she puts on leggings and a fitted top for the gym. When she is done with her workout, a waiter brings her a tall glass of chilled orange juice. She is filmed walking out of the hotel trailed by a few well-dressed men and women who look like members of her entourage but are in fact hotel staff.
Back at the farmhouse, three men—friends? fans?—have been stationed at the gate, their arms full of bouquets of red and white flowers for Qandeel. A shiny black four-wheel drive waits in the driveway. Qan–deel changes into a deep-purple sporty peplum top and tights for a dance session with a choreographer. The men with the flowers join them in a large dimly lit room and watch her writhe and do some belly-dancing moves while vacant-eyed trophy heads of hunted deer on the wall look down on them. Sohail knows that some of the shots from the dancing segment will have to be cut because the dancing is a little too…well, you know. This is a family-oriented show.
The producers want to show her working out, dancing, and partying with her friends, but there are no friends or family she wants them to meet. In the end someone invites Sohail to a dinner, and Qandeel and the whole crew tag along. In the show it looks like a dinner her friends have thrown for her. When the show airs, some of the present people are annoyed with Sohail. They did not want to be seen—much less on national television—with a woman like Qandeel.
Qandeel changes for the dinner. She puts on a pair of black trousers and a grey shirt and twists her long hair—the brown bob is gone—into a topknot, and is taken in a brand-new white car. Some of her friends and family members watch the show and wonder where she got the money for the cars and the house with the swimming pool. On the drive over to the dinner Sohail presses her about how she earns her money, and she says simply, “I don’t depend on show business. I have side businesses, some online businesses, some trading on the side…It’s enough that I live my life very well.”
