by Judy Jones
THE SYSTEM: Parliamentary pseudo-democracy in uniform. Back in 1947, when Pakistan was carved out of old British India as a homeland for South Asia’s Muslims, India inherited the colonial bureaucracy more or less intact, while Pakistan got bad memories and a lot of soldiers trained in the Indian army. As a result, government here has been very much in the Argentine mold—a few years of civilian floundering habitually culminating in a military takeover. In 1977, it was Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a Perón-like populist demagogue, who got bumped (and later hanged) by his chief of staff, General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq. Zia, who’d claimed he’d only be around for ninety days, appointed himself president, twisted the constitution around to inflate presidential power, and began to enforce Islamic law. In 1988, Zia was killed in a mysterious airplane crash. A succession of shaky civilian governments followed, all remarkably similar in their corruption, incompetence, and let-them-eat-cake attitudes toward their countrymen, who, with the exception of a few wealthy landowners given to shopping in Paris, tend to be mud-hut dwellers, well near the bottom of the poverty scale. Twice, these administrations were led by Benazir Bhutto, the Radcliffe-educated daughter of the former prime minister, who became the first woman ever to head a Muslim country and the first to be dismissed, twice, for corruption. In 1999 General Pervez Musharraf staged a bloodless coup that put the country back under military rule, causing much international finger-wagging and Pakistan’s suspension from the British Commonwealth. Ho hum. In 2001, Musharraf declared himself president. In 2002, he announced that elections would be held that year, then declared himself the winner of a controversial and probably unconstitutional referendum that gave him the presidency on a platter for another five years while allowing him to remain head of the army. He then amended the constitution to grant himself many wonderful new powers, including the right to pick whomever he wants to be Supreme Court judges and military commanders and to dismiss an elected parliament. He also created a National Security Council, dominated by the military, that has power over the civilian government. However, the four provincial administrations retain considerable power of their own and aren’t shy about blowing raspberries at the central government. And after surviving four assassination attempts in two years, Musharraf really ought to be the only person in the country who wants his job. Pakistan’s president must be a Muslim, by the way, and the legal system is a combination of sharia (Islamic law) and British common law.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW TO READ THE NEWSPAPERS: That the end of the Cold War meant that Pakistan, whose frontline position in the defense against the Communist March on Asia no longer mattered, was suddenly dropped from Washington’s A-list. The White House kept Islamabad on speed-dial, however, for a couple of reasons. One, it saw the wisdom of maintaining ties with a moderate Islamic state in a part of the world increasingly given to wild-eyed Koranbrandishing and the slaughter of infidels. Two, there was that nasty, ongoing dispute over the largely Muslim state of Kashmir and Jammu, which India refused to relinquish and which Pakistan insisted should join “free”—read Pakistani-controlled—Kashmir next door. (For the record, the Kashmiri insurgents themselves would prefer to be independent of both countries, but who cares what they want?) The West finds this conflict riveting because both India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons and a make-my-day attitude toward using them. Things turned around, sort of, after September 11, 2001. Given a choice between acting as Washington’s point man in the “war on terror” (and receiving tons of financial aid, plus U.S. support for his regime), on one hand, and placating Pakistan’s growing number of radical Islamist groups (but ending up like Afghanistan, with heaps of rubble where towns used to be), on the other, Musharraf prudently chose both sides. Ignoring threats and dodging bullets, he manages one of the word’s trickiest juggling acts (in addition to disgruntled mullahs and radical groups both domestic and global, the president must mollify the powerful Pakistani army, which is packed with high-level, hard-line Islamists). Note, too, Pakistan’s new willingness to dance with India, after nervously watching her flirt with both the United States and China.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW IF YOU’RE DATING A PAKISTANI: Sorry, you haven’t given us enough information. “Pakistani” doesn’t mean much unless you’re in New York, London, or one of the Gulf states, where a couple million remittance men work to support their wives and families back home (sorry, sweetheart, your date’s just using you to get a green card). Within Pakistan, more than half a century after partition, the concept of nationhood is still not much more prevalent— or deeply rooted—than cable TV. So who’s your date? A tenant farmer from Punjab? A little gardening experience should go a long way; in this agriculturally based economy, most farms consist of only five or six acres of land. A rug merchant from Sindh? He or she may be a muhajir, one of the millions of refugees (or their descendants) who fled India at the time of partition and who, being better-educated than the locals, soon controlled the country’s industry and commerce, but were never entirely accepted by the neighborhood. A tribal leader from Baluchistan? Make sure your life insurance premiums are paid; you may well spend thrilling Saturday nights blowing up pipelines to protest the way the government reaps all the rewards from gas that’s pumped out of your date’s ancestral lands. A mullah from the Northwest Frontier Province? That’s double jeopardy. Until the Saudis began opening the religious schools, or madrassas, that educated a generation of Taliban, mullahs, the lowest-ranking of local Islamic clerics, were usually considered ignorant and bigoted even by village standards—which is saying something in a country with a literacy rate of 50 percent, max (much, much lower if you count girls, which no one in these parts does). To further strain your relationship, Pashtuns, as the northwesterners are called, have Pakistan’s most male-dominated society. This is the kind of place where they like to tell you a dozen times a day that “women have no place but the home and the grave.” A note to dopers: Exercise extreme caution, if you’re still capable of that sort of thing. Marijuana, both wild and cultivated, grows all over Pakistan, and the opium that’s been produced for centuries along both sides of the northwest border accounts for a large percentage of the country’s real GDP, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that your date’s going to want to fire up the old bong with you in the evenings. The Islamic injunction against alcohol has been stretched to include all types of intoxication. (Your date may or may not take this seriously.) Of course, you can ignore many of these warnings if your date is very rich.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW TO MEET YOUR DATE’S PARENTS: That they’re probably not having a ball in their golden years. So many divisive elements and so much violence! Sure, there have always been splits in society—fundamentalists vs. modernists, English-speakers vs. Urdu-speakers, the army vs. civilian administrators, the native-born vs. the mujahirs, various tribes and clans vs. the central government—but they were usually held below the boiling point. The ongoing tension between majority Sunnis and minority Shi’ites, for instance, used to be fodder for scholarly debate, not, as it is today, a pretext for bombing each other’s mosques. This surely wasn’t what your date’s folks had in mind back at the beginning, when they dreamed of creating a Muslim homeland. But religion, especially a religion as loosely interpreted as Islam, has so far turned out to be a poor substitute for a common nationality, shared culture, or established democratic institutions. Things started to go sour in 1971, when East Pakistan, a thousand miles away, rebelled against long-distance government from West Pakistan and made a bid to secede. After being ruthlessly suppressed, the East Pakistanis were backed by India, which launched an offensive that forced the Pakistani army to its knees and allowed for the creation of an independent Bangladesh. Traumatized and humiliated, with its very raison d’être suddenly in doubt, Pakistan went into an emotional tailspin from which your date’s parents, among others, still haven’t fully recovered. Try boosting your date’s parents’ self-esteem; smile broadly when they brag about Abdul Qadeer Khan, Pakistan’s top nuclear scientist, who secretly hel
ped Libya, North Korea, and Iran develop nuclear weapons programs. Despite the outrage of the international community, Khan, who claims he acted alone (do not mutter “Yeah, right”) was quickly pardoned by the Pakistani government and remains a national hero to his compatriots. SAUDI ARABIA
THE LAYOUT: 830,000 square miles of stupefying desert, with temperatures routinely in excess of 118 degrees and nary a river, stream, or hotel bar in sight. The oil fields are in the east, over near the Persian Gulf; the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina, along with Jeddah, the leading port, are in the west, over near the Red Sea; Riyadh, the capital, is in the big middle chunk, the traditional preserve of the Sauds, the country’s ruling family; and to the south is the bone-dry, Texas-sized Rub al Khali, the Empty Quarter, which even the Bedouins avoid. In fact, only 2 percent of the country is suitable for growing so much as a date palm.
THE SYSTEM: A feudalistic monarchy, even if the country is only a little over seven decades old. The royal family, consisting of something like five thousand princes and an equal number of princesses, is descended from Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, the man who back in 1932 established a kingdom out of a patchwork of rival desert tribes and a couple of shards of the former Ottoman Empire. Ever since, he and a succession of four of the oldest of his forty-four sons (until fairly recently kingship always passed through the first king, rather than the current one) have ruled with absolute authority. Today’s king (and prime minister) is named Abdullah, and all the ranking cabinet ministers and ambassadors, as well as every one of the thirteen regional governors, are his brothers, half-brothers, sons, sons-in-law, or nephews. (Not for nothing do the Israelis grumble, “It’s not a country, it’s a family”) In 1992 then-king Fahd presented the country with the Basic Law of Government, the closest thing it’s ever had to a written constitution, and rejuvenated the royal talent pool by including grandsons of Ibn Saud, too. The following year he established the Majlis Al Shura, an advisory council now made up of 150 prominent Saudi citizens. True, the king appoints its members and can, at any point, dismiss them and appoint new ones, but at least now there is an established forum where nonroyals can talk things over. Meanwhile, the crown prince and virtually every other royal functionary continue to hold regularly scheduled majlises, somewhere between an audience and an open house, at which they hear all gripes anybody in the kingdom cares, and dares, to make. The other authority in this patriarchal, puritanical nation: the ulama, the religious scholars and priests, who function not only as clergy but also as the national judicial system (sharia rules), meting out punishments Koran-style and on occasion even overriding the monarch. In 2004 Saudi Arabia held its first-ever national elections—a big deal here, even though only half the seats on municipal councils were at stake, women were not allowed to vote, and most of the winners came from lists preapproved by fundamentalist clerics.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW TO READ THE NEWSPAPERS: That the Saudis are sitting on more than a quarter of the world’s proven oil reserves and are, by a long shot, its largest oil exporters (the United States and Russia pump more, but they’re using, not selling, most of it and they’re going to run out of the stuff much sooner). That this, and not some pietistic resolve to keep the Persian Gulf safe for feudalistic monarchies, was why we were so willing to put American lives on the line back in 1990. And that, in addition to a bill for $55 billion, the Gulf War left Saudi Arabia with a lot of seriously upset religious leaders for whom the hundreds of thousands of infidel American soldiers, some of whom were women, camped out along their pipelines—this, in an isolationist, fundamentalist state that sees itself as the world center of Islam and guardian of the Holy Cities— were a sacrilege. Feeling unwelcome, the Americans finally moved next door to Qatar in 2003, but that didn’t stop any number of by now wildly enraged radical groups from bombing the Saudi capital, Riyadh, soon afterward. And that finally lit a fire, so to speak, under the notoriously slow-moving monarchy, prompting it to crack down on terrorist types, despite the fact that the royal family is itself split between traditionalists and modernists and is feeling the pain of being squeezed between its close ties to the United States and the virulent anti-Americanism pervading the Middle East.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW IF YOU’RE DATING A SAUDI: If your date’s a woman, she’ll be a teacher, a nurse, a social worker, a princess, or unemployed; there still aren’t many professional options for Saudi women—and they still aren’t allowed to drive—though a lot of them do go to college, where they listen to the lectures on closed-circuit TV so that they won’t breathe the same air as the guys. She’ll most likely be veiled and covered head to toe by a loose-fitting black abaya (only men get to wear white in this heat). The really good news: In 2005, the country’s top religious leader banned forced marriages—but don’t count on anyone’s actually eschewing them out in the boonies. If you’re dating a man, things will be that much easier, especially if he’s a member of, friend of, or supplier to the royal family, in which case he’s making plenty of money again after a few relatively lean years in which he may have had to pass on that fifth Rolls-Royce Corniche Turbo. If he’s not well connected, he’ll probably be unemployed. Millions of guest workers do the menial jobs to which Saudi men refuse to stoop, as well as most of the demanding high-level ones that require knowledge never acquired by your average university graduate, who majored in theology and studied only Wahhabism, the particularly austere brand of Islam that is the country’s official religion. In any event, you won’t be hard up for creature comforts. Most families own an air conditioner, a washing machine, a radio, a television, and, if they live in town, four or five DVD players. Do stay on your toes, however. The mutawin, or religious police, keep an eye round the clock on everything from drinking, drug use, gambling, begging, and homosexuality to the strands of hair straying out from under a woman’s veil; to dating couples sitting together in the “family area” of the snack bar out at the new shopping mall; to satellite dishes, hidden in rooftop water tanks, capable of beaming CNN—or worse, Desperate Housewives— into Saudi homes from neighboring Bahrain. Most Saudis manage to avoid the big-deal offenses of murder, adultery, and heresy if they’re paying attention at all. Nevertheless, keep Fridays free for public beheadings and/or stonings.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW TO MEET YOUR DATE’S PARENTS: A couple of Arabic words will prove that your heart’s in the right place. To majlis and ulama and mutawin, which you’ve already learned, add hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, Muhammad’s birthplace, which every Muslim is enjoined to make once in his life (or he’d better have a damn good excuse), and salat al-fajr, or dawn prayers, one of five compulsory prayer sessions in the course of the day. Old Abdul Aziz may still be talked of, and how he united Saudi Arabia “by the will of Allah and the strength of his right hand.” Don’t, however, allude to his oldest son, Saud (who was deposed in 1964 for wantonness and incompetence), and be respectful if the name Faisal comes up (he returned the country to moral rectitude and fiscal responsibility, and was assassinated by a nephew in 1975 in the middle of an otherwise routine majlis). You might lament the passing of the Bedouins, those proud nomads of yore, falcons perched on their wrists and salukis prancing at their sides, who are now down to a population somewhere between Sacramento’s and Hartford’s. Or you might simply gape at the modernization—car dealerships, Tower-of-Babel construction crews (all those guest workers), and at least three major airports that claim to be the world’s largest. SWITZERLAND
THE LAYOUT: Small, landlocked nation of central Europe, sealed off top and bottom by mountain ranges (the Jura and the Alps) and on either side by lakes (Geneva and Constance), and full of edelweiss, brass cowbells, fondue pots, rushing streams, hiking trails, snow-capped peaks, ski resorts, and, it turns out, among the highest heroin-addiction, youth suicide, and HIV-infection rates in Europe. Derives its languages and cultural preferences from its neighbors: The western sector (focused on Geneva) speaks French; the central and eastern sectors (focused on Zurich and constituting the bulk of the country) spea
k German; and the south gesticulates in Italian.
THE SYSTEM: Federal republic, officially known as the Swiss Confederation. Still the most direct and most genuine democracy going anywhere, with lots of referenda (“Should we decriminalize abortion?” “Should we have four car-free Sundays a year?” “Should we shut down our nuclear power plants?”), citizens’ initiatives, and gung-ho government at the state and local levels. (The states here are called cantons, and there are twenty-six of them, including six half-cantons— don’t ask—each with its own constitution, budget, and laws.) It’s true that in general, not that many Swiss actually know what any given election is about, but this, pundits point out, only prevents a tyranny of the majority, since any minority with something at stake in a given election can usually make itself heard over the bewildered mutterings of the 40-something percent of voters who actually turn out to vote. There is no prime minister, and the federal council, Switzerland’s executive branch, chooses annually, from among its own seven members, a new president and vice president, who’ll spend most of their time greeting foreign dignitaries and toasting visiting dance troupes. Each council member represents one of the leading political parties and heads a cabinet ministry. Real power, however, both political and economic (not that it’s easy to tell the difference in Switzerland), has traditionally been concentrated in the hands of a few hundred industrialists, farmers, bankers, trade union leaders, and the like, who hammer out consensuses in “preparliamentary commissions.” Political parties and a two-house legislature exist but have agreed to agree on most issues.
