The Forgotten Narrative

Nations, wherever they are born within the time space continuum, are always the offspring of a narrative. A narrative that knits a nation out of its individuals.

A trek down history shows that for the past few millennia this narrative has been either certain regionalities, cultures, languages or certain religions. The Persian Empire for instance was the epitome of the Sassanid culture, one that is a pride for Persians till now. The Roman a commencement of the western culture. Even the New World of America was blank canvas for the experimentation of the western culture.

For those who live in Pakistan though, there is no one such thing. It is imperative for many us to have been confused at least once in our lifetimes about choosing whether to follow our native Indian culture, or the Arab culture that is a working example of our religion or the western ideal. No matter where in Pakistan we belong to it is inevitable that each one of us to have gone through this dilemma at least once in our lives.

To choose between rock concerts or mehfil’s for ghazals, between simple Nikahs or a 5 to 7 day wedding ceremony reincarnating our ancestral rituals. We have taken most of the past 60 years ceaselessly debating which would be better than the other, but what we failed to understand was that the very reason for the existence of this nation was to bar such arguments, once and for all. To live and let live. In a nutshell, not a religion, or a culture or a any other dogma but universal parity.

When new ideas are conceived, their emergence in disparate disciplines depends on the fields capacity to allow penetration. It is a fact that they appear first in the written word, after which it is easy for them to appear in art and productive activities and then finally in the social sphere of ideology which includes religion, politics, law and traditional attitudes that are a societies superstructure. Pakistan is probably the only nation in the world which was born to uphold the most novel of such narrative in our times, that of universal parity where there is diversity, of celebrating diversity so that each ones individuality can be also be celebrated . An ideal that had been talked about, and published and had penetrated into the late modern art and post-modern literature, but had not yet been put into practice as a basis of a society.

Unlike the regions, cultures and religions mentioned above, it is very rare for a people to come together based on a zeitgeist as supra narrative, and this is exactly why this country is not something to be confused about. Contrary to that, it teaches us to be ready for the new order of this world, of a world where so much intermingling of races, cultures and religions will occur that only tolerance will allow us to prosper in it.

That might sound slightly defeatist but actually it is exactly the opposite. Before Jinnah resorted to a demand for an independent country by the name of Pakistan, his initial demand had always been of an appropriate representation of minorities, using the Muslim minority as an example. The final demand of the Muslim League had also been of a very unique Three-tier scheme. The first of its kind in the modern world, which allowed for sovereignty to be shared between provinces, the centre dealing only with issues of common interests, and those of defense and foreign affairs alone.

Such a scheme is reminiscent of no other narrative in the past. It was a special phenomenon and the reason it emerges was that the forefathers of the movement for Pakistan understood, that in a world so globalized and yet ever so diverse, the only narrative that could unite us was the acknowledgment of each other’s rights, cultures and religions as essential. Not that of safeguarding and upholding one’s own culture alone.

Pakistan was finally demanded when the other major stakeholders in the united state of India practically refused to uphold this ideal. The country was demanded only so that this narrative could be upheld without fear, the narrative of Parity and of Individual Freedom.

It is high time we consider this ideal instead of bickering about how to minimize the differences within us. It is time we stop noticing how different a, person in one part of this country is, from another, and which education system, out of the many prevalent in our country today, he or she is a product of. Instead, let each one of us contribute what he or she has to offer to this country out of the repertoire of practices, beliefs and values we have collected within us. A repertoire that has merely been saved up to result in an underutilized resource. In order to make this country an example of a diverse universal amalgam that the world is predicted to evolve into in the future, let’s be the first to be the future. A Future world with a multicultural and multi-linguistic essence in one geographic space.

Our country, unlike India or age old European states, is a blank canvas encouraging us to create this new collage of diversities. Although that may seem to be creating difficulties for us and sometimes, even tempting us to take shortcuts to reach prosperity quicker, but sensibility demands that we utilize the purity that this rare resource has to offer to us. Any person with even a hint of creativity in them would realize what a rare resource coming across a void can be. Our country is an opportunity for us and maybe even the others to experiment the universality within our individual selves that Iqbal and so many other post modern thinkers lead us towards. The individual selves that thinkers such as Derrida and Foucault believed could become the model of a universal superior self by turning it into the ever evolving post modern self. Eventually leading us to Iqbal’s perfect “khudi” which all beings are moving towards, according to their different status of being.