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Make a comprehensive summary of the following book reviews/articles which have been
taken from Books and Authors, Dawn.

1) Bitter pills to swallow:

In the 14th century, Ibn Khaldun — in his three-volume book The Muqaddimah: An Introduction
to History — made a poignant observation that “when we discuss royal and government positions
it will be as something required by the nature of civilisation and human existence.” This
underscores the necessity of a scientific investigation of civilisation itself, in conjunction with the
culture of a society.

Having held key positions in the corridors of power — first in the Punjab Provincial Service for a
few years and later in the Police Service of Pakistan — and having suffered in service at the hands
of rulers for upholding the rules of business and law, Tariq Khosa is well placed to do just that. In
his book Inconvenient Truths: Pakistan’s Governance Challenges, Khosa investigates and analyses
the weaknesses in the structure and culture of our society that have held up its development.

The author very rightly attributes these issues to the elite capture of the state. He declares that
“today’s Pakistan is of the elite, by the elite, for the elite. Laws are often made and implemented
selectively to benefit the elite. They also control and curtail wealth redistribution.” Thus, society
is divided into two sets of people: one comprising its elite members and the other made up of the
mass of deprived and marginalised citizens. The state exists for the elite — politicians, military
rulers, the judiciary and the police — whom Khosa calls “sacred cows.”

Building his argument on this divide by citing examples of the elites’ misdeeds and corruption,
Khosa identifies four major governance challenges that Pakistan faces. These include a) the self-
serving, incompetent and corrupt political leadership; b) the patronage of extremism by the
leadership; c) the civil-military tussle; and d) the breakdown of the criminal justice system.

As regards the first challenge, amongst several instances, Khosa cites the example of a 21-point
action plan, envisaging the prime minister to lead the war against terrorists. However, this
provision was dropped and a 20-point action plan was adopted on Dec 27 by the civil-military
leadership to stem terrorism following a terrorist attack on the Army Public School, Peshawar, on
Dec 16, 2014. The author laments the shirking of their responsibility by the civilian leadership,
stating that “the political and civilian leadership allowed their authority to be eroded. They chose
to aid the work of the military authorities rather than the other way around.”

With regard to the corruption of politicians, a letter that the author wrote to then Prime Minister
Nawaz Sharif in July 2016 is worth quoting: “Mr. Prime Minister, during the time of
convalescence, kindly take a moment to think about some key governance issues. First is the matter
of corruption in our polity. Do you agree with the Army Chief when he states that crime and

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corruption are a nexus and pose a serious national security threat? Are the Panama Papers a non-
issue for the ruling elite, something to be brushed under the carpet? You have addressed the nation
twice and presented your family’s case before the Pakistan National Assembly. You are obviously
concerned that your family not be tarnished. But isn’t the nation justified in seeking probes into
matters of alleged tax evasion and avoidance, laundering, kickbacks and corruption? If so, should
you not ask for an independent commission of inquiry — starting with your family? As a public
office holder, are you not morally bound to demonstrate that you and your kin are the first to be
held accountable? If the family’s accounts and investments are clean and transparent, there is
nothing to fear. It takes courage to lead by example.”

The second governance challenge — that of patronage of extremist elements by the rulers — came
to Khosa’s notice early in service when he was posted as a sub-divisional police officer (SDPO)
in Jhang in 1982. He arrested the Deobandi cleric Haq Nawaz Jhangvi on Muharram 7 from the
mosque when Jhangvi was delivering a hate-speech while the procession of the Shia community
— duly licensed — was passing. The deputy commissioner communicated the orders of then
president Gen Ziaul Haq to the young SDPO to release the cleric. Standing by the law and
anticipating a possible clash between the two communities, the young officer did not release the
cleric till the end of the procession in the evening. Having witnessed the outright patronage of such
extremist and non-state jihadi groups, Khosa succinctly observes in his book that “terrorism,
organised crime, vigilante groups and hired assassins, in addition to covert intelligence operations
— all assisted by technology and social media — have disrupted and dominated the national scene,
creating a mafia-like governance paradigm. To top it all, religious extremism has added to the
witch’s brew of social and economic discontent.”

Khosa ascribes the third challenge — that of a civil-military tussle in the governance of the state
— to two factors. The first is the relinquishment of responsibilities by the civilian government to
the military instead of leading the country from the front. In this connection, he cites examples of
Nawaz Sharif’s failure to appoint a full time foreign minister, thereby providing an opportunity to
the army to formulate responses to regional and global challenges; the assignment of the portfolio
of defence as an additional charge to the minister for power, rendering him an ineffective
participant in defence-related matters; the refusal of the then prime minister to command
implementation of the National Action Plan; and the prime minister’s failure to convene and
preside over meetings of the National Counter-Terrorism Authority for three years since its
inception. The second factor, Khosa writes, is military coups, which systematically weakened civil
institutions. This opened the gate for the military’s ascendancy in key areas of governance,
including the criminal justice system.

With respect to the fourth challenge, i.e. the breakdown of the justice system, the author
vehemently argues that, in the long run, the induction of the army in the criminal justice system
through military courts could neither be a panacea to fight violence, terrorism, extremism and
militancy, nor administer justice. This underscores the necessity to make investment in these two
areas. He points out that “one of the key points of the National Action Plan was to reform the
criminal justice system, including policing, prosecution services, judiciary and prisons.”

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Turning to reforms in the police, which is the main focus of his book, Khosa ruefully recalls that
it “took 25 police commissions and committees to finally arrive at the realisation that politically
neutral, operationally autonomous, highly accountable and professionally sound police services
are vital for democracy and [the] rule of law. That resulted in the promulgation of the Police Order
2002. But the forces of status quo and vested interests never allowed the implementation of that
progressive law.”

Falling in line with the Police Order 2002, the author suggests de-politicisation through
institutional safeguards in the form of public safety commissions; granting operational,
administrative and financial autonomy; creating specialised investigative cadres and substituting
the structure of the police station with a division headed by a superintendent of police. He also
calls for standardising the policing legal framework, extending police jurisdiction to ‘B’ areas of
Balochistan — constituting 95 per cent of the province that is currently monitored by the
paramilitary gendarmerie Balochistan Levies — and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, and
accepting the recommendations contained in the final report of the Police Reforms Committee that
was submitted to the chief justice of Pakistan in August and September 2018.

In his analysis of the structure of our society, Khosa puts the blame of patronage of extremism on
the rulers, but this may not be entirely true if it is viewed in the larger perspective of the polity that
we inherited at the time of our independence. The traditional and customary local power centres,
such as those of chieftains, landlords, pirs and clerics, enjoyed and exercised authority under the
colonial law of the land. Unfortunately, the very same coterie of these power centres turned out to
be rulers who continue to patronise what Lawrence Ziring, in his book Pakistan at the Crosscurrent
of History, calls “medieval rule, patriarchy and monarchy.” The present governance problems
emanate mainly from these forces struggling to maintain the status quo.

Khosa places the major blame on the establishment for lack of reforms in the police. As a
consultant at the National Reconstruction Bureau, I am a witness to the personal support given by
the then chairman, Lt Gen Syed Tanvir H. Naqvi, to the think-tank comprising three inspector
generals of the police, namely Dr Shoab Suddle, Afzal Ali Shigri and Zulfiqar A. Qureshi, to
formulate the Police Order 2002 which the author vociferously supports in his book. Its non-
implementation lay entirely on civil governments that happen to be champions of the status quo.
With Imran Khan in saddle as the prime minister, committed to reducing corruption in the society
at any cost, and the ‘Bajwa Doctrine’ in the background, committing full support to the
continuance of democratic dispensation in the country, let us wait to see if the people of Pakistan
will sight the light at the end of tunnel.

2) All is not quiet:

I begin with a qualification that Pakistan’s intellectual scene — academic, artistic, literary and
social — is not as bright and vivacious as one would wish it to be. After all, it is a country of 220
million people which boasts a rich cultural tradition. Some of us do not refrain from calling it an
intellectual wasteland when we feel irritated by the shortage of excellence in almost every
discipline: the substandard education imparted to students in most public and private institutions,
the insufficient quantity and quality in various fields of art and culture, and the absence of

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academic rigour among many of our otherwise established scholars. Allama Muhammad Iqbal had
once said: “Hai wohi teray zamaanay ka imam-i-bar haq/ Jo tujhay haazir-o-maujood se bezaar
karey” [That person alone is your truthful leader/ Who disillusions you with your current
circumstance]. Hence, no harm in being unsatisfied with what we are producing and no dispute
with critiquing the overall situation that we find ourselves trapped in.

However, what we need to appreciate is that there is a difference between worry and lament.
Besides, what one finds now is that every single thing that citizens imaginatively, socially or
politically pursue in present times is being discredited and dismissed in one way or the other by
the powers that be and the armchair critics belonging to the elite and affluent middle class. There
is a systematic propagation of disdain, it seems, for everything that people at large freely and
creatively wish to pursue. We are told that there is no hope as nothing worthwhile is being written,
painted, performed or produced. There is a bleak apathy, so what else can people do but lament?

If one invites readers to look at the landscape of poetry and literature without being lazy, and after
shedding any preconceived notions, they will find a galaxy of poets in Urdu, from Iftikhar Arif to
Sarmad Sehbai among the senior lot, penning both ghazals and nazms of the highest calibre. They
will spot the likes of Abbas Tabish and Mir Ahmed Navaid in those coming after them and a large
number of talented poets, from Sarwat Zehra to Ahmed Atta, across the length and breadth of the
country. I cannot provide a list here because it will be too long. Many have been mentioned in this
column in the past, anyway. Also, we mustn’t forget that the stalwarts of feminist poetry and prose,
from Kishwar Naheed to Zahida Hina, are alive and writing. They are joined by Nasim Syed,
Noorul Huda Shah, Haseena Gul, Yasmeen Hameed and Shahida Hasan, who write in Urdu,
Sindhi, Pashto, Punjabi and other languages that we speak.

Particularly in the case of resistance poetry, from Gilgit-Baltistan to Balochistan, a fresh breed of
scathingly powerful poets has emerged. There are critics and essayists in our languages who raise
new questions and earn academic respect. There is a whole new generation of fiction writers
making their presence felt. We are still struggling to find an equal space for Pakistani Anglophone
writing with other non-native English-speaking nations, but new and slightly older literary writers
continue to make their mark on the global scene.

Most teleplays and short films we produce today are certainly not up to the mark. But some made
by younger directors are comparable to the finest productions ever in the history of this country.
Our new comedians offer a broad range of stand-up, slapstick, dry and dark comedy. Their media
may have changed because of the use of technology and developed means for wider outreach, but
the message is as potent as ever. Likewise, our musicians come up with memorable records within
short intervals of time, whether in Punjabi or Urdu. One may feel a lull for some time before a new
composition hits the air.

Every single thing that citizens imaginatively, socially or politically pursue in present times is
being discredited and dismissed in one way or the other.

My stint teaching poetry at one of the universities in Lahore and interaction with bright, dynamic
students provided me with an opportunity to rekindle my hope in a future different from the

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imminent disaster most of us have long believed to be coming our way. Additionally, the
environment helped introduce me to the works of some young academics across the country. These
people are reflecting, writing, editing and teaching with such devotion that it presents an
opportunity for the revival of intellectual life on at least a few important campuses in Pakistan.
Even the quality of journalistic articles some of these newer academics write as op-eds is superior
to the old folk regurgitating their take on current affairs, economy, history and social issues.

Therefore, the truth of the matter is that the situation is not as stark as portrayed. All is not right,
but all is not quiet on the academic and cultural front. Something that may continue to cause
concern is whether we will be able to create a critical mass of creative writers, artists and academics
who can subvert the machinations of a quasi-democratic and quasi-colonial state in favour of a
just, inclusive, innovative and healthy society. But to discount the very possibility of that
happening amounts to being cynical, not critical. Undermining the effort of young writers, artists
and academics and undervaluing their work also means that people will become distant from
pursuing these areas of human creativity and stop listening to what is being chronicled and said.
When teaching independent history is methodically kept away from students in school, reading
contemporary literature is the only means to stay connected with our civilisation, culture and
humanity at large.

Here, I am reminded of Jean Cocteau, the great French poet, author, playwright and filmmaker. In
one of his essays, ‘On Invisibility’, in the collection Diary of an Unknown, he says: “It used to be
that artists were surrounded by a conspiracy of silence. Nowadays, they are surrounded by a
conspiracy of noise. There is nothing that is not dissected and devalued. A dizzy self-
destructiveness has swept through France.” Replace France with Pakistan.

3) The politics of constructed identities:

Before I engage in an analysis of What is Pakistaniat? 41 Elements of the Unique Pakistani

National Identity and its author Javed Jabbar’s construction of ‘Pakistaniat’, or Pakistani identity,
let me make three preliminary remarks.

First, identity is constructed with a political project in mind. Often what is subjective is touted as
objective, whether it is self-characterisation or explaining what the prominent traits, features or
behaviour patterns of other communities are. It is like adopting a name, choosing something
desirable, cultivating an image and presenting it to the world. Every nation has constructed a
narrative of its own history and identity. Much of the official ‘truth’ — if removed from the facts
— loses value, as it falls to the low level of propaganda. We turn to professional historians and
sociologists to break the myths; that generates not a single, but multiple understandings of national
character and identity.

The second important point is that identity is a form of politics, which would be obvious from the
above observation, and therefore it is an explosive issue. The question of what is the real character
of a certain people, ethnic group or community becomes a contested issue for two reasons. First is
the subjective lens that is often applied in imagining the self or the other. No group or people
would like to cultivate anything negative about their own selves, or be generous or show empathy

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in portraying the other when the other is a community or any minority at the fringes of social and
political power.

The second reason is the power of the outside or inside observer to generate ideas that attempt to
establish certain characteristics. These are some rough, real or perceived notions about culture,
civilisations and the patterns of behaviour of persons or of ethnic or religious communities. The
colonial rulers in every part of the world wrote about their subject peoples, and their presentation
has often stuck for ages. Decolonising the mind and gaining knowledge of the native self has long
been — and remains — a big intellectual quest. It is not that easy to peel off colonial labels; it
requires removing the layers of the dirt of misconceptions first, and then a long journey of
recovering the real native and his or her true person buried under the debris of colonial gazettes.

The third, and final of my three preliminary remarks, is that identity is neither fixed — the author
brings out this point very clearly — nor is it singular. It is layered, contextual and subjective. Who
or what we are, are serious questions that may invoke very different and contradictory responses
from different ethnic communities. It depends on the intellectual framework applied to the
understanding of the identity issue or issues. Is it a singular national identity framework, a primary
choice and analytical tool of nationalist historians and sociologists, or multiculturalism as an
intellectual paradigm?

One cannot but be impressed by the work and determination that have gone into defining the
identity markers noted in What is Pakistaniat? Jabbar asserts that there are 41 “unique” elements
of the Pakistani national identity, although why these elements cannot be more or less, just the
fixed number, is a question that I feel pressed to raise. Furthermore, what art or science has the
author applied in formulating this list? For an answer, one must recognise the right of everyone in
understanding the social world and one’s preferred presentation of one’s own nation. The work
under review has a familiar issue of constructed ‘objectivity’ laid in thick layers of benign self-
imagination.

Let me explain this a little further with reference to the material in the book. The author has created
five clusters of identity worth mentioning to generate interest in reading the book, no matter what
may be one’s take on Pakistaniat or the national identity of Pakistan. These are individual,
collective, evolving, assertive and troubled identities. One can contest the selection of identity
traits, the methodology and the placing of behavioural patterns into exclusive boxes, but Jabbar is
right with regards to the multi-dimensional nature of the identity issue. It is not one thing, one
aspect or a single colour, but a rainbow of characteristics. The book presents perhaps more of them
than even the best of creative imagination can bring forth. Reading about them, one cannot escape
some contested notions, such as “pride in being a citizen of a nuclear-weapon state”, or “pride in
being part of an intangibly exclusive persona called ‘Pakistani’.”

There are a number of issues that one can raise, but I would prefer to leave them out because the
book under review doesn’t merit a place in the category of rigorous research or scholarship.
Neither, I believe, is that the intention of the author at all. Even if there is any such pretension, the
content of the book would betray it. The objective of writing this sort of book is two-fold: first, to
make the reader believe that Pakistan is not a new country born on Aug 14, 1947, carved out of

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the erstwhile British India, but explain its emergence in “historical, evolutionary terms”, as the
“seed of Muslim nationalism in South Asia ... was sown about 1,300 years earlier when the first
individual of the Islamic faith must have stepped on to the soil of the region.” It seems this very
old narrative about Pakistan’s historical existence has not gone away or been confined to the
periphery, but remains a subject of discussion.

The second avowed objective of the book is to deal with the ‘image’ and integration problems of
Pakistan. The author argues that “in view of the threats to internal cohesion ... there is a dire need
to articulate and assert the elements of identity to make each Pakistani aware of the diverse
complexity and the unifying singularity of Pakistaniat.” Any book written by such motives with
manifested assertions about the characteristic of any nation — in this case Pakistan — will
certainly provoke a lot of debate and discussion as much as controversy and intellectual curiosity.

4) The rise and rise of China:

The centre of gravity of the world has been shifting for the last three centuries. The 19th century
was undoubtedly the European century, with the British empire in its full glory. The 20th —
although it witnessed the rise and fall of communism — would be remembered as the American
century. And the 21st — despite the continued predominance of the United States — is likely to
go down in history as the Asian century.

Oswald Spengler, a German historian, had fired the first warning shot when he wrote The Decline
of the West: Form and Actuality at a time when World War I was winding down. Just a couple of
years before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, Yale-based academic Paul Kennedy
reiterated the warning in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military
Conflict from 1500 to 2000, in which he criticised Washington for imperial overstretch in its
rivalry with the Soviet-led communist bloc. Peter Frankopan, who teaches global history at the
University of Oxford, has now observed the rise of the Silk Roads as the centre of world power
slips from the West to the East. “All roads used to lead to Rome,” he notes. “Today they lead to
Beijing.”

In 2015, Frankopan’s book The Silk Roads: A New History of the World was published to wide
acclaim. In this highly provocative book, he questioned Eurocentrism and explained how the area
comprising the silk routes — mainly Russia, Central Asia, Iran, Afghanistan, China, Pakistan and
India — have been the “engines” of the world. It is a sweeping history of the region stretching
back to around 2,500 years and explains how most powerful networks of trade, ideas, peoples,
religions and even diseases took root along this route.

Three years after his bestseller was published, Frankopan has come up with this slimmer, sibling
volume. The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World is a breezy but compelling
contemporary history of the last three years combined with an insightful look at emerging and
future trends. “The world’s past has been shaped by what happens along the Silk Roads,” he
observes. “So too will its future.”

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The book reminds us that we live in an increasingly inter-connected world despite this being the
age of Trump and Brexit; although isolation and disengagement may be the leading themes in the
Western world, it is the strengthening of the ties and mutual cooperation among the Silk Road
countries which is the dominant trend. Among these countries, it is China which is shaping the
future of the region and perhaps of the world.

In the last couple of decades, China’s economy has grown at breakneck pace. As recently as 2001,
China’s GDP was only 39 percent of that of the US. By 2016 it was 114 percent and rising quickly.
In 2017, at a time when the Chinese economic growth rate seems to have slightly cooled down
compared to the last few years, Starbucks announced that it would open 2,000 shops in China by
2021 — this means a new Starbucks outlet every 15 hours. The increasing disposable income of
Chinese consumers is the driving force behind the growing demand for French bread and wine in
China.

With its giant economy, China is stepping out of the shadows and assuming an important role on
the global stage with massive investments in a network of infrastructure projects — known as the
Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) — in about 80 countries, whose combined populations represent 63
percent of the global population and their combined economic output accounts for one-third of
global output.

By investing trillions of dollars in infrastructure projects — roads, ports, railways, power plants,
etc — China aims to improve regional connectivity through the BRI and redirect the Chinese
economy from dependence on the US towards neighbouring or regional countries. China will re-
orient its economy by reducing the importance of low-cost manufacturing exports to the West and
instead supplying investment goods to countries covered by the BRI. Moreover, China will gain
stable and reliable access to energy and other natural resources.

Some critics have accused China of buying political influence and goodwill or even of power-
grabbing through the BRI. Others have expressed concern over growing debt levels in the BRI
countries, thereby turning those highly indebted countries into Chinese client states, and also of
lopsided contracts which favour Chinese contractors. Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, for
example, opined that in order to make it a win-win strategy, just as Africa opens up to China, China
must also open up to Africa.

An important but unpopular point for the Western audience that the author makes is that for a
country in Africa, Latin America, Central Asia or South Asia, Chinese offerings these days trump
those of the US; as Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen explained it poignantly, “Other countries
have lots of ideas, but no money. But for China, when it comes with an idea, it also comes with
the money.”

Frankopan is critical of Trump’s trade-war policies towards China and believes that his flawed
Iran policy, built on sanctions, is a road to nowhere and will impact Washington’s relations with
European Union (EU) capitals in addition to driving Iran closer to China, Russia and the EU. He
also discusses the current elections in Pakistan, the importance of the China Pakistan Economic
Corridor (CPEC) projects as flagship projects of the BRI, and Islamabad’s pivot away from

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Washington and towards Beijing. He is quite sanguine about the emergence of Gwadar potentially
as a major gateway and ponders if it can one day become the new Shanghai.

The pace of globalisation, with its changing influences and ownership structures, has also been
explored at length in the book. A number of states along the Silk Road were subjected to
colonisation by the British and other European countries. Art, manuscripts and sculptures were
carted away to be displayed as trophies in European capitals. Now the trend has reversed, as the
affluent and the well-heeled from countries along the Silk Road have been hunting for football
club ownerships in Britain and Europe as trophies to be displayed.

The trend is not just restricted to football clubs, but to well-known and prestigious European brands
as well, from Volvo to Harrods, and from the Odeon to the Waldorf. They are being snapped up
with outright ownership or as partnerships by the wealthy elite in the East.

Frankopan has also captured the ironies of globalisation in his absorbing book: Osama Bin Laden
has been held responsible for 9/11 and bringing down the World Trade Centre twin towers. The
Carrara marble quarries in Italy have supplied the marble used in the construction of the Freedom
Tower, built at the site of the twin towers in New York; Bin Laden’s family is the principal
shareholder in the firm that owns the Carrara marble quarries.

“A new world is emerging in Asia, and it is not a free one,” Frankopan warns quite ominously.
There is little concern for political plurality and human rights in this Asian economic resurgence,
led by China. A number of countries in the region are characterised by extractive and non-inclusive
political and/or economic institutions. In their influential book, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of
Power, Prosperity and Poverty, noted political economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson
posited that countries with non-inclusive and extractive institutions can grow for a while, but this
growth is not sustainable.

They argued that even the erstwhile Soviet Union, under extractive and non-inclusive institutions,
grew spectacularly from 1928 to 1960 but then ran out of steam, resulting in initial slowdown and
then total collapse. After economic reforms, China’s economic institutions are more inclusive
compared to the Soviet Union, but both authors questioned the sustainability of breathtaking
Chinese economic growth in the presence of its non-inclusive and extractive political institutions.
With the changing economic landscape emerging across the globe, this theory will be tested in
China and some other Silk Road countries in the next few decades.

5) Passage to beauty:

As we read in history, since ancient times the Indian subcontinent has attracted explorers and
invaders to raid its wealth, or, once arrived there, to possess it entirely for themselves. Such
exploration involves having to go through a narrow pass before arriving in an enchanting land.
That image was in Lord Byron’s mind when, in his poem ‘Don Juan’, he makes a reference to the
“North-West Passage/ Unto the glowing India of the soul.”

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Such a geographical reality has long been a metaphor for many human activities: the scientist
drawn to investigate some previously unknown phenomenon or the artist pursuing a new idea is
each an explorer who must first go through a long passage of experimentation with its many
misleadingly beckoning alleys. We are first in the dark or tempted by sirens to lose our way,
passionate storms overtake us, but then, at the end of our Odyssey, light dawns and ours is the
thrill of gazing at the glowing land as if it had been newly lit up within our soul.

Other poets have created variations on the exploration image, the most notable example being by
John Keats in his sonnet, ‘On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer’, where he describes the
glowing vision in his mind on reading the Homer translation — a vision that has him staring in
silent wonder as did the early European explorers in the New World when they first crossed
Panama and, from a peak in Darien, found themselves staring at the Pacific. And long before Keats,
John Donne drew images from the wonders of geographical discovery that, describing the
beloved’s body as a new-found land, give some of his love poems the glowing vividness of
Renaissance paintings of beautiful women.

Applying this metaphor to creative activity, we have only to read the letters, interviews and essays
of some of the major writers, artists and composers to see that all, either directly or by implication,
refer to their pursuit of art that does not merely convey ideas, but one that glows. And the very few
who succeed, produce that gleaming light as an inexpressible aesthetic experience, for which
Byron’s “glowing India of the soul” is so illuminatingly suggested that even an unbelieving
rationalist accepts it as true.

Drawn to create a work without having an idea as to what is that interior experience pressing to be
discovered, the artist proceeds to explore a seemingly barren and unpromising region where too
many passages lead to dead ends, enforcing a retreat and recommencement to experiment with a
formerly forbidding direction, only to come up with a new blockage; one is compelled to retreat
and look for an alternative and this is where, the prospect seeming hopeless, many works get
abandoned. But stubbornness or sheer good luck pays off, for where what first appears to be a
distracting gleam just at the line where the shadows cast by the towering cliffs are the darkest, one
comes to the window which gives the first glimpse of the glowing land.

Byron’s ‘Don Juan’ is an extraordinary poem. In his 1937 essay on Byron, T.S. Eliot identifies it
as his best poem though, shockingly for Eliot, instead of praising the carefully constructed natural
flow of Byron’s language he dismisses it insultingly as “the schoolboy command of language, that
makes his lines seem trite and his thoughts shallow.” Eliot was a first-rate literary critic, but I
rather suspect that there was a mischievous streak in him that made him taunt, as we see him do in
his essays on John Milton and Byron, putting them down in that affected evangelical voice of his.
While there is no doubt that the best literary criticism has been written not by professors of
literature, but by writers who have themselves produced notable original work, there is inevitably
a self-serving element in some of their assertions and one comes across examples where, when
they attack another writer — especially a contemporary praised highly by others — there is a
haughty subtext in their criticism that implies an assertion of their own superior originality. A close
reading of ‘Don Juan’ shows it to be one of the finest poems in the English language, not the one
so glibly put down by Eliot.

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Readers drawn to ‘Don Juan’ expecting a salacious account of the hero who, as Wolfgang
Amadeus Mozart’s famous Don Giovanni (in his opera that Gustave Flaubert said was “one of the
three finest things God ever made”) philandered his way to hell, will be surprised, or even puzzled,
that Byron begins his poem with a mocking and derogatory dedication in which he attacks his
fellow poets Robert Southey and William Wordsworth. But that mocking tone projecting the poet’s
inner voice, expressing his harsh opinion of popular trends, will be heard throughout the poem.
And though in the first of the poem’s 15 cantos we are shown the young Juan’s early amorous
exploration, making for a very absorbing narrative, the poem’s intellectual interest comes from
Byron’s many digressions. As the poem proceeds, we are looking not at Juan’s love affairs, even
though they take him to the arms of the Russian empress Catherine the Great, but at the mind of
Lord Byron.

The scientist investigating unknown phenomenon or the artist pursuing a new idea is each an
explorer who must first go through a long passage of experimentation.

The passages narrating Juan’s affairs are beautifully composed, the imagery fresh and strikingly
modern with nothing anachronistic about the language. Two hundred years after it was written,
Byron’s rendition of that glowing vision of the soul within the sexually engaged lover’s throbbing
body has not been expressed so well in literature, though we’ve had some superb examples from
D.H. Lawrence and Vladimir Nabokov. And yet, that is not what Byron’s poem is about for, at the
beginning of the 10th canto, he describes how, when resuming work on the poem that morning,
just picking up a sheet of paper on which to write, his “bosom underwent a glorious glow” and his
“internal spirit” did a dance because he was filled with the thought that what he was doing for
poetry was like what an astronomer does for astronomy — discover new stars. And though the
narrative returns from time to time to Juan, who has been sent by the Russian empress on a
diplomatic mission to England, the remaining five cantos are only very incidentally about him.
The poem is really about Byron’s ideas, which range from metaphysical observations to a
devastatingly scathing attack on the English aristocracy whose glum hypocrisy Byron sought to
escape by abandoning Britain for Greece.

That Eliot considered Byron’s language and ideas “trite and shallow” is shocking, considering that
he himself had worked on a PhD dissertation in philosophy when a scholar at Oxford and should
have observed that Byron’s was no casual banter, but sound philosophical thought and that, as a
great poet himself, Eliot would, in his own finest poem ‘Four Quartets’, write “We shall not cease
from exploration/ And the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started.”

Byron had done that exploration. He had penetrated the mind’s northwest frontier and found the
passage to that beauty which great art opens before us like a glowing spiritual ecstasy within the
soul.

6) Out of service:

Evaluating the performance of the Civil Service and reforming it has been on the agenda of several
previous governments in Pakistan. We have seen many commissions and committees formed to
perform this uphill task, but to no avail. All we have seen so far have been cosmetic changes and

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fancy terminologies. The actual difference brought about by these changes still needs to be
ascertained. When I took up Less Than Civil: The State of Civil Service in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa
by Nasser Yousaf, I expected to see such an effort, to gauge the impact on service delivery brought
about by the changes introduced in recent years. However, objective research on this topic remains
elusive.

Yousaf has divided his book into nine chapters and highlighted several contradictions in the
policies that have recently been adopted and the ground reality. For example, in a chapter that
discusses the KP Public Service Commission, Yousaf brings to readers’ attention a case study
about a former chairman of the KP Public Service Commission who conducted interviews in a
manner that resembled an inquisition, in order to judge the suspect beliefs of the candidate more
than evaluating their “aptitude, capabilities and potentialities” for the job they had applied for.
Self-description of candidates using words such as “accommodative, go-getter, cooperative,
innovative, flexible, etc” were turned into nightmares, and the chairman branded them as someone
who would engage in corrupt practices. At the same time, candidates with the right connections
were not grilled by the same self-righteous chairman.

However, Yousaf concludes this chapter by citing a newspaper article and recommending that all
public service commissions in the country, and the Higher Education Commission, read that article
in order to find out what ails the system. In my opinion, this does not do justice to the readers of
the book who, by the end of this chapter, are completely invested in finding out what ails the public
service commissions and how it can be fixed, only to be left to consult an old newspaper article to
reach the logical conclusion of the discussion. Yousaf could have summarised the findings of the
article for the convenience of his readers, if not giving fresh recommendations to revamp the
system. Moreover, Yousaf has stated in the same chapter that a “continuous downward trend has
been witnessed in the results of the competitive examination” without supporting this claim with
relevant data.

An exploration of the problems of the bureaucracy in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is easy to read, but
lacks academic rigour and often leaves the reader unsatisfied.

The narrative in another chapter titled ‘Obedience and Defiance’ keeps shifting from one problem
to another. The chapter starts with an example of the British colonial civil servant Sir Robert
Warburton and his dedication to his job. Then it goes to the illegal means employed by political
agents in the tribal areas, such as the prevalence of corruption, nepotism and misuse of
discretionary powers. Then, the discussion moves on to the misgivings of the provincial civil
service against the federal civil service. Furthermore, Yousaf laments the poor state of education
in the province and how religious parties had made sure, under various administrations, to keep
the school and college syllabi conservative without allowing rational thought. One such
administration during the period 2002-07 even went so far as to direct all provincial departments
to ‘Islamise’ their domains.

Towards the end of this chapter, Yousaf states that in 2016, 24 demands were presented by KP in
a Senate Standing Committee, but members of this committee were unhappy about the way these
demands were presented by the provincial bureaucracy. We do not get any details as to what these

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demands were or how these demands could have been presented in a better way, in accordance
with the observations of the committee members.

In another place, Yousaf suggests to “adopt a more professionally oriented service structure for
good governance”, but he does not share any details regarding how the service structure can be
made more professional and leaves it to the imagination of the reader.

This is the fourth book of the author who writes extensively for various newspapers. The
journalistic background of the author sets the underlying tone of the book, which reads more like
a series of opinion pieces rather than research work done with academic rigour. This very fact
makes it easier to comprehend, but leaves many aspects of the problems unexplored.

7) The critic who became history:

"All changed, changed utterly/ A terrible beauty is born.” These lines from William Butler Yeats
were placed by Dr Jameel Jalibi at the opening of the third volume — covering the first half of the
19th century — of his magisterial Tareekh-i-Adab-i-Urdu [History of Urdu Literature] published
in 2006. With more than a thousand pages to each volume, this is undoubtedly the largest of such
endeavours related to Urdu literature, unsurpassed for its encyclopaedic breadth and the scope of
its coverage. Jalibi started working on it around 1967, coming up to four hefty volumes. It seems
implausible that this is the single-handed work of one person; in the past even institutions have
failed to do something on such a large scale.

Literary history, as its proponents have noted, faces a double challenge since it has to be literary
and historical at the same time. ‘Literary evolution’ — which has remained a great favourite of
our critics as ‘irtiqa’ — is a limited concept when applied in such a context, but Jalibi managed to
find the golden mean. He conveys a sense of the chronological continuity of individual authors, at
the same time highlighting the social processes which add layers of meaning to literary works.
While some may disagree with details, it is the overall design which remains unique.

The enormity of the task notwithstanding, Jalibi had prepared himself well for it — his writing
career began as a literary critic. He contributed a column titled Baatain [Conversations] to the
reputed monthly magazine Saqi which appeared alongside Mohammad Hasan Askari’s trend-
setting column Jhalkiyan [Highlights]. This marked Jalibi’s long association with Saqi’s editor
Shahid Ahmed Dehlvi, which continued till the latter’s death in 1968; Jalibi edited the special issue
of Saqi designed as a tribute to its editor. His first compilation of literary essays was titled Tanqeed
Aur Tajruba [Criticism and Experience] and was followed by several other collections of essays,
which made his mark as a critic.

Unlike most other literary critics of the day, Jalibi had larger concerns and this became obvious
from his first major independent book, Pakistani Culture, which won an award and was later also
rendered into English. Closer in spirit to the point of views upheld by writers such as Karrar
Husain, Muhammad Hasan Askari, Saleem Ahmad and Intizar Husain, Jalibi’s view was
formulated through his understanding of literature and informed by a close study of Western
opinions. Jalibi describes the concept of culture in general terms, highlighting the necessity of

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imbibing Islamic spirit and values, but his usage is different from the approach which came to
dominate the national narrative, especially following the Zia regime. One wonders if he saw an
apparent contradiction between his views and the national narrative. Much water has flowed down
the Indus and questions of language and ethnicity appear far more complex to us because of the
way history has evolved. Not only the flow of history, but contemporary discourses have seriously
challenged earlier views.

As an analyst of culture, Jalibi shows strong traces of T.S. Eliot’s influence. I wonder what he
would make of a more recent author such as the Latin American novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, the
very title of whose book, Notes on the Death of Culture, is a refutation of Eliot. Llosa opens his
book in a way which has great contemporary relevance: “It is very likely that never in human
history have there been as many treatises, essays, theories and analyses focused on culture as there
are today. This fact is even more surprising given that culture, in the meaning traditionally ascribed
to the term, is now on the point of disappearing. And perhaps it has already disappeared, discreetly
emptied of its content, and replaced by another content that distorts its earlier meaning.”

Literary scholarship was closely linked with translations for Jalibi. His immersion in Eliot led to
the remarkable Eliot Ke Mazameen [The Essays of Eliot], the Urdu translation of selected literary
criticism of the arch-modernist who prided himself on being a classicist, and laid the foundation
of his heavy influence on Urdu critics. A more detailed and systematic effort was Arastoo Say
Eliot Tak [From Aristotle to Eliot], the Urdu rendering of the major critical texts from the Western
canon. To Jalibi’s credit are also Urdu versions of poet and writer Aziz Ahmad’s two scholarly
books on Islamic India. On a different scale, he translated George Orwell’s political fable Animal
Farm into Urdu as well.

The scholar in him led him to decipher archaic manuscripts from the Deccan and add the masnavi
by Fakhruddin Nizami of Bidar — titled Kadam Rao Padam Rao — and the Divan of Hassan
Shauqi to the Urdu canon. While he devoted much attention to classics from the Deccan, I cannot
but help wish he had given some attention to classics written in north India during the same period,
as these are generally relegated to be outside the canon. Jalibi moved easily from the classic to the
contemporary and went on to edit the collected poems of Miraji, the arch-modernist of Urdu verse.

Jalibi’s rapidly growing reputation as a scholar and research writer may have eclipsed his status as
an editor. After his association with Saqi, he founded the literary magazine Naya Daur and, with a
few issues, it achieved a standard surpassed by no other periodical. The best writers of the day
appeared in its pages, with new writings by Noon Meem Rashid, Qurratulain Hyder, Ghulam
Abbas, Aziz Ahmad, Abul Fazal Siddiqui and Jameela Hashmi becoming regular features. It also
carried the unpublished writings of Miraji and Rafiq Hussain.

In fact, Abul Fazal Siddiqui’s richly detailed stories were a hallmark of the journal. But in spite of
its distinction, the editor remained in the shadows. Because of his government service, Jalibi did
not allow his name to appear on the cover and, at best, it remained an open secret that he was the
moving spirit behind the journal. Among others, Noon Meem Rashid entrusted his new poetry to
him and corresponded regularly with him. It was as an editor that Jalibi encouraged my early
writings, giving me the opportunity to publish in Naya Daur’s prestigious pages.

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Tall and upright, Jalibi was a formidable presence in my boyhood as he remained a close friend of
my mother’s uncle, Shahid Ahmed Dehlvi, and through him, of my father Dr Aslam Farrukhi.
Literary gatherings were a regular feature at Jalibi sahib’s home in North Nazimabad and I have
fond recollections of several such events hosted for visiting dignitaries. His home was a treasure
trove of books and papers, which have since been donated to the University of Karachi.

The family friendship deepened when Jalibi took over as vice chancellor of the University of
Karachi and invited my father to work with him as the registrar. I was able to see Jalibi working
at close quarters. Sometimes he and my father would take off from the office and come to our
home to be free of a ceaseless flow of visitors. Cushioned on the sofa and surrounded by papers,
we would see Jalibi working tirelessly for hours on end, fortifying himself with paan and green
tea. His signatures confirmed the degree I was awarded at the completion of my medical studies.
My brother and I would smile when he enquired about our studies with a mouth full of paan, as he
would still get to say what he wanted. After a full day at the university, he would devote himself
to his writing and would sometime mention to me the various projects he was working on.

Although the Karachi rumour mill did not spare him, I never heard him speak of anybody with
rancour, not even the people responsible for maligning him. He was too large-hearted to stoop to
such a level. Painstaking and hardworking to a remarkable degree, these were habits acquired from
a lifetime of discipline. I saw him working with the same zeal when he moved to Islamabad to
head the Muqtadara Qaumi Zaban [National Language Authority]. He supervised the Muqtadara’s
English-Urdu Dictionary and, when I complained that his time would have been better utilised
working on the Tareekh, he would smile and explain to me how necessary it was to have a good
dictionary.

The benign smile — but no paan — was all that I was able to see when I met him in the waiting
area of a hospital a few years ago. When I enquired about his health, he told me to pray that he
gets to complete the last volume of the Tareekh. The completion of the self-assigned task was more
important to him than existence. The last time I saw him, he had already turned into history.

8) Vistas of Pakistan:

Pakistan’s rich diversity of historical and natural landscapes makes it an exciting destination for
adventure travellers and so Muhammad Rehan Khan — a director at the Karachi Metropolitan
Corporation with a passion for photography — took to documenting Pakistan’s heritage with a
view to promoting tourism in the country. Pakistan, Heaven on Earth is the culmination of 15 years
of Khan’s travel photography across 187 locations in Pakistan.

Tired by the recent noise and clutter on social media about Pakistan’s tourism scene, I was more
than eager to pick up a coffee table book that would help me add to my list of places to see in the
country. Pakistan, Heaven on Earth begins on the right note with a section dedicated to
photography in and around Karachi. I’ve felt that conversations on Pakistan’s travel potential far
too often don’t include its largest city; to illustrate, not a single place on the website Lonely
Planet’s list of top 20 attractions in Pakistan is from Karachi. That said, I couldn’t help but wonder
why most photos of the city featured in the book are of architectural landmarks dating to the

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colonial era. A megacity that represents the collective hopes and fears of an estimated 20 million
Pakistanis surely has far a richer visual vocabulary. In the rest of Sindh, Khan takes us through
shrines, temples, forts and the palaces of regional kingdoms. Each photo is accompanied by a brief
caption that mentions the history — and occasionally the present condition — of the locations. A
stunning photograph of the Varun Dev Mandir on Manora Island convinced me to plan a visit to
it when I’m in Karachi next, and I was happy to learn through the photo description that efforts
are currently underway to restore the temple.

In the rest of the book, the author takes us across natural and architectural landscapes across
Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Balochistan, Gilgit Baltistan and Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK)
through the lens of his camera.

Khan organises Pakistan’s architectural heritage into four classifications: pre-Islamic, Islamic,
colonial and post-colonial. The pre-Islamic architecture covered includes Hindu temples in Sindh,
Punjab and Balochistan; Gandharan Buddhist sites in northern Pakistan; Jain temples in
Nagarparkar and Indus Valley sites. Although interest in Sikh, Buddhist and Hindu heritage in
Pakistan has rekindled thanks to recent state-led efforts to promote religious tourism, the country’s
rich Jain heritage is yet to receive the same level of public interest. The author’s photos of
intricately designed Jain temples set against the desolate landscape of Nagarparkar are a visual
treat.

Several structures dating to the Mughal era, Sufi shrines, and forts and palaces associated with
local kingdoms have been covered in the book as examples of regional Islamic architecture. I was
happy to see the author’s focus on the heritage of the local princely states; although princely states
account for nearly 40 per cent of the landmass of the subcontinent, they have not received adequate
scholarly attention in Pakistani historiography. Pakistan, Heaven on Earth also offers us interesting
visuals of the palaces and forts held by the rulers of Khairpur, Bahawalpur, Chitral and Hunza.

Khan’s photography of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Gilgit Baltistan, AJK and Balochistan focuses
primarily on natural landscapes. Photographs of nearly 70 scenic locations in the Karakoram, the
Himalayan and the Hindukush mountain ranges are evidence of the author’s familiarity with
remote locations in northern Pakistan. I really enjoyed the section on Balochistan’s beaches,
topography and rock structures, and made notes to plan a trip to Chandragup, the 300-foot-tall mud
volcano in Balochistan revered by Hindus as sacred ground.

While I was impressed by the author’s skilful photography, I couldn’t help thinking that a
compelling written narrative would have made Pakistan, Heaven on Earth a more interesting read.
The author mentions briefly in the preface how an accident on a horseback journey near Fairy
Meadows exposed him to the risks posed by weak infrastructure in the region. When I started
reading the book, I had hoped to come across more such insights that were grounded in the veteran
traveller’s personal experiences. Instead, the captions accompanying each photo — the only text
in the book — are painfully generic at times; for example, Kund Malir in Balochistan is described
as “considered to be one of the most beautiful beaches in the world with a calm, peaceful and
soothing environment.” It would have been good had the captions been phrased better, especially
considering the premium price of the book.

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Lonely Planet, the world’s premier travel guide publisher, describes Pakistan as “the difficult child
of South Asia — blessed with abundant natural and historical riches, but plagued by political
instability, which has kept the country off the radar for all but the most hardened explorers.” As
normalcy returns to Pakistan, visual storytelling is a powerful way to engage with domestic and
international audiences for tourism. Khan’s book is a rich pictorial catalogue of attractions across
the diverse country and should interest seasoned travellers as well as everyday readers looking to
connect with Pakistan’s heritage.

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