Khuda ke Liye . . . In the Name of God

The auspicious beginning, the shubharamabha (my sanskrit's been brushed up since returning from Orissa!), with the name of God, indeed in the Name of God.

I wonder if it was the appeal of something as exotic as a Pakistani film (most we're told are bad, but I've always liked Pakistani plays we'd watch on video cassettes rented from the "video parlours" as they were called back in the day) or its theme of the clash of moderate and extremist versions of Islam that caught my attention. Filled with an uncharacteristic enthusiasm for the cinema halls, I coaxed and cajoled the (whom I thought to be) faithful for company, only to encounter apathy and disinterest. Finally, a more pliant friend agreed, so off I went to the Patel Nagar Satyam Cinema, deliberately trying to find the auto ride novel, brushing off traces of last years memories of daily trips to those Ridge-lined parts of town.

Awful acting, a melodrama of extreme happenings, almost deliberate irony and a porous story line, Khuda Ke Liye still manages to disturb and confront all at once. A story that brings together the mixed realities of the Pakistan that stretches from Lahore to London, and New York to the NWFP, through the geographical setting of the lives it chronicles and caricatures underlines the complexities of understanding this country as its stands today. By attempting to spread the canvas wide enough to capture them all, Khuda Ke Liye immediately forces the outsider to look in not at the image that suits him best to associate with, but the entirety of a society coming to grips with its situation in a vortex of contradictions; on a terrain marked by the fault lines demarcating moderation and extremism. Where the movie disappoints is in its treatment of the two, failing to talk about the complexities, and what makes one traverse the buffer space between the two realms. One sees the younger brother's tilt towards the more extremist and militant manifestation of Islam, without even the slightest insight into what caused an otherwise yuppie musician to seek acceptance and validation in dogma. On the other hand, a most exceptional circumstance is created to show how moderate Muslims, as the older Mansoor represents, bear the brutal brunt of stereotyping and prejudice. Skewed patriarchy is shown to magnify itself in the micro-culture mentality, demonstrating the simultaneous westernisation and fossilization of the country's Diaspora. The valiant defense of moderation in Islam and its compatibility with modern times and its freedoms seems text-bookish, trite and undeserving of the eye-opener value it was shown, and certainly hoped to create. Haven't we heard the moderate middle pronouncements too often to believe them by now, forgive our prejudices and focus instead on what keeps them alive? Isn't there too much of an almost apologetic justification, and very little confrontation of the larger forces and issues that sustain a militant order in the name of God?

The eloquent Naseruddin Shah may have at best well-researched and aptly referenced his rebuttal of fundamentalist interpretations of Islam, but is there anything new in what he says? Haven't our long-standing shared traditions of Sufism, interviews of Benazir and the mumblings of the Pakistani intelligentsia time and again established not the case, but the fact of Islam's liberal outlook? The film fails, again, to focus on the causes for the survival of those who preside over a system that keeps the extremist lobby alive, active and accommodated. This is in fact again conveniently (and of course correctly in part) deflected to the America-sponsored arming of the Afghan Mujahideen to counter the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The film refuses to draw attention to the politics that create space for the extremist forces to rule the roost. Surely enough the censor sword, if not a bullet… oops sun-roof wound is potential threat enough to anyone who seeks to tread this space!

The film has its gripping moments. The baseless and open-ended persecution of Mansoor by American intelligence agents, however extreme an example, compelled you to question the preoccupation with America as the fitting democratic model one must aspire to be. The interrogating officer's mocking Mansoor for having the temerity to suggest he could only read but not understand Arabic (a fact very understandable and known to many of us with close enough exposure to sub-continental Muslim cultural practice) came to me as a poignant reminder of the west's occasional inability to comprehend matters outside their familiar rationality. The contradictions of assimilating in a foreign culture while still hoping to keep the umbilical cord intact are no more stark than when the young Sarmad says that his (Lahore-based) parents would never consent to his deceitful marriage with his cousin (ensured to maintain her purity as a Muslim, lest she marry her British Christian lover) which he had hatched along with his Londoner uncle. The instant and matter-of-fact suggestion of the Pashtun women to let Mariam run away when the men were gone, knowing (unlike the obstinate menfolk) that she was not cut out for their kind of life, nor could come around to, was as amusing as unexpected. On a lighter note, the musician brothers, through their jamming and their songs reminded me why on many a long night spent in cold England, the Karachi crowd was often much more engaging,and entertaining than some Bombay bores, for instance ;-)