Piercing The Veil

A Pakistani student at Stanford has produced a documentary about re-inventing the Taliban. This she hasdone on an assignment for the New York Times.

What Sharmeen Obaid didn't ask the MMA beards - several of them - is whether in their 15-month-old reign, theyhave delivered the dreams of some 20 million voters who resurrected them politically because they werepromised food, shelter, jobs and an end to corruption!

By padlocking their womenfolk as if they be cattle, banning music, defacing advertisements, have these squat,well-fed, fat-faced hirsute leaders of the six religious parties - the United Action Front - converted theNorth-West and Balochistan provinces into an El Dorado worthy of emulation elsewhere?

"This madness must not be allowed to continue. We don't need to be taught how to follow Islam and it'snone of their business," Bushra Gohar, a Peshawar-based social worker and a blue-blooded Pushtun blaststhe beards. "I will never cover my head - Islam does not tell you that it's compulsory. If told by MMA tocover my head, I'll resist, our civil liberties are threatened, it's a cause for alarm."

Gohar is furiously frank with her interviewer Sharmeen, an M.A. student of Journalism in Stanford University,on an assignment for the New York Times to produce a documentary titled Re-inventing the Taliban? It will bepremiered in the US tomorrow on the Discovery Times channel. Millions will view it.

The best response comes from a model in Lahore: "The Shariah is being made to focus on what women aredoing. Islam doesn't revolve around women!"

"Yes, it does!" asserts a shrill Razia Aziz, an MMA woman member of our National Assembly. Staunchlyloyal, she defends her party in hastily delivered sound bites, but is bowled out when it comes to a turf matchbetween men and women MNAs: "We have little influence over them. Men don't take us seriously...they feelsuperior and maybe they are right because this is what Allah ordained...women are more emotional...we needseparate assemblies and speakers!"

Aziz says she's free to go anywhere she pleases, but again contradicts herself by insisting that lawsdecreeing 'chaddar' for women must be promulgated without further delay!

A heft of the 54-minute documentary details the jingoistic climate prevalent in the NWFP (North West FrontierProvince). Sharmeen, 26, is seen straddling among men-infested streets, the majority of them staringmenacingly at her (no blame here, for the young woman attracts attention in her tomato-red shalwar kameezewith a matching dupatta that stubbornly refuses to cover her moving body). Dressed in similarly strikingcolours, Sharmeen even manages to move around Darra Adam Khel and fondle with firearms, something mostPakistani women would not be seen doing.

Fearlessly intrepid in attempting to pierce the veil in a bid to show the real face of MMA as the re-inventedTaliban, Sharmeen moves freely in a landscape where women are sparsely seen in walking tents while trying toobliterate themselves fully. The young Pakistani woman is all over the place, quite at home in the malebastions of the Frontier with that alluring smile of hers and a charmingly confrontational style ofquestioning.

Her two sessions with the veteran politician Samiul Haq, founder of Darul Uloom Haqqania (super madressah)that has churned out the Taliban, are fun to watch, quite entertaining. He seems to enjoy the little arrowsshe slings his way, eliciting his comment on co-education, burqa as a fashion and women banned from work.

"Will I be able to work and even interview you five years from now if you fully enforce the Taliban-likeedicts on women?"

Teasingly, the Maulana chortles, "You appear more concerned about yourself. Why worry? Allah has givenyou a place in the US..."

Prior to this very disarming exchange, the man who mentored the Taliban at his Akora Khattak seminary is allfire and thunder against the Americans who malign the Taliban: "It's pure propaganda to crushIslam...secularism and the US are unacceptable to us and there can be no separation between government andreligion. Progressive Islam is unacceptable."

Come on - this is old hat - I have been hearing the Maulana parrot these clichés, by now so shopworn andhackneyed, since decades. The only difference today is that he's actually calling the shots - something he'salways lusted after but never got till now.

Sharmeen seems obsessed with co-education and apart from engaging Samiul Haq in this debate, she earlier asksMNA Razia Aziz, the mask in black with just two slits for eyes. When the survival of women as human beingsitself is at stake, I find the co-education question to be too facile to really resonate.

But Sharmeen belongs to another generation: "I grew up in a progressive Islamic society, listening toGuns N Roses and U2, familiar with the West; like millions of other Pakistani's - wearing jeans and studyingin a co-education school in Pakistan." She's the first in her family to study in America.

Any no-go areas in Peshawar? Nope - MMA men must be credited for allowing Sharmeen the liberty to move aboutfreely filming anything that makes for a spicy story, including her firing guns and enjoying it thoroughly andin-your-face (to MMA) musical concert by singer Gulzar Alam chatting up two chicks!

Despite Sharmeen showing cops lollygagging with burning video cassettes allegedly in line with the Shariahlaws (shown to excess) or stale footage of over-heated rhetoric at MMA rallies shouting death to America(cloyingly replayed here), I ask her if she is playing to her Western and Indian audiences by backing upelectronically what her sponsor, the NYT, has been inking in its editorials on Pakistan and its leadership notdoing enough to contain the Taliban menace: "Local governments (MMA) along the Afghan border continue toprovide the Taliban with valuable sanctuaries," is the latest NYT indictment.

"I don't think I am playing to the Western phobia of religious extremism by portraying the worst ofPakistan," answers Sharmeen. "I show a balanced Pakistan with two sides of the story. If mydocumentary had only concentrated on the religious elements, then I think it would have been fair to make thisassumption. But my journey took me from the NWFP to Lahore, where I show a fashion show and where we meetliberated Pakistani women."

Insisting that she was given "complete editorial freedom", Sharmeen is on mark when she says thatshe did not "churn" out a Pakistani PR film. "There are things that are wrong in my country andI need to speak out about them, because if educated people like myself keep silent, then our country will loseout."

But isn't it a bit odd for her to rush to India and show her film, instead of Pakistan?

"Indians rarely get to see films made by Pakistanis. Everyone needs to see my film because it depicts thestruggle within Islam between the forces of fundamentalism and secularism.... I plan to show my film inPakistan as well. Unfortunately, we do not have a vibrant film culture and people rarely watchdocumentaries."

The only interviewee to give Sharmeen a rough time is Khurshid Alam, leader of the dangerously armed andradicalized MMA Youth wing. Playing to the galleries (actually 6-7 men in crisp white shalwar kameeze sprawledon a nearby charpoy with one of them standing up defiantly, resting his foot on the cot facing Sharmeen), theprofessor of Business with eyes downcast makes a mockery of her questions on the treatment of women by puttingcounter questions to her - tacky and somewhat harsh.