Meray dard ko jo zuban miley …

“Almost always, the creative dedicated minority has made the world the better.”

                                                    (Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.)

I remember my school days. The dose of patriotism was inseparable from those of religion and so the green color of the flag was my favorite color, the emotional ideological slogans were my favorite phrases in literature, Iqbal’s community poems were my favorite poems by far, military was my favorite profession and emotional anthems were my favorites in music. But even in those days I remember whenever I listened to “Sindhi hum, Balochi hum, Punjabi hum, Pathan hum . . .” I was innocently irritated over the absence of any mention of my Hazara ethnicity. Years later I realized there were far more deserving communities whose names were missing in those verses and also some whose only names were there.

So how exactly it feels to be a Hazara when you have to explain to every person you meet that you were not a Pathan, an Irani or a Chinese? It really tests your nerves when you are protesting against the brutal mass killing of your fellow community members in Balochistan and the ‘khabarnaak’ journalists in Islamabad question if you really believe you can get a whole new province out of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. I cannot describe how weird it feels that the moment you tell people you are a shia, you are re-adjusted.

Later on I realized it was not all about a Hazara or a shia for that matter; how would a Baloch feel when even the sympathetic figures in mainstream politics and media insistently keep calling the Balochs ‘the Baluchis’? Calling someone a proper name is the first in ethics of dialogue whereas here in 65 years nobody noticed that Balochs may mind if called as Baluchis.

What I further observed was that unquestioned perceptions were not exclusively for alien ethnic minorities but also the religious minorities within the mainstream. In my Quetta years, I knew nothing against or about the Ahmedi community. Now a matter of shame for me, I witnessed for consecutive four years in UET Lahore that Ahmedi students were not allowed to dine in the common mess halls. This tradition continues unquestioned and unchallenged to date despite the fact that no politico-religious student wing is officially active in the university now for more than a decade.

Sometimes I try to imagine how an Ahmedi would feel when after the heinous murder of 80 Ahmedis, nobody is even allowed to sympathize and the top leader of the province has to clarify his utterance of the symbolic term ‘brother’ for the grieved community. (June 2010)

Ahmedis, Balochs, Hazaras, Shias are some of the marginalized groups; the actual list is too long to be covered in this piece. But after all such sensitive psychological details of ‘how it feels to be marginalized’, I now argue from a moral perspective what it ‘should mean to be’ a Baloch, a Hazara, a Cristian, a Hindu, a Kalashi Kafir etc.

If you have consciously experienced all these waves of pain and the identity crisis by being a marginalized or by walking a mile in the moccasins of the doubted, the denied, the discriminated then I believe you have experienced one of the very universal, time free and space free pains that I regard as one of the sacred assets and a common treasure of humanity.

I am doubtful if I have been able to correctly describe and appreciate the ‘respected pain’ so I add; if you have consciously experienced this universal pain of the oppressed ones then believe me God has entrusted you to be confidant of a great secret if you believe in God and if you don’t, it is no less than a miracle that you can connect to universal oppressed souls. It is the realization of this universal connection of pain that compels Sahir Ludhianavi to scoff at The Taj Mahal and write ‘Mere Mehboob kaheen aur mila kar mujh se’ and it is this universal connection that makes Dr. Ali Shariati cry when visiting the pyramids in Cairo and write the letter, ‘Yes my brother, it was all the same’ to a slave of the Pharaoh thousands of years ago. It is because they feel together, they feel connected, they share the same pain, they are ‘Hum-dard’.

Switching from the spirituality of this pain, now I invite all to intellectually question if there is any real impacts this pain and the interpretation of this pain can bring to the ‘real world’. I dare claim it’s all about directing this pain and that it always does impact our lives in one way or another.

Let me share an interesting program of Peace Education conducted in Israel in 2002 by Shechter to some hundreds of high school students. The students from Israeli high schools were facilitated to participate in the March of Life, an educational tour to the death camps and torture houses used during holocaust in Poland. Political views of students were recorded pre-tour and post-tour. It was interesting to see two groups of participants drawing very different lessons from the same trip. The hawkish individuals who already had an unfriendly view of Palestinians tended to express more nationalistic conclusions with feelings of power and pride that Jews have to keep protecting themselves against antisemitism after what has already been done to the community by the merciless antisemitic ‘others’. But those dovish students who somehow connected to Palestinians with empathy and compassion tended to express more universalistic views with strong feelings of helplessness and increased both general empathy for humanity and also specific empathy for Palestinians.

The above case study demonstrates how ‘interpretations of our pain’ can translate into destructive forces of revenge, hatred, division of the world between ‘us’ and ‘them’, monopoly over victimhood and fear and greed for the self — or constructive forces of universal brotherhood, Global support for all oppressed of the world, morally support of the marginalized humans and connecting to ‘the oppressed of the times’ and ‘wretched of the earth’ and committing not to return what hateful you have received.

Faiz Ahmed Faiz rightly stresses that it is the expression of our pain that makes us who we are;

Mera dard, naghma-e-bay-sada

Meri zaat zarra-e-bay-nishaan

Mere dard ko jo zuban milay

Mujhey apna naam-o-nishaan miley

Meri zaat ka jo nishaan milay

Mujhey raaz-e-nazm-e-jahan miley

Jo mujhey yeh raaz-e-nihaan miley

meri khamushi ko bayan miley

Mujhey kaayenat ki sarwari

Mujhey doulat-e-do-jahan miley

Translation;

My pain is the voiceless song

My being is nameless, void of identity

If my pain gets a voice..

I get a name, an identity

As my being gets an identity

I get to know the secret to the patterns of the universe

If I get to this top hidden secret,

If my silence gets its voice

I get the throne of the universe

I get the treasure of  both worlds

 I believe It is this unique relationship of the suffering souls that we need to discover and it is the absence of the recognition of the victimhood of the others that has hijacked brilliant movements sorrowfully and thus reform movements have ended creating just another sect, anti-colonialist freedom movements have ended becoming racist and hardliner nationalist in the end.

In the context of Pakistan, it is saddening to see Shias, a suffering community itself, not only keeping silence over the structural and direct violence Ahmedi community suffers from but it also actively collaborated with hardliner extremist Sunni organizations in 1973 to alienate the community as Non-Muslim and hence helped the religious fanatics to hijack the very social and political fabric of the state and society. Similarly Hazaras can be seen protesting against the one-sided violence the community has suffered from since 1999 but little or no contribution comes forth against the human rights violations in the interior Balochistan. Another sorrowful case is the victimizing of unarmed labor class of settlers in the Baloch province while Balochs are running a political movement more inspired by the Socialist literature. Such examples can be many but what I find extremely sorrowful about these is that the system succeeds to divide the oppressed and that one oppressed community claims sole proprietary of victimhood.

I assume it should be part of global morality, if there is any, that one oppressed community extend the empathy, compassion and recognition to fellow community that has been culturally, religiously, politically, economically or socially marginalized. A Proletariat rule should not exploit another labor class, a mother-in-law should not abuse her daughter-in-law, Muhammad (PBUH) did not return to Non-Muslims what he had received from Kuffar in Mekka, once a colony itself should not colonize others and if I do not challenge the law of nature, a fish should not eat a smaller fish.

It is a call for Universal Justice, a call for respect for all have-nots if you believe in Socialism, a call for tolerance, pluralism, secularism and mutual co-existence if you are a liberal, a call for the shared Golden Rule of compassion if you are a religious individual, it is a call for Global Morality if you believe in morality and if you don’t , it is a call for humanity that I have in me, that you have in you.