How Maudoodi Revived Pakistani Cinema

Maulana Maudoodi

In a decade when the world fussed over slumdogs and swine flu, Pakistan’s proudest cultural achievement was a film called Khuda Ke Liye. The man who gave us Fifty Fifty, cute soldiers doing cute things in Alpha Bravo Charlie and Junaid Jamshed made us believe for a while that there was such a thing as Pakistani cinema. Here was a state-of-the-nation film, complete with slick remixes, pop singers in bandanas preaching tolerance and mullahs in cheap beards preaching tolerance. It was a film begging the world to look at us; we are not who you think we are. But at its heart the movie tried to make a slightly more old-fashioned political statement. What the audience cheered the most in the film is a line that is spoken towards the end of the film where Naseeruddin Shah says: ‘Darhi Islam main hai, Islam darhi main nahin’ (The beard is in Islam, but Islam is not in the beard). I didn’t know for what people really cheered, Islam or the beard, or that we are so clever that we got Naseeruddin Shah to say those lines. But the fact is that this celebrated line is a direct quote from Jamaat-i-Islami founder Maulana Maudoodi, whose dodgy witticism now forms a part of our textbooks, media commentary, our urban graffiti and, above all, our constitution. Now remember that even the life-long Jamaat followers only pretend to have read all of Maudoodi. What does it say about the time and age that we live in when Hazrat Maulana Maudoodi becomes a very popular dialogue writer in a populist medium. As a society we have moved so far towards the right that Maudoodi has become the very soul of common sense.

But it didn’t happen overnight. It happened slowly and I think it happened because we finally discovered what was wrong with our ketchup.

The Great Tomato Ketchup Conspiracy

If you are reading this, or even if you have bought this magazine for its fashion pages only, I can bet you know what tomato ketchup is. I can bet you like it with your fries. Or maybe you don’t like it but, unlike mustard or marmite, ketchup is easy to like. But did you ever wonder if your ketchup was halal? The thing is made of tomatoes. That is why it’s called tomato ketchup. Maybe you did grow up feeling secretly guilty that you have had no way of knowing if your ketchup was halal. You can put that guilt to rest. Now your ketchup bottle and even your little sachet with the airline food comes with a halal label.

During this decade halal certification has been one of the biggest ideology-driven business booms in Pakistan. It was pioneered by international fast food giants like McDonalds and KFC, who brought in busloads of mullahs from Binoria Town, gave them double cheese burger meals, happy meals and got them to sign a certificate. Maulanas have never looked back since.

The list of things that didn’t need to be halal in the last millennium but are now required to be halal is very very long. You can have halal porridge for breakfast, then get into a car which has halal insurance and drive to the stock exchange to buy halal bonds and when you return home you can use your halal make-up remover or, if you are a man, you can put on some alcohol-free halal perfume.

There are no halal certifications required for minimum wages and how you make your money. Getting a maid to clean your thousand square yard house and paying her five thousand rupees is obviously very halal and requires no certification.

In Maudoodi’s Pakistan, God and greed have embraced each other with the zeal of long-lost brothers.

If we have perfected halal ideology, then surely the science based on this ideology cannot be far behind. No sir, it’s already here.

The Greatest Invention of the Decade: the Plastic Miswak Holder

Karachi has had a very successful international book fair for the last four years. Unlike Fashion Pakistan Week this year, which, as every senior fashion journalist has noted diligently, was great for our image but wasn’t really a trade fair (or only an R&R opportunity for international war correspondents based in the region), the International Book Fair was really a trade fair where people bought and sold books. Only this year Saudi publishers sold us Islamic books, Iranian publishers sold us some Iranian Islamic books and we also sold our Islamic books to ourselves. There were some Indian publishers selling medical textbooks, but then what do you expect from baniyas? A walk in Hall 2 of Karachi Expo Centre would have made you forget all the alarmist talk about madrassas. There were thousands of titles for little children produced in bright child-friendly covers with titles like My Wudu, My Pardah, My Salat. If you have a taste for history you can buy a fancy atlas of all the past Islamic empires. If you are a woman with health problems we have got a whole book dedicated to your ailments and how you must behave when you are not well.

But the most fascinating thing at the fair wasn’t a book or even a comprehensive software guaranteed to give your child a complete Islamic education. Rather, it was a miswak holder, a plastic container that you can put your miswak in. It was billed as the greatest invention in the Islamic world and described using the kind of adjectives normally reserved for Pakistan’s nuclear bomb. As I imagined our youth conquering the world with a miswak holder in one hand and a nuclear device in the other, I heard an elderly customer suggest to the young salesman, “If you start manufacturing that in a green colour, wouldn’t you sell many more.” At which point the salesman said respectfully, “When you are doing Allah’s work, you don’t worry about profits. Allah himself takes care of the business.”

And if you are killed in Allah’s name then obviously that’s better than being killed by someone who is not doing Allah’s work. Hence…

Continued . . .