Militants and Mgirants: Fun and Urban Violence in Pakistan - pg. 55

These two anecdotes indicate that far from one-dimensional ways to which the MQM positioned itself within the field of ethnic religions stereotypical categories. As I have argued in this chapter, these ethnic categories were partly the result of a state promoted nationalism, which endorsed Islamic modernist, high-caste (ashraf), Urdu-mediated values as more Islamic and more patriotic than regional folk customs, languages, and religious practices. The ethnic categorization was also partly promoted by ethnic movements such as the Sindhi nationalist movement that protested state nationalism by adopting its categorization while reversing its moral evaluation, turning "low" and "backward" into "authentic," and "modern" and "educated" into "uprooted" and "detached." This reversed, ethnic form of nationalism was to some extent taken up and incorporated into state nationalism by the government led by the Pakistan People's Party in the 1970s. The "culture of ethnicity" included Islam, separating so-called folk and traditional Islamic practices from high culture, modernist Islam, and dividing these categories along ethnic lines. As indicated by the two examples, the MQM's response to this was an ambiguous one, sometimes disrespectfully mixing up categories, sometimes embracing them.

Militants and Mgirants: Fun and Urban Violence in Pakistan - pg. 47

The link between migration to Pakistan and the hijra was made soon after independence. As early as September 1947, the term muhajir (one who takes part in the hijra) was used when Pir Ilahi Bakhsh, education minister of Sindh, was reported to have "revived the good old Arab memory of brotherhood between the muhajireen and the ansar ... when he took a family of Muslim refugees from Amritsar from the railway station to his house as guests." Initially the use of muhajir was used to overcome differences among social, linguistic, regional, or sectarian groups. The term had several positive connotations. It ascribed a degree of agency to the migrants that other possible terms like panahgir (refugee) lacked.

Militants and Mgirants: Fun and Urban Violence in Pakistan - pg. 45

The main character of the novel is a young professor of history, born in a town called Rupnagar in Uttar Pardesh. The novel "Basti" describes his doubts and memories during the last months of 1971, just before the parting of Bangladesh:

When Pakistan was still all new, when the sky of Pakistan was fresh like the sky of Rupnagar, and the earth was not yet soiled. In those days how the carvans arrived from their long, long journeys! Every day caravans entered the city and dispersed among the streets and neighborhoods ... The refugees told whole long epics about how much suffering they had endured on the journey, and how many difficulties they had overcome in order to reach the city. They told about those whom they left behind. Then the refuge-givers and the refugees together remembered those who had clung to the earth, refusing to leave their homes and their ancestor's graves.

Militants and Mgirants: Fun and Urban Violence in Pakistan - pg. 44

To some extent, the distinction between the educate and the uneducated revives an older divide between the high caste of pure Muslim descent (ashraf) and the low caste of indigenous converts (ajlaf). The ashraf -- plural of sharif, meaning cultured, noble, soft-spoken -- were the groups occupying high positions in the Moghul Empire. They included subcastes or zat like the Syed, Siddiqi, Qureshi, or Sheikh, who claim a foreign and fully Muslim genalogy. In contrast, the ajlaf -- plural of jilf, meaning vulgar, or rude, low -- belong to occupational groups such as cobblers (mochi) or buthchers (qasai).

Migrants and Militants: Fun and Urban Violence in Pakistan - pg. 43

Things, however, become more complicated with the introduction of the opposites hot and cool. These are moods and qualities, poles on a scale on which potentially all phenomena can be ranked. All food, for instance, can be characterized by its hot or cool properties. Almonds are hot, like most meat, mangoes, alcohol, clarified butter, ice cream, etc. By eating them you become inflicted by their hotness. Again, hotness is associated with life, virility, physicality, creating, and destruction. But it does not completely overlap with nafs, because the spiritual world can also be hot. God Himself has a hot (jalal) as well as a cool (rahman) quality. There are hot, intoxicated forms of love and passion (mast) as well as cool and serene forms ('ishq). Colors can also be classified as hot or cool. Red and black are the hot colors of anger and martyrdom, while white and green are the cool colors of death and mercy.

Migrants and Militants: Fun and Urban Violence in Pakistan - pg. 8

The imaginary of the MQM martyr/terrorist, for instance, is a mixture of East Asian martial art traditions, Middle Eastern styles of Muslim militancy, Hollywood cinema, and Bollywood pop music.

Migrants and Militants: Fun and Urban Violence in Pakistan - pg. 18

The man who was in charge of this little garden, which also featured the seven graves of the May 1990 victims, was Pir Sahibzada Syed Mazhar Hussain Moini. I was reading Anna Karenina then and did not understand what the author meant by men with moustaches -- in plural -- until I met this Mazhar Sahib. He was a seventy-year-old widower with several white moustaches and had been an influential man in the neighborhood till the younger generation had deprived him of his power base. He was very proud of his titles and genealogy (shajra), which he had, after many requests, recently received in writing from relatives in Ajmer, India. During one of our first meetings he took me to his house to show me the document. Under his name was written in pencil "gone to Pakistan," which to me appeared not unlike the "expired" written under the names of those who had died without heirs. But it did not bother Mazhar Sahib. What mattered to him was the written proof that he had a respectable background.

Migrants and Militants: Fun and Urban Violence in Pakistan - pg. 4

More important, the MQM constituted for its supporters both a spectacle and a sacrifice. It was an adventure and an excellent pastime to belong to the movement and take part in its public gatherings, which were often described to me as joyful and liberating. The MQM seemed to have offered the joy of provocation and transgression. The powerful were ridiculed, social conventions were temporarily set aside, and ethnic and religious stereoptypes were uprooted through role inversion and grotesque exaggeration. This ludic character of the MQM often went hand in hand with the vandalism carried out by the young male peer groups, that is, locally organized groups of friends, which played a major role in the recruitment and mobilization of new party members. All this was expressed in the term fun(shughal?), an emic term, adopted by the young Muhajirs like many other English words. Fun was a boundary marker, which set the MQM apart from the established political parties, condemned for their grave, solemn, hollow, ideological language. Fun was even, to some extent, considered a feature of Muhajirness, part of the metropolitan, cosmopolitan Muhajir culture and a far cry from the supposedly rural dullness of other ethnic groups.

Migrants and Militants: Fun and Urban Violence in Pakistan - Opening

Introduction

ON SEPTEMBER 26, 2001 -- fifteen days after the suicidal attacks on the Twin Towers and Pentagon -- a large public gathering was held in Karachi, Pakistan to demonstrate the city's solidarity with the thousands of victims in the United States and to offer sympathy and support for the United States-led campaign against terrorism that would soon lead to the bombing of Taliban and Al Qaeda targets in Afghanistan.

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Sergei Prokofiev: Piano Concerto No. 3 in C Major, Op. 26

Book Cycle

• Apology
• Edisto
• Train to Pakistan
• Metamorphoses

Apology - Opening

I do not know, men of Athens, how my accusers affected you; as for me, I was almost carried away in spite of myself, so persuasively did they speak. And yet, hardly anything of what they said is true.

PLATO COMPLETE WORKS

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Introduction and Notes, by

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The Sleepwalkers - pg. 325

And he forgave the malignant rage of men, for he saw quite well that it sprang from fear that was always at their backs, telling them they must die. A stupid and thoughtless orchestra player he might be, but he could play sonatas from memory, and, versed in all kinds of knowledge, in spite of his sadness he could smile at the fact that human beings in their thirst for the absolute yearn for eternal love, imagining that then their lives can never come to an end, but will endure for ever. They might despise him because he had to play potpourris and polkas; nevertheless he knew that these hunted creatures, seeking the imperishable and the absolute in earthly things, would always find no more than a symbol and a substiute for the thing which they sought, and whose name they did not know: for they could watch others dying without regret or sorrow, so completely were they mastered by the thought of their own death; they furiously strove for the possession of some woman that they might in turn be possessed by her, for in her they hoped to find something steadfast and unchangeable which would own and guard them, and they hated the woman whom in their blindness they had chosen, hated her because she was only a symbol which they longed to destroy in their anger when they found themselves once more delivered over to fear and death.

The Sleepwalkers - pg. 307

No, that man would never run after him again, so as to strike him from behind with his crutch; no man could really run after another, nor could the other send him away, for each was condemned to go his own lonely path, a stranger to all companionship: what mattered was to free oneself from the coil of the past, so that one might not suffer. One had simply to walk fast enough. Martin's threat had had singularly little effect, as if it were a clumsy work-a-day copy of a higher reality with which one had been already familiar for a long time. And if one left Martin behind, if one so to speak sacrificed him, that too was merely a work-a-day version of a higher sacrifice; but it was necessary if the past was to be finally destroyed.

The Sleepwalkers - pg. 304

Yet one must be cautious in expressing such generalizations: for the colonists easily take offence, and then they withdraw into a still more impenetrable solitude. In the prairies, however, in the grass-lands which they love, rich in hills and veined with cooling streams, they are a cheerful race, although they are too shamefast to sing. Such is the life of the colonists, remote from care, and they seek it beyond the ocean. They die lightly and still young, even should their hair be already grey, for their longing is a perpetual rehearsal of farewell. They are as proud as Moses when he beheld the promised land, he alone in his divine longing, and he alone forbidden to enter. And often one may see among them the same somewhat hopeless and somewhat contemptuous gesture of the hand as in Moses on the mount. For irrevocably behind them lies the home of their race, and inaccessibly before them stretches the distance, and the man whose longing has been transformed without his knowledge sometimes feels like one whose sufferings have been merely deadened, and who can never fully forget them. Vain hope! For who can tell whether he is pressing towards the blessed fields, or straying like a lost orphan? Even though one's grief for the irretrievable becomes less and less the farther one presses into the promised land, even if many things thin away into vapour in the deepening radiance, and one's grief too becomes lighter, more and more transparent, perhaps even invisible, yet it does not vanish any more than the longing of the man in whose sleep-wandering the world passes away, dissolving into a memory of the darkness of woman, desirous and maternal, where at last it is only a painful echo of what had once been. Vain hope, and ofter groundless arrogance. A lost generation.

The Sleepwalkers - pg. 296

The desire that someone should come to pay the debt of sacrificial death and redeem the world to a new innocence: this eternal dream of mankind may rise to murder, this eternal dream may rise to clairvoyance. All knowledge wavers between the dreamt wish and the foreshadowing dream, all knowledge of the redeeming sacrifice and the kingdom of salvation.

The Sleepwalkers - pg. 295

They are sitting on benches which the designers, with shameless and perhaps premature knowingness, have made to fit the twice-curved form of the seated body, they are sitting eight in a row, packed tight in a wooden cage, they roll their heads and hear the creaking of wood and the light squeak of rods above the rolling, pounding wheels. Those facing the engine despise the others who are looking back into the past; they are afraid of the draught, and when the door is thrown open they fear that someone might come in and make them look over their shoulders. For the man whose head is turned the wrong way can no longer judge between guilt and atonement, he doubts that two and two make four, doubts that he is is his own mother's child and not a changeling. So even their toes are carefully pointed forward in the direction of the business affairs that are to occupy them. For the occupations they follow bind them together in a community, -- a community that has no power but is full of uncertainty and malice.

Stanley Fish: Secular Reasons

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/22/are-there-secular-reasons/#more-39171

Smith does not claim to be saying something wholly new. He citesDavid Hume’s declaration that by itself “reason is incompetent to answer any fundamental question,” and Alasdair MacIntyre’s description in “After Virtue” of modern secular discourse as consisting “of the now incoherent fragments of a kind of reasoning that made sense on older metaphysical assumptions.”

And he might have added Augustine’s observation in “De Trinitate” that the entailments of reason cannot unfold in the absence of a substantive proposition they did not and could not generate; or Roberto Unger’s insistence in “Knowledge and Politics” that “as long as formal neutrality is strictly maintained, the standards it produces will be . . . empty shells . . . incapable of determining precisely what is commanded or prohibited in particular situations of choice.” (In“The Trouble With Principle” I myself argue that “there are no neutral principles, only principles that are already informed by the substantive content to which they are rhetorically opposed.”)

The Sleepwalkers - pg. 272

"Love is only possible in a strange country. If you want to love really, you must begin a new life and destroy everything in your old one. Only in a new, quite strange life, where everything past is so dead that you don't even need to forget it, can two human beings become so at one that the past and even time itself no longer exist for them."

The Sleepwalkers - pg. 292

When desires and aims meet and merge, when dreams begin to foreshadow the great moments and crises of life, the road narrows then into darker gorges, and the prophetic dream of death enshrouds the man who has hitherto walked dreaming in sleep: all that has been, all aims, all desires, flit past him once more as they do before the eyes of a dying man, and one can well-nigh call it chance if that road does not end in death.

The Sleepwalkers - pg. 272

"Love is only possible in a strange country. If yo want to love really, you must begin a new life and destroy everything in your old one. Only in a new, quite strange life, where everything past is so dead that you don't even forget it, can two human beings become so at one that the past and even time itself no longer exist for them."

The Sleepwalkers - pg. 263

Esch could not but think of Frau Hentjen's silence. The band was making a great din, and Harry, leaning over the table so as not to have to shout, said mysteriously and in a low voice: "Love is a matter of distance; here are two people, and each is on a separate star, and neither can know anything of the other. And then suddenly distance is annihilated and time is annihilated, and they have flown together, so that they have no separate awareness of each other or of themselves, and feel no need of it. That is love."

The Sleepwalkers - pg. 259

"Police swine," he growled. The wet asphalt shone like a photographic film, dark brown in the light of the yellow lamps, and Esch saw before him the Statue of Liberty whose torch consumed and released all the husks of one's past life, delivering into flame all that was dead and gone -- and if that was murder, it was a kind of murder beyond the jurisdiction of the police: murder in the cause of redemption.

The Sleepwalkers - pg. 256

He read a portion of it every day. At first he had contented himself with the illustrations, and now when he thought of America it seemed to him that the trees there were not green, the meadows not brightly coloured, the sky no longer blue, but that all American life was deployed against a polished and elegant chiaroscuro as in the brownish grey photographs, or against the sharp contours of the delicately limned pen-drawings. Later on, however, he became absorbed in the text. The recurring statistics certainly bored him, but he was too conscientious to skip them and succeeded in learning a good deal by heart.

The Sleepwalkers - pg. 255

For the man who wills Goodness and Righteousness wills thereby the Absolute, and it was revealed to Esch for the first time that the goal is not the appeasement of lust but an absolute oneness exalted far above its immediate, sordid and even trivial occasion, a conjoint trace, itself timeless and so annihilating time; and that the rebirth of man is as still and serene as the universal spirit that yet contracts and closes round man when once his ecstatic will has compelled it, until he attains his sole birthright: deliverance and redemption.

The Sleepwalkers - pg. 245

When Frau Hentjen got up the dawn was just breaking. She opened the window to see how the day promised. The sky arched clear and cloudless over the dark, grey, yard, which lay below her in motionless silence, a little rectangle within dark walls. The clean washtubs from last washing day were still standing down there. A cool wind, imprisoned between the walls, smelt of the city.

The Sleepwalkers - pg. 223

When an honest man emigrates to America his relations and friends stand on the quay and wave their handkerchiefs to him. The ship's band plays, Must I then, must I them, leave my native Town, and although one might regard this, in view of the frequency with which ships make the voyage, as a show of hypocrisy on the part of the bandmaster, yet many of the listeners are moved. When the rope is once made fast to the tiny tug, when the ocean giant floats out on the dark, buoyant mirror of the sea, then fitful and forlorn over the water come faint gusts of more cheerful melodies with which the kindly bandmaster is trying to enliven the departing passengers.

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster, Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn't hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster. I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three beloved houses went. The art of losing isn't hard to master. I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster. -- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident the art of losing's not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) a disaster.

Letting His Wisdom

Letting his wisdom be the whole of love,
The father tiptoes out, backwards. A gleam
Falls on the child awake and wearied of,

Then, as the door clicks shut, is snuffed. The glove-
Gray afterglow appalls him. It would seem
That letting wisdom be the whole of love

Were pastime even for the bitter grove
Outside, whose owl's white hoot of disesteem
Falls on the child awake and wearied of.

He lies awake in pain, he does not move,
He will not scream. Any who heard him scream
Would let their wisdom be the whole of love.

People have filled the room he lies above.
Their talk, mild variation, chilling theme,
Falls on the child. Awake and wearied of

Mere pain, mere wisdom also, he would have
All the world waking from its winter dream,
Letting its wisdom be. The whole of love
Falls on the child awake and wearied of.

Mad Girl's Love Song

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The Sleepwalkers - pg. 210

It was altogether a good day for Fraulein Erna. Esch had asked her for something which she could refuse him, and besides she was wearing a pair of new shoes that made her feel gay and looked well on her feet.

The Sleepwalkers - pg. 158

IV

Nevertheless after some eighteen months they had their first child. It actually happened. How this came about cannot be told here. Besides, after the material for character construction already provided, the reader can imagine it for himself.

The Sleepwalkers - pg. 99

"Somewhere in everybody there's an insane hope that the little scrap of love that is given us will fling that bridge over the void. Be on your guard against the pathos of love."

The Sleepwalkers - pg. 97

"Love is an absolute thing, Elisabeth, and when the absolute tries to express itself in earthly terms, then it always turns into pathos, simply because it can't be demonstrated. And as the whole thing then becomes so horribly earthly, the pathos is always very funny, represented by the gentleman who goes down on his knees to get you to accede to all his wishes; and if one loves you one must avoid that."

Was his intention in saying this to intimate that he loved her? As he became silent she looked at him questioningly. He appeared to understand:

"There is a true pathos, and we call it eternity. And as there is no positive eternity for human beings it must be a negative one and can be put in the words 'never-to-meet-again.' If I go away now, eternity is here; then you will be eternally remote from me and I can say that I love you."

The Sleepwalkers - pg. 89

The trees beside the road rose darkly and the dust smelt cool, as it would smell probably in a cave or a cellar. But in the west a reddish strip still hung in the darkening sky over the rolling landscape.

The Sleepwalkers - pg. 48

When a man follows another in the street, even if it is only mechanically and with ostensible indifference, he will soon find himself attaching all sorts of wishes, benevolent and malevolent, to the man he is following . Probably he will want at least to see the man's face and wish that he should turn round, even though since his brother's death he has thought himself invulnerable against the temptation to seek in every half-feared face the face of his mistress. In any case there is nothing to explain why the sudden thought should have come to Joachim that the erect bearing of all the people here in this street was quite unjustified, that it was compatible with their better knowledge, or due merely to an abysmal unawareness that some time all their bodies would have to stretch themselves out in death. And yet the walk of the man in front was not in the least sharp, rapid or headlong, nor was there any fear that he might fall and break one of his legs, for he was far too soft for that to happen.

The Sleepwalkers - pg. 39

Oh, dread of life streaming from the living flesh with which the bones are clothed, softness of the skin spread and stretched over it, dreadful warning of the skeleton and the many-ribbed breast frame which he can now embrace, and which, breathing, now presses against him, its heart beating against his. Oh, sweet fragrance of the flesh, humid exhalation, soft runnels beneath the breasts, darkness of the armpits.

The Sleepwalkers - pg. 39

Oh, dread of life streaming from the living flesh with which the bones are clothed, softness of the skin spread and stretched over it, dreadful warning of the skeleton and the many-ribbed breast frame which he can now embrace, and which, breathing, now presses against him, its heart beating against his. Oh sweet fragrance of the flesh, humid exhalation, soft runnels beneath the breasts, darkness of the armpits.

The Sail

THE SAIL

A lone white sail shows for an instant
Where gleams the sea, an azure streak.
What left it in its homeland distant?
In alien parts what does it seek?
The billows play, the mast bends, creaking,
The wind, impatient, moans and sighs...
It is not joy that it is seeking,
Nor is't from happiness it flies.
The blue waves dance, they dance and tremble,
The sun's bright rays caress the seas.
And yet for storm it begs, the rebel,
As if in storm lurked calm and peace!...

The Sleepwalkers - pg. 29

The words, "the pit," "the bottomless pit," came into Joachim's mind: why did this man keep on talking of religion and the Church? But before he could gather himself together to reply Bertrand had already noticed his astonishment: "Yes, you see, Europe had already become a pretty dubious field for the Church. But Africa, on the other hand! Hundreds of millions of souls as raw material for the Faith. And you can rest assured that a baptized negro is a better Christian than twenty Europeans. If the Catholics and the Protestants want to steal a march on each other for the winning of these fanatics it's very understandable; for there's where the future of their religion lies; there will be found the future warrior of the faith who will march out one day, burning and slaying in Christ's name, against a heather Europe sunk in corruption, to set at last, amid the smoking ruins of Rome, a black Pope on the throne of Peter."

The Sleepwalkers - pg. 20

And because, when the secular exalts itself as the absolute, the result is always romanticism, so the real and characteristic romanticism of that age was the cult of the uniform, which implied, as it were, a superterrestrial and supertemporal idea of uniform, an idea which did not really exist and yet was so powerful that it took hold of men far more completely than any secular vocation could, a non-existent and yet so potent idea that it transformed the man in uniform into a property of his uniform, and never into a professional man in the civilian sense; and this perhaps simply because the man who wears the uniform is content to feel that he is fulfilling the most essential function of his age and therefore guaranteeing the security of his own life.