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.