Twilight of a Passionate Love Affair

Fareed Zakaria and Haroon Siddiqui are two journalists I follow quite closely; not the journalists themselves, obviously, but what they write. Both, like me, are South Asian. Both, like me, are Muslim. And, both, like me, now live in North America. Fareed is the editor of Newsweek International magazine. Haroon is the editor emeritus for the Toronto Star newspaper. Growing up in multiple cultures and amongst different religions, has given them knowledge of international affairs that cannot be matched by their American and Canadian counterparts, respectively - who have limited exposure, only to one culture and one society.

It is not easy for an immigrant, much less a Muslim immigrant, to reach such a high position in journalism, anywhere in the world. The fact that these two individuals have reached such a status is a credit to their hard work, as well as to the societies to which they currently belong. Both, Fareed and Haroon, comment regularly on the Iraq war. But with one difference: Haroon’s comments are a straightforward, hard-hitting, no-holds-barred politically incorrect criticism of the USA. Fareed’s criticism is mild and politically correct; enclosed in velvet; ensuring he praises the USA regularly, puts down the USA’s enemies regularly, as he critiques US policies.

This difference in attitude and style of commentary (and perhaps even confidence), amongst two prominent Muslims immigrants in two outwardly similar societies, is a result of the subtle and not-so subtle differences between Americans and Canadians.

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My father and I (used to) take a regular evening walk, at the foot of the cool, green and beautiful Margalla Hills. These daily hour-long walks started when I was thirteen, and continue to this day, whenever I get the chance to visit. We debate(d) and discuss(ed) everything under the sun - politics, religion, history, music, my career and his. I can trace nearly every major decision affecting my life, to a discussion, with a Margalla hills background.

As my father got older, he tried hard, albeit unsuccessfully, to control his desire to pass on the wisdom of an experienced elderly man, in repeatedly long drawn out monologues. Our intense debates slowly started turning into one-sided advice sessions. “Yaar, you know, it would have been great,” he would say, “One year in Bombay, the next in Peshawar; one week in Calcutta, the next in Chitral.” “You know I lived in Bombay and Delhi as a teenager. I really want to visit our old house.” “I am sure you will get a chance, someday,” I would reply, on cue. “What a great country it would have been,” he would conclude. “But, you know what?” “What?” I would reply, having heard the story so many times before that I had each word memorized. “Par, changa hee hooya, Pakistan banh gayaa.”

On the eve of the day that I was leaving to study in the USA, and more than likely, like most students, never return to Pakistan, I nostalgically walked alongside him, thinking of all the topics and issues we had discussed, over so many years. And the ones, that still remained to be discussed. “Was there a special piece of advice he had saved for me, for this special day?” I thought to myself. As if reading my mind, he said, “Son, when you are in the USA, remember one thing.” He paused, as I anxiously waited for him to provide me with the concentrated dose of over sixty years of wisdom. “Make sure you don’t fall in love.” I confusingly looked at him to make heads or tails of what he was trying to say, as he quietly walked off towards our house.

It would take more than a decade for me to understand his words.

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I first landed in North America a long time ago, as a little kid tourist - barely ten years old - with my family. We drove the length and breadth of the East Coast, from Toronto to Miami. The trip proved very educational. I realized that American women did not have hair on their legs. I had never seen so many exposed female legs in my life. Such a large amount of bare limbs are enough to overwhelm any ten year old; much less one from a conservative Pakistan. The odd few female legs that had caught my eye, in Pakistan, were hairy. Those glimpses had been quick blurs. “But definitely hairy,” I had concluded. “Definitely.” American women were born with hairless legs, while Pakistani women were born with hairy ones. In a nutshell, this was the gist of the knowledge I gained from that long trip. I was convinced it was enough to impress my friends, back home.

The only other memory I have of that time, is of painfully boring trips to museums and old monuments. And of even more boring lectures on American government and history, that my father forced me to listen to, as we stood under the statue of a very tall lady, holding an oversized torch in her hand. “Do you know she is French?” he confided in me, as I was trying hard to figure out whether she had hairless legs, under her long dress. “Do French women have American legs or Pakistani legs?” I wanted to ask him. But decided to replace it with a more politically correct, “Can we stop off in France on our way back?”

Safar-wasilayee-zafar.

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A decade or two later, within a few months after saying good-bye to my family in Islamabad, I found myself standing in the same museums, next to the same statues, listening intensely to similar lectures. By now, I was utterly fascinated by the system of government that had been put into place in this casually paced, yet supremely efficient large country. The first time I laid my hands on a copy of the Constitution, I ended up reading it end to end. And then I read it again. And again. Every article, every section, every clause, every amendment.

Each day was spent searching through piles and piles of microfilm and stacks of books; swallowing as much as possible from this bursting fire hydrant of knowledge, before time ran out. Each night, spent studying at the local Borders, listening to the live soft music of the latest unknown band trying to make it in the local music circuit. Like a kid in a candy store, reading and reading, till my eyes started to hurt. Trying hard to figure out the details of the complexities that made this country tick. “Sir, we are closing for the night.” “I just need five more minutes.”

What my father had tried to explain to me, was slowly starting to make sense. The soothing sight of the vast plushly manicured sports grounds of an American campus; the heated debates with the scholarly American professors and their informal down-to-earth demeanor; the inquisitive minds (and seductively hairless legs) of the gorgeous American co-eds. Was it possible not to fall in love?

“…How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?....the hypocrisy in our taking umbrage at the Geneva Conventions and using that as justification for a continuation of this war when we are more guilty than any other body of violations of those Geneva Conventions.”

Can any combination of bits and bytes move the soul like the poetic words of a one-time soldier-philosopher? “People like that should be leaders of the free world,” I thought to myself, in my naiveté. Can anyone pursue a career in technology, when he is more interested in the lives of Ada and Pascal, than the software languages named after them? “I don’t think technology is where my heart is. I am seriously thinking of switching to American History,” I wrote in a fit of emotionalism.” Good luck. But I will not be paying any part of your tuition,” came back the brief but stern reply. And that was that.

Back to algorithms and pseudo codes.

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Less than a decade later, on a dark, cool and windy summer night, I found myself crossing the crowded Ambassador Bridge at Detroit. Hoping Daler Mehndi, at full blast, and the rolled-down car window, would ensure I did not fall asleep at the wheel. I stopped at the Immigration window, and extended out my paperwork. I stared nervously into the eyes of the Canadian immigration agent, with the same anxious, impotent and beggar-like look that has become the trademark of all third-world educated immigrants, trying hard to find a place in the first world. I felt like a student having his research paper being reviewed by the department dean. Like a scared lover hoping his beloved would not reject his innocent, but unappealing, proposal.

“Welcome home, Sir,” the young rosy-cheeked Canadian immigration official replied with a smile, as she handed back my papers.

The time in the USA had been, for a long while, an ideal match. Like the perfectly designed pair of jeans, finding a perfect pair of legs, around which they fit perfectly. Both, the jeans and the legs complementing each other; perhaps even needing and wanting each other. Yet somewhere along the line, either the jeans had shrunk, or the legs had put on weight. And now, the jeans, though still outwardly attractive, were no longer snug. They had started to pinch in all the wrong places.

I crossed the Ambassador bridge at 1:00 a.m. As I on-ramped my car to the 401, with the cool breeze rushing into my face through the open car window, a strange feeling started to run through my body. A feeling of relaxation. Perhaps, even of freedom. As if I had just stepped out of a pinching pair of pants. I looked down at my faded blue Levis, symbolically wanting to take them off and throw them out the window; completing the remaining three hour drive in my underwear.

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I was consulting on Bay - Canada’s Wall - Street, the morning when two airliners crashed into the third tallest pair of buildings in the world. After the first plane crashed into the North Tower, at 9:03 EST, I calmly utilized my aviation and international affairs experience and pointed out to my excited co-workers, “It will be a major event for a few weeks, and then everyone will forget about it.” Then the second airplane crashed into the South Tower. But my opinion did not change much.

The newly-hired young Egyptian graphic designer, with his easily distinguishable oval and thinly-bearded Arab face, looked worried. “Who was it?” everyone asked. “Probably us,” the Egyptian quietly commented, as he walked towards the elevator. CNN immediately showed a group of Palestinian children celebrating in their refugee camps. “Oh, they’re going to get it now! They are going to get it now!” a Black VP screamed out in excitement, after seeing the Palestinian kids, as if relishing the thought. “Is Sammy Davis the only Black Jew, or are their others?” I looked at her, trying to figure out her religion. She looked almost as happy as the Palestinian kids on CNN.

“America deserves it,” an East European guy with an English accent whispered with an angry look on his face. Palestinian, Iraqi, Chilean, Nicaraguan, even a Pakistani, with such feelings, I could understand. But what was this guy getting all irritated about? It turned out, he was Bulgarian, before he moved to London and then to Toronto. Apparently, somewhere along the line, Uncle Sam screwed over Bulgaria pretty badly also.

“Why do, even, Bulgarians hate us?” must have been the question in every American’s mind. At least I hoped it was.

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“Western European societies are unprepared for the massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and maintaining different standards of hygiene...All immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most.” So wrote Daniel Pipes in one of his many lovely articles.

“Ignorant desis. Bahen ch//ud.” I whispered angrily to myself. “Why don’t they try to fit in. They are going to ruin it for the rest of us, “with-it” desis.” The late Izzy Asper’s media empire was trying hard to get Canada into the Iraq war. Nearly every Jewish commentator, on Canadian TV, now seemed very concerned about the poor Iraqis. Each dying for Canada to help the USA, “liberate” the Iraqis. One felt overwhelmed by their concern for their Arab brethren (if one did not know better, of course).

(Is it anti-Semitic to call the Jewish organizations trying to get the USA into Middle East wars, “Jewish?” Should one use the more politically correct, “pro-Israel?”)

During this whole rigmarole, George Bush considered Pipes’ assessments of Muslims so enlightening that he decided to appoint him to the governing board of the US Institute of Peace. “What if, tomorrow, Izzy’s newspapers got a member of Team Pipes into a similar position in Canada? What the hell will I do then?” I thought to myself. “I can’t go around switching countries, every five years.”

So, I quickly decided to log-in to my MarthaStewart.com account. And added a tube of peach moisturizer to my regular monthly order of watermelon-scented bubble-bath and aloe-enhanced soap. “That should handle the hygiene issues.” And then, with a heavy heart and tears in my eyes, I decided to cancel the weekly trip to my favorite Sardarji’s vegetarian restaurant. “That should handle the strange foods.”

Some days later, I saw Akbar Ahmed on the same show as Mr. Pipes. Finally an, “Islamic scholar,” who can speak English. “Pipes is going to get it now,” I thought. “Had I been too quick in giving up on the masala dosa?” I asked myself. “Who is better placed to act as a bridge than the scholar of Islam? What better challenge for Daniel Pipes than to assist in creating genuine dialogue with the Muslim community? I endorse this appeal for discussion and debate,” was Akbar’s analysis.

“What! What about the bad hygiene and exotic food nonsense?” I yelled confusingly. Had 9/11 completely neutered American Muslims? Had it turned them into Uncle Toms? Tell a Pakistani in andaroon Lahore that his mother doesn’t know how to cook and doesn’t shower, and he will hit you with a right hook you will remember for the rest of your life. Apparently, not when he is on CNN.

Team Pipes, and its neo-con gang, eventually made its way to the CBC. On CBC, their Muslim, “scholar” opposition seemed even more ordinary. Sitting across the TV screen from Daniel Pipes was generic looking Abdul the Activist - a shabbily dressed overweight twenty-something Muslim-Canadian teacher, unknown even to people in his own neighborhood. “Pipes will eat him alive,” I thought. Could I have been more wrong!

Abdul Activist tore into Pipes and Co. as if there were no tomorrow! No apprehensions, no fear of being declared anti-American or an anti-Semite. Nor of having his kids targeted in Canadian elementary schools. But there was more. A lady from Chile got up and took the baton from Abdul, pointing out her own Chilean 9/11. And then the grand finale: “I am not a Muslim. I am Christian,” an Iraqi-Canadian lady in the audience, with a thick accent took the microphone. “I want to tell all you Americans one thing,” she paused. Then she screamed at the top of her voice, “Get the hell out of my country!” Not sure which one of, “her” countries she was talking about - Iraq or Canada - but perhaps agreeing on both counts, the Canadian crowd clapped loudly in unison.

Team Pipes didn’t know what had hit them. Completely shell-shocked by this unexpectedly fearless machine-gun assault by the unhygienic brown-skinned adversaries with funny foods, they were unable to recover. They must have been dying to get back to the safer pastures of the CNN studios.

Fareed Zakaria, Haroon Siddiqui… Akbar Ahmad, Abdul Activist… CNN, CBC… USA, Canada.

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“One, two, three, four. We don’t want your f//ckin’ war. Five, six, seven, eight. Blair is English whore…..One, two, three, four…” It had a nice beat to it. Kind of like Madhuri’s Aik do teen in Teezab. It was drizzling on Toronto’s University Avenue. I saw the crowd at a distance, from under my jumbo-sized umbrella, and raised my arms to show my comradeship with them. For a brief moment, I even seriously considered joining them. After all, I had more in common with the people they were protesting for, than they did. But I decided against it. It was not that I was afraid of getting my new Hugo Boss blazer wet. That could be dry cleaned. It was just that on that morning, my volumizer/gel had worked perfectly, and I was truly having one of my best good-hair days. “The rain will ruin my hair,” was my excuse.

As I got closer to these few thousand folks on the street, I slowly started to realize that something was missing. All of them were goras. Not a single desi nor Arab amongst them. This was really embarrassing. As much as my lazy desi nature wanted to avoid it, now, I had to jump in. Hair or no hair. And there we were: thousands of goras, marching in protest, through the conviction of their conscious. And one desi Muslim, trying hard to not get his hair wet, participating, only, due to the embarrassment of his lack of conviction.

“Gora, gora hai,” my friend replied, when I asked him why goras greatly outnumber Muslims in protest demonstrations about Iraq. I have never heard a more concise, straightforward and accurate analysis of the socio-political superiority of the West over the rest of the world. Huntington would be well-advised to use this phrase, as a replacement title of his famous book.

“When you get up in the morning, you use an electric toothbrush. Who discovered electricity?” my friend elaborated his views. “Gora.” “Then you turn on your TV to catch the morning news. Who invented your TV? Gora. Then you get in your car to go to work. Car? Gora. Then you follow the ups and down of the TSE on the Internet, through your laptop. Stock Exchange, Internet and laptop? Gora, gora and, once again, gora. And who set up the country you live in?”

As much as my light-brown-but-not-quite-gora pride wanted to disagree, I had no counter-argument to offer. I sat down, shrugged my shoulders, rested my temple on my fist, ala, Allama Iqbal, and replied, “You’re right.” Then I told him to move away from the TV. A dark-skinned heroine, had started jumping up and down, excitedly trying to convince her even darker-skinned paramour, “gori hain kalieyaan.”

Gora waqaee gora hay….No doubt about it.

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Mehr Ahrar, an Arab-Canadian engineer, was sent on a one-way trip to Syria, by the US government. In Syria, Ahrar was jailed for over a year, and allegedly tortured. No one in the USA was bothered. Had Americans been bothered, the USA would not have embarrassed by Lyndie England. Mona Ahrar, Mehr’s hijab-clad, extremely shy, Ph.D. in economics from McGill University, wife has been offered a seat for the Federal Assembly by the NDP - one of Canada’s main three political parties.

Sacha, a young Canadian journalist, decided to embed himself in Iraq, during the war. But unlike his American counterparts, he embedded himself with an Iraqi family to tell their tale. Fifty-six years earlier, in 1947, Sacha’s father, another Canadian journalist at the time, had marched for many days, with Muslim refugees from Ludhiana-Jullunder to Lahore, sharing their miseries, “helping the falling old men and women.” Twenty-one years after 1947, Sacha’s father, Pierre, became the third longest serving Prime-Minister in the history of Canada.

One fine day, Jean Chrétien - Canada’s rather uncharismatic and often-caricaturized Prime Minister - uttered the following words, “I have said clearly that it is not justified….we have not been asked and we do not intend to participate in a group of the willing," This was truly Canada’s finest hour; at least out of all the hours I have spent in Canada.

A few weeks later, Francoise Ducros, Chrétien’s director of communications, went one step further. She loudly (and probably proudly) called George Bush a, “moron.” This was truly Canada’s finest sound byte; at least as far as I was concerned. As if to put more salt on America’s wounded pride, Chrétien refused to accept Ducros’ resignation. How many Arab kings, in the ivory towers of their marble castles, must have envied Ducros on that day? As the last, “n” sound of the word, “moron,” rolled out of the reporter’s mouth, quoting Ducros, my wife and I looked at each other, and without saying a word, agreed, “This is the place where we want to raise our kids.”

O Canada!
Our home and native land!
True patriot love in all thy sons command……

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“‘Tis better to have loved and lost, then not to have loved, at all,” they say. Yet how does one differentiate between love and lust? Between the permanent and the temporary? “We’re not together any more, but we are still friends,” is the convenient phrase, used in the USA, to put an accepting face to such situations. Perhaps, sometimes it is better to part ways early, as friends, then to wait and become enemies.

Or, perhaps, it is even better to never lust for anything, as we move through life. After all, no one invites one to lust for them. People, places, cultures, countries, and events in general, are what they are. If one doesn’t like them, one should part ways, instead of selfishly expecting them to change. Why should others change to accommodate those who fall for them? Perhaps it is wrong to raise one’s expectations to the point where they reach unrealistic levels. Perhaps, in future, I should follow the advice given to me, a long time ago, “Don’t fall in love.”

I don’t know…..