The Price of Belonging

For me, growing up in a fundamentalist, religious dictatorship like Pakistan, I was taught to live in fear of and hate our Indian neighbors who might attack us at any time. I was taught to believe in the supremacy of one religion above all others. I was taught that this religion needed our state to defend it and we, as Pakistanis, were the ultimate expression of the arc of history that inevitably bent toward humanity, united under one God. 

That spell of ideological indoctrination and belonging ruptured like a million balloons when I was authentically exposed to the writings of the great minds of the Western intellectual tradition. I felt that my intuitive conception of a higher power had more in common with Spinoza than anything I was taught to believe and was indoctrinated with in Islamic studies. When it came to religion, I agreed more with Freud than Mohammad! I had more Jewish heroes at one point in my development than Muslim heroes. From Kafka and Sarte to Noam Chomsky. After many years following the rigid path of the New Atheists like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, I found myself coming full circle with the love, compassion, and flexibility of Muslim Sufis like Maulana Rumi and Baba Bulleh Shah, with whom Spinoza actually had more in common than Western philosophers like Plato or Descartes. I learned about fighting injustice, facing oppression with integrity, and deception with honesty from the civil rights activist W.E.B. Dubois.

At the same time, I learned from Franz Fanon about the idea that colonialism encourages the colonized population to aspire to the experience and position of the oppressor through its emphasis on language. I had gone to an English private school in what was a former British colony. I learned to speak and write perfect English, cementing my place among the elitist “brown sahibs” whose destiny was seemingly to rule over the unwashed, uneducated masses who spoke only Urdu. In school, we had focused more on Shakespeare than Mirza Ghalib. The end result of which was, in retrospect, as Fanon describes, a type of alienation from my own real heritage, culture, and way of life. That remained the case until I was able to find my way back to it after integrating and learning the good things I could from the West. I am still exploring and learning about my heritage today, but I never felt that I need to “decolonize” my mind of everything Western. 

I also realized at a young age that all of the hypernationalism and constant drumbeats of war with India were just a way for the military establishment of Pakistan to stay relevant and remain in power. The required textbooks fed us a bastardized version of our own history that erased large parts of our unbelievably rich Hindu past, and glorified only the Muslim histories while villainizing Hindu India. This sought to keep us identified with an artificially constructed, confessional nation-state born in bloody mayhem and murder, and manufacture consent for an insane military budget meant to fight aggressive neighbors who were always baying for its blood. There is only one other state in the world like that. So, I speak about Israel even though I am not Israeli, because I know instinctually, in my bones, what it feels like to be raised in Israel. I speak because the silenced cannot speak for themselves. 

While all of this this shattered the belief system of my childhood indoctrination, it gave me the building blocks to consciously construct a new ideology as an active agent and architect of my own belief system. I see myself today as a humanist citizen “belonging” to the world, not primarily as a Pakistani or an American. However, I still love Pakistani people and Pakistani culture, and I love my adopted homeland. I have a skepticism toward the dogma, superstition, and irrational beliefs I grew up with, while recognizing the limitations of the scientific method as “the most reliable way of acquiring knowledge” and finding in hermeneutics and phenomenology some indispensable tools for understanding the world. I believe that one of the most important endeavors in which human beings can engage is seeking to rise above our belief systems and group ideologies to overcome injustice. And for that to happen, I believe it takes all people “standing in solidarity” with those who are “terrorized,” regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, or tribe.

All this to say it is difficult and it takes work to escape the insidious impacts of our early indoctrination and feeling of belonging on our ability to discern “truths” about the world.