Not long ago, a Pakistani who would live abroad (especially a Western country) for a few years and then return home, was considered to have become more informed, educated and ‘modern.’

This is how he was treated and perceived until about the early 1980s. More often than not, most Pakistanis who returned, found their country to be stuck in a whirlpool of conservatism, superstition and illiteracy. They would suggest adopting Western political, social and economic models because they thought that by being exposed to the politics, education and culture of the West, they had become more enlightened.

One interesting way of observing this phenomenon is to notice how the country’s once-thriving cinema portrayed such Pakistanis. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, most films that had a character shown to have come back from the UK or the US, would usually be portrayed as a rational, enlightened person.

One should remember that the 1960s in Pakistan were perhaps the most secular and ‘liberal’ period in the country’s history, even though this political and cultural disposition emerged under a military regime (Ayub Khan).

Late filmmaker, Mushtaq Gazdar, rightly informs us (in his excellent book, 50 years of Pakistani Cinema) that Ayub’s regime was very interested in using cinema to promote secular and liberal ideas; but it is also correct to suggest that the films themselves were reflecting the overall cultural zeitgeist of the time.

The social status hierarchy in this context (in both films and reality) went something like this: An educated city dweller was seen to be more level-headed and intelligent (and far less religious) than a person from the rural areas. However, above the city dweller in this respect was the Pakistani who had gone to the West for studies or work.

It was all about Western-educated men and women being expected to infuse modern scientific, political and cultural ideas into a static society. However, this did not only mean introducing capitalist economic and cultural innovations.

Although the above was the overriding expectation and perception, many young Pakistani urbanites and those coming back from the West, also reflected many other ideas taking shape at the time in the West.

On the one hand, where many young urban Pakistanis and those returning from the West aspired to imitate modern capitalist economics and liberal cultural pursuits, there were also those who challenged these with the other side of what was transpiring in the West in the 1960s.

For example, the idea of radical social democracy and an interest in revolutionary Marxism that had erupted on American and European campuses in the 1960s made their way on to various campuses in Pakistan as well.

A growing interest in modern leftist ideas was mainly inspired by newspaper reports, and by many tales of protest and direct action brought back by Pakistanis returning from the West.

Of course, there were various vital economic and political factors at work behind the leftist and democratic students’ movement that erupted in Pakistan in the late 1960s, and the above is just one of them. But a young Pakistani who had experienced life in the West was always expected to be either a capitalism buff or a radical democrat. In both cases however, he remained to be perceived as being thoroughly secular.

In fact, many conservative Pakistanis thought that it was such West returned Pakistanis who were influencing their young urban countrymen, encouraging them to divorce themselves from religion and ‘eastern traditions,’ sometimes in the name of liberalism and sometimes, Marxism.

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Between 1970 and 1977, Pakistan experienced its first popularly elected government (Z.A. Bhutto) that was as liberal as the dictatorship of Ayub, but far more populist.

This populism meant a promotion of social democracy and secularism that was (supposedly) more rooted in the common wisdom of the ‘masses’ that the Bhutto regime explained as being traditionally moderate and open-minded.

Coming back to how Pakistani films treated this phenomenon, it is interesting to note a slight shift of gears in the 1970s.

Suddenly, as a range of radical political youth movements in the West exhausted themselves, they became more faddish in content. These emerging fads and fashions also arrived in Pakistan. Now Pakistani films made sure to separate the cheese from the chalk. Whereas in the 1960s, most films had celebrated the US or UK returned Pakistani as a beacon of modern ideas, in the 1970s, he/she usually became being portrayed as a longhaired, guitar-slinging and dope-smoking hippie!

This did not suggest that the Pakistani society had shifted towards the religious right. It was just that the largely elitist and bourgeoisie liberalism of the Ayub era had evolved (through Bhutto), into a more encompassing and populist notion.

Though the ‘level-headed’ US/Europe returned Pakistani was still being perceived as progressive, many of his more socially and culturally ‘radical’ contemporaries were now being seen through the prism of the earthly ‘masses.’

Pakistani films of the time were  studded with a narrative informing us that it was fine to be liberal and secular, as long as one remains in contact with the traditions and conventions of his surroundings.

That is why whereas the ‘foreign return’ Pakistani hippie was portrayed as a bumbling buffoon in most 1970s films, an urban Pakistani who was equally liberal, but did slip in a dialogue or two about ‘eastern values,’ became an admirable aspiration.

The 1970s were also a time when a large number of Pakistanis began to go abroad (a lot more than in the 1960s). The only difference this time was that whereas almost all Pakistanis used to go to Europe or the US for work and studies in the 1950s and 1960s, a large number began moving to Middle-Eastern countries (mostly for work) in the 1970s.

In spite of the fact that Pakistanis going to the US and European countries were still the ones being perceived as becoming westernised and ‘modern,’ nobody quite knew what to make of those travelling to the oil-rich Arab countries.

Until about the late 1970s, Pakistan (as a Muslim country and society) was a lot more liberal, pluralistic and secular than most Arab countries. So, for example, Pakistanis going to Saudi Arabia, Libya and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), were actually going to countries that were squarely under the yoke of either strict, puritanical monarchies (Saudi Arabia), totalitarian dictatorships (Libya), or conservative autocratic regimes whose states were still in the process of being ‘modernised’ (UAE).

Pakistanis were well attuned to ‘western ideas’ reaching Pakistan and how Pakistanis living or returning from the West become more ‘modern’ and less traditional. But little or almost nothing was known about what was happening in this context to Pakistanis travelling in droves to Middle Eastern countries during the oil boom there in the 1970s.

I once had a very interesting conversation with a Pathan Pakistani taxi driver (in Dubai) two years ago. He had first gone to Saudi Arabia and then come to Dubai between 1973 and 1974.

“Look at them,” he said, pointing at two Arab teens screeching away in their brand new white Porsche. “It was us who made their cities.”

This Pathan was not only talking about the Indian and Pakistani labour that these countries used to build their skyscrapers – he meant something more: “They were Bedouins!” He laughed, speaking in Urdu but in a very Pushtu accent. “They did not know anything about the outside world. We taught them. Had God not given them oil, they would still be mending their camels in the desert.”

Sour grapes perhaps, but it is true that a majority of Pakistanis who left for these oil rich Arab countries, initially felt extremely homesick.

By the late 1970s however, all these Pakistanis began to send in large amounts of money to their families back home. A prosperous new urban middle-class began to emerge. According to famous architect and academic, Arif Hassan, this new middle class took a leading part in the Jamaat-i-Islami led PNA movement against Bhutto in 1977.

Men like Hassan and economist, Akbar Zaidi, believe that the material gains enjoyed by the families whose relatives were in Middle Eastern countries, and the consequent rise in consumerism among the new middle- and lower-middle classes, did not turn them into the kind of budding secular and liberal entrepreneurs Ayub was trying to create.

On the contrary, being exposed to a particularly puritanical strain of Islam practiced by these Arab populations mixed with a sense of rising economic status, all this generated a whole new strand of Pakistanis who began relating their former (more ‘moderate’) religious convictions (that prevailed in Pakistan), as something associated with low status and illiteracy.

From 1980 onwards, a large number of urban middle- and lower-middle class Pakistanis began converting to various shades of puritanical Islam. The process was also hastened by the policies of a staunchly conservative military dictatorship that had toppled Bhutto’s regime (Zia-ul Haq).

Gradually, if till the late 1970s, being educated and enlightened in Pakistan had meant being liberal and ‘modern,’ by the early 1990s, it began meaning being a puritanical and practicing Muslim who shunned practices such as going to the shrines and other ‘superstitious’ and ‘ignorant’ beliefs.

A ‘successful middle class Pakistani’ now became to denote an educated urbanite, who was either a trader, businessman, banker or employee of a reputed company, but who, at the same time, observed regular namaz,  and preferably kept a beard or adorned a hijab.

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Interestingly (especially after 9/11), Pakistanis living in the West too, went through this transformation. No more were US- or Europe-returned Pakistanis associated with social modernism and secularism. Whereas this transformation had been gradual among Pakistani middle and lower middle-classes, it was rather quick among the Pakistani Diaspora in the West.

Anecdotes abound about how the children of Pakistanis who had been living like ‘true Muslims’ in Europe and UK from the 1980s, after returning to Pakistan many years later were shocked that it wasn’t the kind of an ‘Islamic Republic’ they had imagined it to be.

This is a stunning development. West-returned Pakistanis are now known to be ‘better Muslims’ than those living in Pakistan.

Had Pakistani cinema been thriving today, I am sure, our films would have been portraying the new West-returned Pakistani not as a Godless modern or a hippie buffoon, but a shocked Muslim putting his countrymen to shame by his puritanical ways and beliefs.

What an about turn.

Nadeem F. Paracha is a cultural critic and senior columnist for Dawn Newspaper and Dawn.com.

*Cover design by Eefa Khalid/Dawn.com The views expressed by this blogger and in the following reader comments do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Dawn Media Group.

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