This is not really that great a time to be writing about religious tolerance in Pakistan, seeing as how it is dangerously short in supply. Perhaps that is why, after a hiatus of over a year, I am putting something up here. This piece was originally published in The Friday Times, where the editor at the time (in my view) butchered it badly, thus pretty much putting me off writing for that publication for life.
This is also a tribute of sort to my unofficial copy editor for many years, Silas the Albino Monk, who will need to stock up on the max strength sunblock now, for fear of blistering his delicate skin.
Any time that I feel that I, as a moderate, (dare I say it) secular Muslim, I am in a dangerously shrinking minority, I walk around the office, look underneath unoccupied desks, and am immediately reassured that I am not alone.
Unfortunately, unlike the bombs and brimstone brand of Islam that shakes its hook at us regularly from our television screens, the gentler face of the Faith is much lower key. It is like a secret society whose members keep their heads down, hold down steady jobs and ride the bus to work every morning. However, like all secret societies, even those which are themselves unaware of their own existence (as this one surely must be), there are hallmarks whereby members of this society can be identified by the cognoscenti. The Society also does not, officially, have a name.
Naming a collective after an item of clothing that can be used to identify them is a tradition with a long and distinguished history. There were the Redcoats in the days when wearing bright outfits to the battlefield was considered to be a good idea, the Green Berets of the American Military, the Orange Order in Northern Ireland, and, in recent years, the Bloods and Crips of US gangland, and the Trenchcoat Mafia of Columbine High School. Therefore, for the purposes of this piece, I too will call our lot, be they much less violently inclined than the names I have just mentioned, after a piece of kit that distinguishes them from the rest.
I shall call them the ‘Chappal Brigade’ or, affectionately, the CB.
Sometime around the lunch hour is when they begin to manifest themselves in offices all round the nation. For this is the time of the afternoon prayer, and the first time when the gloves come off. Or the socks and shoes, anyway. They are then replaced with the footwear which gives the Brotherhood its name and, in most cases, stay on until the end of the working day.
The reason for the change of footwear is not just simple expediency. Sure, the fact that it is easier to slip in and out of a simple pair of flip-flops for ablutionary purposes is a factor. But there is also prudence in the act, for your normal office footwear is nothing if not hideously expensive, and repeated exposure to water will only result in a damp and damaged shoe with a seriously shortened life. In addition, left unattended, nice shoes are much more likely to attract the unwelcome attention of footwear bandits, for whom the entrances of mosques are a favourite hunting ground, than tatty old flip-flops. The sound of a freshly watered pair of flip flops may be one of the most distinctive in the modern Pakistani office building; there may even be a correlation between the moisture content of the footwear and the devoutness of the wearer, but that would be going into the realms of conjecture.
Although the footwear is the most distinctive part of their attire, there are other clues that can tip one off that a person may be a member of the CB. Chief among these is the handkerchief, used both for wiping off excess ablutionary waters and for protection from the sun and, on Fridays, the prayer mat, for the amount of people in the mosque on a Friday invariably spills out into the streets.
On a Friday, when the Godless or, like me, the Godawful, are making their way to Sakura, Flo or Aylanto, the CB slowly builds in numbers, arriving in ones and twos, flip flops in place, handkerchief now doubling as a head covering, prayer mat lodged under arm. It is ironic that in the business district of Karachi one of the largest congregations on a Friday lunchtime is directly opposite a franchise fast food restaurant that is a particular favourite of the band of merry men whose preferred form of protest is to burn all things heathen. Although a goodly number of the CB do make their way into the aforementioned restaurant for some post-prayer fried chicken, most of them return to their offices for the subsidised food offered there or, as a treat, visit one of the many greasy spoons designed to offer good food to the office worker on a budget. As to the quality of the food and the reasonableness of the prices, I can personally attest to both.
One unwelcome side effect of this phenomenon is that, if one carelessly stands downwind of the shoes and socks thus left lying around to catch the unwary office worker, the aroma that wafts its way towards you can best be described to those of a delicate constitution as ‘not pleasant’.
Still, this is a small price to pay for the warm glow that somewhere out there a veritable army of householders is quietly going about its business of making ends meet, from paycheck to paycheck in most cases, while at the same time they are equally quietly, and probably with equal determination, continuing to practice their religious beliefs with the minimum of attention being called to themselves or their practices.
The CB, in many ways, typifies the ‘silent majority’ of this country. It is not that they do not have a political conscience; just yesterday I met one of their ranks whose words hurt some quarters so much that they employed both sticks and stones on him. Eventually, it was not the broken bones that deterred him as much as the fact that there was a family at home to provide for. And that, eventually, is the nature of this collective. They are much too pragmatic to be militant; too fettered by the mundanities of everyday existence. And they are for me the face of devout Islam. And I, for one, can put up with the sight of colleagues walking around in flip flops accompanying their shirt and tie for the pleasure of being in on the secret.
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