|
 Way
to go, ladies!
Feisal Naqvi
With its devotion to the ephemeral, the fashion industry represents
the most complete rejection of the fundamentalist ethos possible. At
the same time, our fashion industry is one of the few things in this
benighted country that is uniquely Pakistani
Gigapan, a website, specialises in giant zoomable panoramas. Type
‘Münster’ in the site’s search engine and you would get what looks
like a standard street-view of an average German town, complete with
the requisite Gothic steeple in the background.
Now zoom in on that church steeple till you find three hanging metal
cages. Because therein lies a tale.
In February 1534, the town of Münster was as solidly bourgeois as it
looks now. But to a group of radical Christians, Münster represented
a priceless opportunity which they exploited to the hilt. After
seizing City Hall, the radicals set up a regime in which all
property was to be held in common. After a brief period of communal
glory, Münster dissolved into a madness where the “elect” were able
to force women into marrying them, dissenters were executed and all
normal life ground to a halt.
In June 1535, the forces of the Church finally succeeded in taking
back control. The leaders of the uprising were tortured to death and
their bodies were hauled up for public viewing in three cages hung
to the spire of St Lambert’s Church. After 50 years or so, the
bodies were themselves removed. But as the internet testifies, the
cages remain there till today.
Except when viewed from a great distance, history’s progress is
never smooth. We are too prone as a nation to comparing our plight
with the West in which all seems as serene as the unruffled surface
of a pond. But go beneath that placid façade and it turns out that
things were once as bloody and as confused there as they are here.
Those boring streets of Münster ran with blood 500 years ago and the
half-millennium since has not been all milk and honey either.
Between 1900 and 1945, Germany was the centrepiece of two world
wars. Between those two wars, Germany first went financially insane,
destroying its economy through hyperinflation, and then went
politically insane, giving vent to its darkest urges through the
nightmare that was Nazism.
The point of all this history is not to say that everything will
turn out fine. That platitude may or may not be correct but it is
certainly irrelevant. Instead, the point being made is that life is
to be lived, not just endured: the fight is now.
All of this brings me naturally enough to the charity event recently
organised by the Pakistan Fashion Design Council.
As a fund-raiser, the show was spectacularly successful, raising Rs
4 million to go along with the Rs 8 million worth of goods already
sent to Mardan by the umbrella group, Hum Pakistani. But the true
importance of the event was not in the amount it raised but in who
did the raising, and how they raised it.
The PFDC event was organised almost entirely by women. One could,
with some justification, refer to the organisers as socialites. But
the throwaway cynicism of that tag would be unjustified. Yes, they
are all women who are social. But they are also all women who are
successful professionals. And that is an important fact because
while militant sympathisers present the current conflict as being
between true believers and a corrupt elite, it is also a war between
a small group of men and pretty much most of the women in this
country.
The PFDC event was therefore an important function because it showed
that those women of this country who will have the most to lose when
the fundos come to town are determined to fight back. And the way
they fought back is also important.
Fashion may seem light years removed from the theological debates
between liberals and extremists but it is not. Extremists believe
that there is only one way of being Islamic, which is to act like a
well-armed 10th century goat-herder. The rest of us believe that
there is no limit to human expression, that one can be both modern
and Muslim, and that Islam is a religion for all times and all
places, not a template for reproducing one place and one moment in
time.
With its devotion to the ephemeral, the fashion industry represents
the most complete rejection of the fundamentalist ethos possible. At
the same time, our fashion industry is one of the few things in this
benighted country that is uniquely Pakistani — as in not Indian, not
Arab, not ‘Islamic’, but simply, specifically Pakistani.
Celebrating Pakistani fashion is therefore not just frivolous
escapism but a defiant gesture that rejects those who wish to
enchain all of us in an arid time-warp. In the case of the PFDC,
that defiance was more than symbolic because the organisers had
received several bomb threats. But even in symbolic terms, the
PFDC’s defiance was many-layered: not only was the event organised
by women of all ages, but it featured the work of many extremely
talented female designers which was in turn presented by the best
female models of Pakistan.
Perhaps all of the above is too complicated. If so, let me put it
more simply: the PFDC function was an extremely public,
well-manicured finger from the (mostly) female fashion designer
community to the militants. Way to go, ladies!
The writer is an advocate and can be reached at laalshah@gmail.com.
An archive of his previous columns can be found atmonsoonfrog.wordpress.com
Daily Times: June 8, 2009 |
