July 30, 2021
Speaking Haq
During a Washington summer weekend, a forum was convened on how Pakistanis can make headway in mainstream US polity and society, where I was asked to offer remarks. Its gist is encapsulated here. he audience included a US congressman, local politicians, diplomats, academia, and business figures, as well as the working class.
Useful lessons can be drawn from the conundrum of Asian Americans. They are highly proficient, hard-working, law-abiding, and economically well-off. Yet, their being a ‘model-minority’ did not inoculate them from being scapegoated as the source of coronavirus. The pandemic period is overflowing with violent attacks on them. They did their best to fit in. Their appeasing posture, however, made them inviting targets of harassment and abuse. Now, a much-overdue stock-taking has been thrust upon them.
When George Floyd was murdered in broad daylight in the streets of Minnesota on May 25, 2020, this outrage was a trigger for the worldwide spread of the BLM protest movement of racial equity. Over half a century before that, Muhammad Ali raised his moral voice as a conscientious objector upon first winning the heavyweight boxing crown at Miami on February 25, 1964. Blacks were slow to embrace him. Black ambivalence endures in acknowledging the enormity of the debt owed to Malcolm X, whose biography, “The Dead Are Arising” by the father-daughter duo, Les and Tamara Payne, just won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.
Ali’s greatest fight started outside the ring when his title was snatched from him. He took the matter right to the Supreme Court, and eventually won. But it was no thanks to Justice Thurgood Marshall – the sole black judge on the 9-member US Supreme Court – who recused himself from the case because of his involvement earlier as Solicitor General at the Justice Department and who in 1959 had termed the Nation of Islam as a “bunch of thugs organized from prisons and jails.” Because of his stance, Ali became the most famous face on earth. Although initially shunned in his own country, he got the biggest non-state funeral in the history of the US, in June 2016. Why? Because he chose to speak Haq (truth) against all odds when it mattered. And won over the admiration of his erstwhile foes, inspiring hundreds of millions across the globe.
When Palestinians, during Ramadan 2021, were bearing the brunt of a brutal bombardment from Israel, it took one Congresswoman, Rashida Tlaib, to turn the tide when, on May 18, she accosted the hitherto unmoved President Biden on the tarmac at the airport in Detroit, Michigan, about the man-made catastrophe unfolding in Gaza. Biden then called Prime Minister Netanyahu and told him to cease and desist.
The power of Kalma-e-Haq (voice of Truth) can never be underestimated. If it is instilled in the young generation, it can move mountains. It doesn’t require loads of money or tons of resources. But it does require heart.
In the US, such is the pressure to conform that there is a dread of appearing controversial, thereby risking popularity, with its career-damaging implications. It is often at the expense of doing the right thing. It explains why it is uncommon to hear voices of Haq. And this, despite freedom of expression being constitutionally enshrined under the First Amendment.
Despite tremendous talk of diversity, the misplaced focus is on diverse faces and diverse names but not on diverse voices.
Expatriates are prone to console themselves with the belief that the next better-educated generation would be better without furnishing evidence of how and why. All the education, resources, and numbers put together are of little use if there isn’t the mental strength to fight irrational fears. To cite Shakespeare, a frail heart never won a fair lady. This risk-averse mindset is a partial explanation why there is a glaring under-representation in the corridors of power.
My core point, which resonated amongst the audience, was: if you keep passively waiting, going “knock-knock” at the door and the door is not opening, then muster the collective daring and determination to push the door down and break it open.
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