One Family Divided

(2 of 2)
Karachi, the densely packed southern port where Attiya and Aslam live, encompasses all the tensions of Pakistan. At one end of the city, well-dressed young men and women pay $20 on a Saturday night to drink and dance at an exclusive disco. At the other end, an entire neighborhood enforces prayer, bans cable TV and even smashes its television sets in Taliban-style protest. Attiya believes that such pockets of extreme piousness and intolerance will spread more widely. "In a few years, Pakistan and Afghanistan will be the same," she says. Karachi has just brought in a rabidly conservative mayor from the Jamaat-e-Islami, the country's largest and most powerful religious party. The white-bearded, temperamental Naimatullah Khan, who was indirectly elected in August, said his first priority would be to impose Islamic Shari'a law on Pakistan's biggest city (pop. 14 million), although observers tend to regard that as unlikely to happen. Even without Mayor Khan at the helm, things have been uncomfortable for Attiya. Her work has attracted hate mail over the years; some accuse her of being a prostitute and a puppet of the West. Her brother Aslam was furious when she published her first poem as a teenager, and he forbade her to use Larik, the family name. She then adopted her father's first name, but it took her ages to feel brave enough to write again. Three years ago, she received death threats that made her consider staying at home and never writing again. But she re-emerged as outspoken as ever, walking out of a poetry reading that began with a religious verse and arguing on a TV panel discussion that Islam was detrimental to women; Pakistan Television censors chopped out most of her comments.

These days, she is mostly worried about the future her girls will find in an increasingly religious milieu. "The first thing Islam does is remove women," she says. "Islam and the modern world cannot coexist." She was horrified when her daughters' prestigious private school ordered little Suhaee to cover her head with a white veil every Friday, and when 11-year-old Soonha—whose preferred attire is a T shirt and jeans—was punished for refusing to wear a maroon sash across her chest. "When my daughter wore a dupatta (veil), I saw tears in her eyes," says Attiya. She can empathize: as a teenager, she was forced by Aslam to wear the all-enveloping burka whenever she went out in public. In a poem titled I Do Not Accept This, she writes: "Every woman knows/ That respectability is not simply/ Wearing a dupatta on your head/ Which you, Khomeini-style/ Order us to wear."

Across town, Aslam sits at home with his 27-year-old son Nadeem, a gregarious civil engineer who spends his spare time proselytizing. "As teenagers, we always ran away from preachers," Aslam says softly. "We thought if we followed them, they would get God's favor, not us." As Aslam grew older, though, religion became more important. The preachers he followed were his own sons. He had always prayed five times a day but became more devout seven years ago when his youngest son, Masood, then 16, asked permission to grow a beard and join the Tableeghi Jamaat. Nadeem had already done so. Motivated by their example, Aslam entered the movement, which emphasizes the importance of preaching and bringing others into the Muslim fold. "It is in my blood," he declares. He says his increased commitment to Islam makes him feel more at peace, more comfortable with the world: "Money and materialistic things can't give people a feeling of peace." And so father and sons take holidays from work and travel the length and breadth of the country, preaching God's word wherever the movement assigns them to go. They stay in mosques and try to attract more followers. And the followers come in droves. The annual Tableeghi Jamaat convention in Karachi attracts more than half a million people.

As a young Muslim, Nadeem, Aslam's bespectacled son, is coping with the apparent contradictions of modern life. He likes to surf the Internet for Urdu translations of the Koran, and says it would be a tragedy if people were forced to get rid of their computers. But he sold the family's un-Islamic TV a year or two back. He admits to listening to pop music, very quietly, on headphones, but says he feels guilty about it. "Listening to music is wrong," he says, "but I still do it." He and the family deposit their money at an Islamic bank that does not pay interest—which is prohibited by Islamic law—and he forbade photographs at his arranged marriage in August. His new wife is a schoolteacher, but he doesn't want her to work. "Nadeem asked me to buy a burka as a wedding gift for his new wife," says Attiya, "but I said no." Nadeem describes his aunt as his "very, very, very good friend," and he admires her work helping victims of domestic violence. But their different approaches to life—secular vs. religious—have become a running joke. "Nadeem, your job should have been to come to me and make me a good Muslim," Attiya tells him. "I know I can never convince you," he sighs good-naturedly.

But Nadeem has rejected Islam's more military strains. As an 18-year-old university student, he was recruited for training as a mujahedin fighter in Afghanistan. He lasted two days, then returned home. He won't discuss the experience, other than to say: "Their intentions weren't good." In the past 10 years, six of his college friends trained to fight the jihad in Kashmir; all of them died. "They absolutely wasted their lives," he says. "It's all politics. These groups aren't interested in the system of God." He makes no secret of his contempt for hard-line militants. "Islam is against any sort of extremism," he says. "These groups are defaming Islam. Islam never preaches blood for blood."

The signs on the road to Larik, the family's ancestral village 250 km north of Karachi, suggest otherwise. Visiting for the first time in eight years, Attiya is struck by the number of jihad slogans scrawled on the roadside walls. They weren't there before, but Kashmiri militant groups now recruit fighters from all over Pakistan, even in the remotest areas. Sind province is known for its mellowness; Sufism, the most tolerant brand of Islam, flourishes in the numerous shrines. So it is jarring to see the invasion of graffiti along Sind's national highway, which cuts through vast fields of cotton, wheat and sugarcane, exhorting Muslims to kill Hindus and Westerners. VICTORY OR MARTYRDOM reads a sign by Lashkar-i-Tayyaba, one of the most influential Kashmir militant outfits. DEATH TO THE INFIDELS reads another. Attiya laughs. "Their infidels include all of us," she says, gesturing to her husband and young daughters. The slogans, which started appearing a year or two ago, creep up almost to the edge of her village. But for Larik's residents, Kashmir is as distant as the moon. "We feel sad for what is happening there," says one, "but we don't have the commitment to fight." Attiya and Aslam come from a long line of religious scholars, going back at least seven generations. Their forefathers all memorized the Koran, and the house where they were born in Larik, on the left bank of the river Indus, was on Mullah Street, so called because of their family's traditional profession. But their father, a poet, rebelled. He threw off his religious mantle and started a school for girls. As a child, Attiya was surrounded by the rhythms and cadences of his poetry, and she followed in his footsteps, writing in her native Sindhi about the injustices women face in an Islamic society. Her mother was married off to her father at age 13; he was 60. By the time she turned 30, she was already a widow with three children to care for. Attiya knew from childhood that she would only wed for love. She married when she was 31; when Aslam found out, he felt scandalized by her love match and informal wedding.

It has been so long since Attiya has visited Larik that she hardly knows the way. She finally recognizes the blue-and-white-tiled mosque where her ancestors used to preach—and where she, as a child, avoided praying. The village is more congested now, and her old family home is gone, but she knows the way to her niece's house, where she and her daughters receive an enthusiastic welcome. Attiya pays a quick visit to her maternal uncle, Muhammad Larik, a 70-year-old maulana, or religious scholar. He tried to persuade Attiya to attend a medressa when she was a rebellious child but, he says now, "it was not her path." Attiya and the girls are almost immediately ushered into the women's quarters of his home. With money from Saudi donors, Larik recently built a mosque across a small field outside his house. He concedes that relatively few come to pray there—about 10 families in a village of 200—but that does not discourage him.

The maulana frets about his niece's progressive beliefs. "I'm not just worried about Attiya, but about all such people," he says. "It is up to God to forgive her." In turn, Attiya worries about people like her brother and uncle—but it is her own intolerance that troubles her most. She lashes out in one of her poems at those who "brandish religion like a sword." She says, "The mistake made by intellectuals and the learned class, including myself, is that we avoid meeting religious people. I myself am very rigid and I don't like meeting them." Coming from the same family helps keep Attiya and Aslam from open conflict—but their troubled country lacks such a mediating force. As Pakistan aids the U.S. in the coming weeks, its vocal hard-line minority—already urging a jihad against the U.S. and openly warning of civil war—will surely try to drown out the moderate majority. In doing so, it threatens to upset the delicate balance of the nation, and that of families like Attiya and Aslam's.