Pakistan Extremists in West- Society

[aakash_2410]

Congratulations for generalizing and letting your hatred of Pakistanis in the way of your judgements

I guess you didn't read Batman's post. But nevertheless he shouldn't have stooped down to his level.

 

[Raja.Pakistani]

What a stupid post ..No wonder why he got banned..How the hell he define extremism?

I am sure you will also call extremist to those who are fasting in month of ramdhan

 

[American Pakistani]

@ thread opener, most Pakistanis in US are very cool type, i don't know how you come up with that.

 

[Burger Boy]

Look... some one has even taken notice of your thread seriously

He looks better with the beard....

http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc4/hs1385.snc4/163731_131724066890989_100001601908771_207068_1394070_n.jpg[img]

:rofl: :rofl:

 

[Paan Singh]

lolzzzzzzzzzz...........

 

[Salik]

Right, madrasahs and masjids become a potential recruting place for suicide bombers, they brainwash poor kids and ruin many families' lives.

Ahmad??? madrasahs and masjids, why stop there, go further than that. First recruiting place is the lap of the mother who teaches her child the first kalima, there is no God but Allah and Muhammad (peace be upon him) must be the ideal one, and be a good muslim. A good muslim will at least have a beard as well, as per the basics.

The point is all madrasahs and masjids are not the same. Only a particular group has that attitude.

 

[Devil Soul]

 

[mayankmatador]

thumb up, that's how World see these Pakistani people!

what has happened to pakistan,these people seemed to be from PAF dear see their haircut,,, if im right then yaar they seriously lack discipline and pride in their uniform.

 

[muse]

Raptor

Congratulations for a superb thread - and of course my sympathies -- the response of some of the defensive by itself justifies the topic -- An item that is missing from our discussion is the dimension of class distinctions - the kinds of Pakistanis who become not just religiously oriented by more motivated by radical or obscurantist religious thought, are generally, middle class and lower class types of people -- below is an interesting piece, how these distictions played in Pakistani cinema is interesting:



The new hippies
Nadeem F. Paracha

[
Illustration by Abro

Till about the 1980s, Pakistanis who had lived in a western country for a few years and then returned home were usually perceived to have become more informed and ‘modern’. One interesting way of observing this phenomenon is to study 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.

The social 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, the city dweller in the context was a Pakistani who had gone to the West for studies or work. Then, in the 1970s, Pakistan experienced its first popularly elected government led by the left-liberal populist, Z. A. Bhutto. This populism meant a promotion of social democracy that was (supposedly) more rooted in the common wisdom of the ‘masses’. It is interesting to note how Pakistani films treated this new phenomenon.

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

In films during the Bhutto era, though the ‘level-headed’ US/Europe returned Pakistani was still perceived as being progressive, many of his more socially ‘liberated’ contemporaries began being seen through the prism of the earthly ‘masses’.

This did not suggest that Pakistani society had shifted to the religious right. It was just that the largely elitist urban liberalism of the Ayub Khan era (in the 1960s) had evolved (through Bhutto) into a more populist, mass-level notion.

Pakistani films of the 1970s were thus studded with a narrative informing us that it was fine to be liberal, as long as one remained in contact with the traditions of his/her surroundings. That’s why whereas the ‘foreign returned’ Pakistani hippie was portrayed as a bumbling buffoon in most 1970s films, an urban Pakistani who was equally liberal but managed to slip in a dialogue or two about ‘eastern values,’ became an admirable aspiration.

The 1970s were also a time when a larger number of Pakistanis began traveling abroad. 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, many began moving to Middle-Eastern countries (mostly for work) in the 1970s. Up until about the late 1970s, Pakistan was a lot more pluralistic and secular than most Arab countries.

So, for example, Pakistanis going to these oil-rich counties were actually going to places that were squarely under the yoke of strict, puritanical monarchies, dictatorships or autocratic regimes whose states were still in the process of being ‘modernised’.

Soon these Pakistanis began sending impressive amounts of money to their families back home, triggering the emergence of a prosperous new urban middle-class.

Interestingly the process that saw these Pakistanis being exposed to puritanical strains of the faith practised by Arab populations mixed with a sense of their rising economic status generated a whole new strand of Pakistanis who now began relating their former (more ‘moderate’) religious convictions as something associated with low economic status and illiteracy.

This is at least one reason why from 1980 onwards, a large number of urban middle and lower-middle class Pakistanis began sliding towards various shades of puritanical Islam.

The process was also hastened by the policies of a staunchly conservative military dictatorship that had toppled the Bhutto’s regime.

A successful middle class Pakistani now became to denote an educated urbanite who was a trader, businessman, banker or employee of a reputed company, but who, at the same time, was now more likely to observe regular prayers and preferably adorn a beard or hijab/burqa.

Interestingly (especially after 9/11), Pakistanis living in the West too went through this transformation. No more were West-returned Pakistanis associated with cultural modernism or liberalism as such. And though this transformation had been gradual among the middle and lower middle-classes within Pakistan, it was rather quick among the Pakistani diaspora – further accelerated by the popularity of travelling Islamic evangelists catering squarely to the urban middle-classes (Ahmed Deedat, Zakir Naik, Farhat Hashmi, Babar Chaudhry, etc.).

Anecdotes abound about how the offspring of Pakistanis who had been living like ‘true Muslims’ in Europe and US from the 1980s onwards, after returning to Pakistan many years later, were shocked to discover that it wasn’t the kind of an Islamic Republic they had imagined it to be. This is an intriguing development. West-returned Pakistanis are now perceived as ‘better Muslims’ than those living in Pakistan, or at least that’s how they like to distinguish themselves.

Had Pakistani cinema been thriving today, I’m sure our films would’ve now been portraying the new West-returned Pakistani not as a modernist or a hippie buffoon, but a shocked Muslim wagging a righteous finger at his countrymen and advising them to repent — in an American/British accent!

 

[Perceptron]

Congratulations for generalizing and letting your hatred of Pakistanis in the way of your judgements

There are no smoke and mirrors here ; Point out one single fabrication in my statement, and i will withdraw it. You can find out yourself about whether it be Daood Gilani or whoever else.

 

[Ahmad]

Ahmad??? madrasahs and masjids, why stop there, go further than that. First recruiting place is the lap of the mother who teaches her child the first kalima, there is no God but Allah and Muhammad (peace be upon him) must be the ideal one, and be a good muslim. A good muslim will at least have a beard as well, as per the basics.

The point is all madrasahs and masjids are not the same. Only a particular group has that attitude.

which particular group?

 

[muse]

A good muslim will at least have a beard as well, as per the basics.

Another new Farz

 

[Ahmad]

Another new Farz

i used to have beard before it was forced on us, i loved it as well, it was small and trimed---not bushy one. but now it has been 10 years i am clean shave, i will never go back to it.

 

[muse]

10 things I hate about being a British Pakistani
Sunday Magazine Feature
By Anealla Safdar
Published: September 11, 2011

1. The fundamentalist fashion. The wiry beards on the chins of teenage boys from Bradford to Bristol are already looking a bit passé, fellas. Props for predicting the ankle-swinger trend before it became universally fashionable, though.



2. The lack of progression. I’ve only been to Pakistan three times, but it’s clear our native Pakistani brethren are years ahead of us in terms of ideas, fashion and entertainment. Your women wear sleeveless kurtis with jeans, we’re still in patiala shalwars. Let’s use our politicians as a crude metaphor: you have Hina Rabbani Khar, we’ve got Sayeeda Warsi.



3. The pitiful selection of spouses. Is it just me or are we facing a bit of a crisis here girls? It seems we have a few options. 1. The Cousin 2. The Rudeboy 3. The Mummy’s Boy who won’t leave his postcode 4. The Imam wannabe 5. The Party Animal or 6. A mixture of 4 and 5, depending on which day of the week it is.



4. The need for role models. Apart from the boxer Amir Khan — and he really doesn’t have universal appeal — we have none. I’m not talking about ‘successful people’ here, I mean genuinely famous ones. On the Wikipedia page for ‘List of British Pakistanis’ our famous ones include a fictional television character, a Michael Jackson impersonator and someone called Nigel Le Vaillant.



5. The outrage at mixed marriages. We arrived in Britain a very long time ago. Aunties, Uncles, larkis and larkas, it’s natural that a few of us will marry white (or even black) people.



6. The feeling of inadequacy. Although British Pakistanis have formed a strong community of our own, the facts remain unchanged. We will always just be a bunch of BBCDs to ‘real’ Pakistanis or a load of ‘Pakis’ to the (far rightish) British people.



7. The invasion of privacy. My father has nicknamed one of my Aunties ‘Radio Pakistan’. You might have thought Twitter was the quickest way to spread information/gossip. That is, of course, until you meet this Aunty and many others like her.



8. The expectation that we can all speak Urdu. Jinnah didn’t speak it well and desi films have subtitles now, so there are enough excuses not to be fluent. Don’t be surprised that to some, Urdu might as well be Swahili.



9. The “Are you X?” question. Fill X in with any other brown race you can think of. “No, I’m Pakistani!” should be tattooed on my forehead.



10. The assumption that all Britpaks know each other. There are more than a million of us here. Although most of us come from the same region (i.e. somewhere in the Punjab), no I really don’t know your doctor, taxi driver or the lady who taught you how to make a curry last year.

 

[Perceptron]

Another new Farz

The " Deen mein Dadhi hai; Dadhi mein deen nahi" conundrum.