Mohsin Hamid: ‘In the land of the pure, no one is pure enough’
Perhaps it is living
half your life in Pakistan, for Pakistan is the land of the pure. Literally so:
the land, stan, of the pure, pak. Perhaps that is why
you have come to question the commonly held perception that purity is good and
impurity is bad. For a tribe of humans newly arrived in a location never before
inhabited by humans, such an outlook is perhaps sensible. Purity in a stream of
water renders it fit to drink. Impurity in a piece of meat sickens those who
eat it. Purity is hence to be valued and impurity to be avoided, resisted,
expelled. And yet you believe the time has come to seek to reverse, at least
partially, the emotional polarity of these two words, to extol impurity’s
benefits and denounce purity’s harms.
The issue is, of
course, personal. We are each of us composed of atoms, but equally we are
composed by time. Since your time has been spent half inside Pakistan and half
outside, and your outlook and attitudes shaped by this, you are in a sense
half-Pakistani, which is to say, as Pakistan is the land of the pure, you are
half-pure: an impossible state. You cannot exist as you are. Or rather, you
must be impure. And if impurity is bad then you are bad. And to be bad is
hazardous, in any society. So yes, the issue is personal, and pressing.
But in Pakistan, the
issue is political as well, for it affects everyone. Once purity becomes what
determines the rights a human being is afforded, indeed whether they are
entitled to live or not, then there is a ferocious contest to establish
hierarchies of purity, and in that contest no one can win. No one can ever be
sufficiently pure to be lastingly safe. In the land of the pure, no one is pure
enough. No Muslim is Muslim enough. And so all are suspect. All are at risk.
And many are killed by others who find their purity lacking, and many of their
killers are in turn killed for the same reason. And on and on, in a chain
reaction. The politics of purity is the politics of fission.
This should not be
surprising. Pakistan was founded by fission, the splitting of British imperial
India into two separate independent states, Muslim-majority Pakistan and
Hindu-majority India. And Pakistan has experienced further fission, the
splitting of its western and eastern wings into Pakistan and Bangladesh. In
each case, a more complex entity was broken into what was believed would be two
more internally harmonious ones. But a retreat from complexity is no guarantee
of future harmony. Too often, it is accompanied by the rise of a fetish for
purity, the desire to exterminate lingering traces of complexity within.
Pakistan is not
unique. Rather, it is at the forefront of a global trend. All around the world,
governments and would-be governments appear overwhelmed by complexity and are
blindly unleashing the power of fission, championing quests for the pure. In
India a politics of Hindu
purity is wrenching open deep and bloody fissures in a diverse
society. In Myanmar a politics of Buddhist
purity is massacring and expelling the Rohingya. In the United
States a politics of white
purity is marching in white hoods and red baseball caps, demonising
Muslims and Hispanic people, killing and brutalising black people, jeering at
intellectuals, and spitting in the face of climate science... read more:
