Over the years, a large community of Pakistani-Americans has enjoyed success and upward mobility living here in America. As a community we are well-assimilated, mostly educated and enjoying a fair degree of financial success. We are comfortable in our American identities, but like earlier waves of immigrants we have a strong bond of affection for and like to keep tabs on the “Old Country”.
The news from Pakistan, however, is not good. As much as we would like to hear about progress and prosperity, we have instead become accustomed to reports that leave us shaking our heads in dismay and disbelief. Suicide bombings, assassinations and kidnappings-for-ransom are de rigueur. The economy remains weak. And the country seems often to be lurching from one existential crisis to the next. While other similar large developing countries are rapidly moving into the age of modernity, Pakistan seems stuck in place or even moving backwards. 50 years ago, Pakistan was at least socially and economically on-par with the likes of India, Turkey and Indonesia. Today Pakistan is embarrassingly receding further and further into their rear-view mirrors.
In most peoples’ minds today, Pakistan is associated with terrorism, violence and religious extremism. Terrorist bombs and ignoramus religious fanatics have wrought enormous physical damage on Pakistanis’ property, infrastructure and lives. But on a deeper level they have damaged the country in more profound ways: They have succeeded in fundamentally changing the Pakistani psyche and the very cultural fabric. Mountains of anecdotal evidence indicate that Pakistanis have become more religiously intolerant, more illiberal and more prone to wild conspiracy theories in the past decade. And these changes are ruining the country.
How is it even fathomable that in the 21st century a village “council of elders” would officially sentence a 30-year-old woman to be gang raped as honor-revenge for the alleged misbehavior of her teenage brother? Or that a large swathe of society believes that both 9/11 and the Bin Laden’s killing were both faked? In which other country will 70,000 people participate in a demonstration because of an offensive cartoon run in some obscure Danish newspaper? What are we to make of a society that gives widespread approval to a law that exposes its Christian and Ahmeddiya minorities to the death penalty for simply criticizing Islam? And what does it tell us when the assassin who killed the governor leading the charge against that law is feted with rose petals by jubilant mobs?
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