Christopher Hitchens is, alas, only as smart as Christopher Hitchens

Updated: Wednesday, Sept. 17, 6pm.

Don’t you just love it when someone who has no expertise and yet still the pretense to propose, with smug self-satisfaction, that he does? After writing a book in which he criticizes all religion for practically being the source of all human evil, and simultaneously endorses the Bush administration’s agenda, rooted very much in a right-wing understanding of Christianity, now Christopher Hitchens has turned his sights on Pakistan. This can only mean both Pakistan and logic will suffer.  Poor Pakistan; poor logic.  You are both too often and sometimes unfairly hated on.

I found this article through the wonderful website Talk Islam (original post), which I only very rarely contribute to, which you can blame on my laziness or my busyness, depending on how you are feeling. I really must say Christopher Hitchens is becoming a bothersome little man. It was bad enough that God is Not Great came with such ugly arguments in such ugly yellow, a "book" poorly researched, warning of a simplistic mind, incapable of the deeper appreciation of the nuances of human thought, theology, as well as causality.  I happily eviscerated that book in a post which generated a lot of attention, precisely because so many Muslims were so sick of hearing that man continue to yap.  Where once before he boasted that he knew the definite article in Arabic (congratulations!), now he pridefully claims to understand acronym formation in Urdu (and Persian) and, therefore, understands why Pakistan "failed."

I simply don’t understand how it is that one can endorse the war, become its biggest cheerleader, watch it fall apart and cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, as well as the squandering of hundreds of billions of dollars, and continue to believe somewhere in one’s mind that one continues to be a competent observer of human affairs. Why do such people still have jobs?  How can you be so off, so tremendously, and still be an "authority"?  Now Christopher Hitchens has turned his sights on Pakistan, and he is right insofar as he is pointing to the designs of the Pakistani government (more properly, the government within the government) on controlling Afghanistan or at least keeping it out of the Indian orbit (a point which would, in part, explain unfortunate Pakistani policy decisions which Hitchens entirely is unaware of).  Fairly, Pakistan's foreign policy has often been disastrous; in the case of the 1971 war, it was brutal, merciless and vile.  Hitchens talks about how dangerous Pakistan has become, and how dangerous Pakistani colonial designs on Afghanistan are for the future fight against terrorism. If this is the case, pray tell, what the hell did Iraq have to do with the war on terrorism?  Forget that: First of all,  Mr Hitchens, define terrorism.  And then: How possibly can America "handle" Pakistan, which has the arms, the instability and complexity to dwarf Afghanistan or Iraq, plus about three times the population of the two put together?  No answer.  Just absurd rhetoric, absent context (no mention of the reasons Pakistan fears India, or the genocidal campaigns in Gujurat against Muslim minorities, feeding brutal terrorism in return.)

But the most galling segment of his piece has to be a paragraph in which he simultaneously demonstrates his unawareness of subcontinental history and thinks it sufficient to sum up his punchy, snarky argument with this incorrect analysis. You may think this is too harsh. Wait for me to finish.

The very name Pakistan inscribes the nature of the problem. It is not a real country or nation but an acronym devised in the 1930s by a Muslim propagandist for partition named Chaudhary Rahmat Ali. It stands for Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, and Indus-Sind. The stan suffix merely means "land." In the Urdu language, the resulting acronym means "land of the pure." It can be easily seen that this very name expresses expansionist tendencies and also conceals discriminatory ones. Kashmir, for example, is part of India. The Afghans are Muslim but not part of Pakistan. Most of Punjab is also in India. Interestingly, too, there is no B in this cobbled-together name, despite the fact that the country originally included the eastern part of Bengal (now Bangladesh, after fighting a war of independence against genocidal Pakistani repression) and still includes Baluchistan, a restive and neglected province that has been fighting a low-level secessionist struggle for decades. The P comes first only because Pakistan is essentially the property of the Punjabi military caste (which hated Benazir Bhutto, for example, because she came from Sind). As I once wrote, the country's name "might as easily be rendered as 'Akpistan' or 'Kapistan,' depending on whether the battle to take over Afghanistan or Kashmir is to the fore."

First of all, the name “Pakistan” was not the creation of anyone affiliated with the movement to guarantee Muslim rights within the subcontinent. It was the creation of a man, said Chaudhry Rahmat Ali, on the fringes of the Muslim independence movement within the Indian context, doodling dreams of Muslim revivalism while stuffed up at Oxford.  So absurd were these that Ali planned for most of India to fall under Muslim rule, and to be renamed the "Pak Confederation" on the Continent of Dinia (get it? get it part two?)  Ali considered Pakistan to be some kind of sovereign or extremely autonomous entity within the greater framework of the Indian subcontinent, yet associated with other such entities of Muslim majority or significance.  The reason there is no “B” in Pakistan, for Bengal, is because the author of the scheme anticipated that there would be a separate sovereign area for Bengal, named Bangistan or Bang-i-Islam(istan).  The plan called for ten Muslim territories, whose names would either be an acronym, or evoke something specific to the territory; the name was eventually picked up by the Muslim League some years later, and did not necessarily include or refer to Bengal, which may have been intended to be separate from Pakistan (but tied to it). Not to mention the "stan" was often taken to refer to Baluchistan...

Secondly, the name caught on despite the absurdity of the original plan behind it.  The name caught on because it was catchy, it was easy to say, and through its Persianate connotations, evoked the romantic past that all nationalisms are susceptible to.  "Land of the Pure," yes; that is not therefore racist expansionist jingoism.  This does not make Pakistan any different, or any worse, than any other country. Simply because its name has been created does not imply any sense of artificiality: What exactly does Hitchens mean when he says, "it is not a real country or nation."  Was Belgium real?  Did it become real?  What about Georgia, or Moldova, or England, or France?  One could argue the same of so many other countries.  One could also point to strong national identities and strong state institutions which were simultaneously colonial or savage, say England or Germany; that a nation is weakly realized does not mean its idea is itself weak.  Its institutions, environment, economy or leadership could, jointly or severally, be to blame.

In this respect, Christopher Hitchens, supposed enemy of religion and metaphysics, has proven himself to be all the more of a hypocrite.  How can a nation not be “artificial”?  Does Hitchens believe that some nations are natural, organic entities? If so, when did he become a proponent of the logic that gives us Aryan race theory?  Doesn't this smack of religion?  One can argue that nations are more contrived, or less realistic (pragmatically speaking), but we must be honest: the narratives by which nations are created and sustained are of course artificial in so far as they are firstly often terribly historically inaccurate and secondly, quite obviously the creation of human beings and do not respond to any kind of biological or essential fact.  This explains why until 1946, perhaps even until early 1947, the supporters of the Paksitan movement did not seem to intend an independent Muslim state, but rather one or several very autonomous territories of Muslim majority within the framework of a loosely confederated Indian state.

Thirdly, the author of the name “Pakistan” was an astute observer in one respect: when Jinnah finally agreed to the partition plan as it was proposed by the British, even though he was very much against its boundaries, Rahmat Ali noted that the eastern wing of the country should be forthwith granted independence or a great degree of autonomy in all practical and economic matters. In fact, historical records prove that Jinnah as well as prominent members of the Muslim League were never opposed to the creation of two or more independent Muslim states on the Indian subcontinent, though when we say independent, it is of course unclear whether the Muslim League actually wanted a truly independent state or a confederation of Muslim and Hindu (and even Sikh) states within some kind of constitutional framework that allowed for the possibility of secession as well as the possibility of greater unification. Thus the “two nation theory” is not in fact an argument that there should be two nations in place of British India. The point is, that in the view of the Muslim league, the Muslim population of India was sufficiently homogenous to merit the status of “nation” and to demand rights, by virtue of its coherence, at both the regional and all-India levels of government.  Congress disagreed in some respects; the dispute was never resolved, the British rarely helped and often hurt; hence Partition...

Fourthly, by what measure does Hitchens argue that all the territories represented by the individual letters of the acronym “Pakistan” were part of India and hence the country is nonsenical?  I hate when I hear this; Pakistan did not secede from India.  Colonial British India became independent as two states of equal age and international standing.  Of course what is Pakistan was Indian in the 1930's, if by Indian you mean India as a British colony! They were, furthermore, part of the United Kingdom at the time, which further gives proof for the inane comment that there is no letter “B” for Britain in the name "Pakistan", nor a "UK," either.  There is, in case you haven’t noticed, no such letter in the name "India" either.  The Pakistan movement was one of several movements or trends in the subcontinent which were aimed at freeing the subcontinent from British rule. The disagreements began as Indians of different backgrounds, classes, ideals and values, not to mention languages, religions, and regions, debated what exactly an independent India should look like and how it should work.  To say Kashmir and Punjab were part of India in 1933 is to state the obvious (for Hitchens, correspondence with reality can be a victory); to state that not even all of Punjab went to Pakistan is to state the trauma: Jinnah wanted whole provinces under larger groupings for the purposes of autonomy.  This didn't work, but it doesn't mean Hitchens is therefore telling us anything.

I will follow this up shortly with a second post which explains how stupid it is, in every sense of that word, to say that a country is not real because its name is an acronym.  What is real?  One could say the very same thing, regarding instability and failed national cohesion, about Afghanistan; is it not real?  Or, Iraq!  Perhaps it is not a country, but a figment of an anti-religion activist's imagination, a dream in which he urged a religious Christian to invade it, to save it from the tyranny religion causes.  Many people died, but the man never woke up.

Comments

[suhaib webb]

Peace and Ramadan Gettings:

This was really an exhilarating article. Would you mind if we posted it and linked it back to you?

Suhaib

[Sulayman]

a sound thrashing on mr hitchens. Bravo, Haroon!

[Muse]

Fantastic. What a satisfying intellectual chapair.

[Svend]

Good show, old boy. Incidentally, what is more nondescript and artificial than "The United Kingdom" by this foolish standard? Must be a flash in the pan. Someone needs to give it a unique, specific name that identifies some of its core qualities. Like "Pakistan" does. Just illustrates how petty and devoid of thought so much Muslim-bashing is today.