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I do not know enough about Islam to confirm Akbar Ahmed’s billing as “one of contemporary Islam’s outstanding exponents, a role model of reason in an age of anxiety, tolerance at a time of tension, and hope when all too many are tempted to despair.” Nor am I in a position to place my money on his description by Rabbi Sir John Sacks, chief rabbi of Britain and the Commonwealth, as “one of the great religious sages of our time.” Prof Tamara Sonn, one of Dr Fazlur Rahman’s students when he was teaching at Chicago, calls Akbar Ahmed “one of the world’s leading experts on Islam.” Judea Pearl, Danny Pearl’s father, considers Akbar Ahmed’s new book – Journey into Islam: The Crisis Of Globalisation – as “a must read for anyone concerned with the course of the planet.”

If one-hundredth of such praise had been heaped on me, I would have started flying above the stratosphere, but last time I checked, Akbar Ahmed had not sprouted any wings and he still had his feet on terra firma. I must say though, that he does not mind being praised and if there is a pause in the process, on an off day he is likely to see that as something akin to disloyalty. Comrade Abdulla Malik was once asked why he had gone to congratulate Maqbul Sharif who had been made chief editor of The Pakistan Times under Zia ul Haq. “Success,” said Comrade Malik, “must be acknowledged, even if you do not like it.”

Akbar Ahmed and I go back a long way. For several years now, we have maintained a ceasefire, and I no longer call him Anthero Panthero [you just did.– Ed.]. The fact is that whether he is the “greatest living authority on contemporary Islam” or whether he is not, he has made a large number of people here in America – and elsewhere without doubt – believe that he is. Since he arrived in the States from Britain around a decade ago, he has more than made his mark here. He has been on every big time TV show that you can think of. There are few conferences on Islam where he is not listed as a speaker, and he is always good for a pithy quote when a reporter calls him as his deadline looms on the horizon.

One thing about Akbar Ahmed. No matter where he is or how much work he is straining to complete, he always keeps those on his list well informed. If he is speaking somewhere, he makes it a point to let his friends know. “He carries his audience with him,” our friend Malik Zahoor Ahmed once observed. Akbar Ahmed may not convince any maulana of his knowledge of Islam, but he certainly has convinced the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security of it. They consult him, and I am sure he gives them good advice. Whether they take it or not, I do not know. But experience shows that good advice is seldom taken.

Akbar Ahmed is a smart man. In an academically crowded country like America, he has carved out a niche for his special expertise, which is interfaith harmony and understanding, with the emphasis being on Jewish-Muslim relations. It is quite remarkable that he has persuaded Judea Pearl, whose son Danny Pearl was so brutally murdered in Karachi by those who believed they were working for the glory of Islam, to team up with him and speak to audiences in America and Europe about interfaith reconciliation and understanding. Akbar Ahmed’s platform is Abrahamic religions. He argues that all three major – and often contending religions – Islam, Christianity and Judaism share a common progenitor, the Prophet Abraham. This perhaps is the kind of message that needs to go through a divided world. Whether it will take effect or not, remains to be seen, but it is an attempt well worth making. Akbar Ahmed is the only Muslim to have been invited to speak at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, which shows his outreach.

Akbar Ahmed’s new book is based, in part at least, on a journey through several Muslim countries that he undertook with two of his American students, one of them a young woman. He has come up with three models that Muslims can follow: the Sir Syed Model, the Ajmer model, and the Deoband model. He argues that the salvation of Muslims everywhere lies in following the first two. He quotes Anwar Ibrahim of Indonesia, whom he met with his students, who “spoke ominously of ‘creeping shariatisation’,” with what was once a tolerant society being infiltrated by “Deobandi thinking.” The author is alarmed by the Aligarh and the mystic Ajmer models being under attack by those who insist on a literalist interpretation of Islam. He finds it ironic that Western politicians and commentators shine the spotlight only on the Deobandi model as if that were the only representation of Islam. He fears that the Aligarh model has become enfeebled and is in danger of being overtaken by the Deoband model, which never had much sympathy for a modernist Muslim like Quaid e Azam, Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

Akbar Ahmed found at the end of his multi-country trip that moderate Muslims are practising a compassionate and just Islam that is taught in the Quran, without rejecting modernity and the West. The global media, he regrets, have fed into the feeling of urgency and terror that they have come to associate with Islam. Akbar Ahmed has also confirmed that Dr Farhat Hashmi, the female face of Deobandi Islam, masquerading as a modernist, was able to consolidate her operation when Farooq Leghari was President. It was his wife who patronised Hashmi, “adding to her fame.” However, Akbar Ahmed errs when he writes that “Farhat appears an attractive alternative for learning Islam.” She, according to him, represents “valid Muslim responses to globalisation” with her followers viewing her as “the closest embodiment of the Aligarh model.” I have no doubt that when Akbar Ahmed awarded this certificate of excellence to Farhat Hashmi, who is now happily ensconced in Toronto for the greater glory of her puritanical and repressive version of Islam and the further replenishment of her already considerable bank balance, Sir Syed Ahmed Khan must have turned in his grave.

Does Akbar Ahmed have advice for Muslim leaders? Indeed, he does. Addressing them, he writes, “Stay as close to your ideals as possible. Emphasise Ilm , knowledge; Ihsan , balance and compassion and adl, or justice in your societies. At this time your people groan under your rule because they see little of these attributes. Neither you nor the surrounding world can afford to keep the Muslim Ummah from playing a full role on the world stage.”

I only hope no Muslim ruler reads Akbar Ahmed’s book because, frankly, they have been doing and they will continue to do exactly the opposite of what my good friend has proposed.

This has been quite a week with the diplomatic whirlwind, otherwise known as the Foreign Minister of Pakistan, Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri, whose name, if idiomatically translated into English, would read K M Blameworthy, just having left town. By the time these lines see the black light of print, he would have hit Chicago, to which city he flew along with his Foreign Office tail, Ambassador Khalid Mahmood, who has to go into some kind of a record book for handing out visiting cards that no wallet known to man can hold because of their size, which I have personally measured and established at 10.5 by 7.5 centimetres, compared to the humbler sized 8.5 by 5 centimetre cards that the rest of us carry.

Is a visiting card cut in accordance with the bearer’s ego? I don’t know, frankly, and invite shrink Humair Hashmi to enlighten this newspaper’s readers on that point in his next column. I have not dared ask the foreign minister for his visiting card because given my present wages, I do not have the resources to hire a truck to carry it home.

The affable Mr Kasuri, who has inherited his great father’s booming voice, without the shadow of a doubt, if not his credo, comes to this country twice a year, once when the UN General Assembly session opens and once when it is high summer. Am I remiss in thinking as I write this of the man who had three swimming pools built at the back of his sprawling residence: one for warm water, one for cold water and one for no water at all. “Why,” he was asked, “the third pool?” “There are days when you don’t feel like a swim,” he replied. The jury is out on whether Mr Kasuri’s summer visits are to be put in the no-swim category.

Some years ago, he arrived in Washington and stayed for three weeks, meeting everyone, except (Micky please take note) Charlie’s aunt. Being the dutiful reporter that I am, I wrote in a dispatch listing the names of some of the 74 figures in the administration, Congress, academia and the media, Mr Kashui had met. Since I never ever get called by anyone in government, I was thrilled when the phone rang one morning and who should be on the line, but the Foreign Office operator in person. After having ascertained my number three times, which was a tad unnecessary since that was the number he was calling me on, and having instructed me to stay on the line “though hell may bar the way”, and stand by for the Foreign Minister, he was as good as his word taking no more than ten minutes to deliver on his promise. Being quite sure that I had got something horrendously wrong in my published report, I was relieved to know that I had only got a number wrong. The foreign minister had met not 74 but 76 men and women of import in Washington. When I asked if a contradiction should be necessary, he graciously replied that it wasn’t really, but I might throw it in somewhere, sometime, which, if memory has not deserted me entirely, I did.

It is always of course good to have Mr Kasuri visiting because he is such a nice and pleasant gentleman. The ambassador, Gen. Mahmud Ali Durrani, who is known for being a straight shooter, arranged a semi-bara khana for the minister at the chancery, which it is nice to visit, when one does, despite the fact that its air-conditioning unit in the main hall has never worked. Perhaps it is run by WAPDA and we haven’t been told. In fact so hot it became at one point — Washington, we should remember, is located on what was once a mosquito-infested swamp — that I saw a sight I never ever dreamt I would see in all my living days. The foreign minister, gracing the head table, actually took off his jacket, though not his waistcoat. They say if you hang around long enough, you will see everything; so who knows, there may come a day when he will caste aside not only his jacket but his waistcoat as well — and in public. I am sure he takes both off at home at some point and I am equally sure that rumours that he sleeps in his immaculately cut three-piece suits are just rumours.

Mr Kasuri’s news conference a couple of days later, I have already reported in this newspaper. What I have not reported is that after the news conference ended and the hacks had no more questions to ask, I raised my hand. My question, I submitted, was not related to the minister’s Washington visit but to something that had been on my mind for some time. “Had his eminent father, the great Mian Mahmud Ali Kasuri, been alive today, would he have been where the his son is or would he be on the streets of Pakistan marching with the lawyers?” Mr Kasuri said he was glad I had asked him that question and, what was more, he was going to answer it. He said he would not stay in this government for a minute longer the moment he felt it was not good for Pakistan. Gen. Musharraf, he said, had done a lot of good and while there had been mistakes, as there always are, Pakistan was on the right road. He said he had always spoken his mind out and given his honest and frank opinion, unmindful of how it might be received. He had given it to the president one to one. He had given it in front of his close aides and he had done so in the presence of a dozen people. But he had never held back what he in all honesty believed.

It would have been indelicate to ask what opinion he offered to the president on the judicial crisis. Not all questions should be asked, nor should one expect that all that are asked will be answered. And then there are questions that should never be asked. I wondered later if what I had asked fell in the last category.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

Ahmed Faraz has left Pakistan, some say to go into exile once again, something that the poet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s true heir and successor, has denied. It is to Faraz’s great credit that he has chosen to remain a fearless critic of the military regime, while many of our leading literary lights have taken the path of least resistance and keeled over. During the dark days of Zia ul Haq, Faraz lived for six years in exile, mostly in London, with frequent stays in the United States and Canada where he has never wanted for admirers.

He told the BBC in an interview before he left this time that he was not going into exile because he wanted to live in Pakistan and continue his struggle against dictatorship. “I am against dictatorship and military rule. The time has not yet arrived when I should escape from the country out of fear. I will stay home and fight.” Faraz has been actively involved in the movement that has built itself around the ousted Chief Justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry. He has used his influence to urge writers and poets to join the protest. He believes that it is incumbent on intellectuals and writers to stand up and be counted when it comes to the defence of institutions that impart justice to the people.

Last year to our shame, Faraz was unceremoniously relieved of a position he had held for many years as head of the National Book Foundation. A nation that does not respect its artists can respect no one, including itself. I wrote at the time, “Ahmed Faraz is a national treasure and although he does not believe in the succession system, either in politics or in poetry, the fact is that if there is to be a successor to Faiz, it is none other than Faraz. This is not the first time Faraz has been persecuted by the establishment. He was sent home by Maulana Kausar Niazi, a misstep that was soon rectified. Faraz lost his job under the Zia regime and he went into exile. His great poem, Mohasra (The Siege), remains one of the most powerful indictments of military rule. Who else but Faraz could have written, “ Peshavar qatilau tum sipahi nahin,” (You are professional assassins not soldiers). There can be no question that Faraz is also the greatest romantic Urdu poet of our times. Such a man should be placed on a pedestal so high that one should have to crane one’s neck to see him. But what is the reality of Pakistan? Some time in 2004, he and his family were evicted from their house and the family belongings placed on the street. There was a nationwide uproar, and the government had to eat humble pie. This time he has been dismissed from his post on the orders of Shaukat ‘Shortcut’ Aziz, CitiBank’s gift to Pakistan. This crass and tasteless act is all he will be remembered for long after he returns to where he came from.”

Asked once why he had left Pakistan when Zia was in power, he replied that he was in Karachi when an order was served on him, exiling him from the province of Sindh. “I said to myself, ‘What have we come to when a man is exiled from his own land! Today, it is Karachi, tomorrow it will be Peshawar, the day after, Lahore. That is when I decided to leave.’” We have always treated our great writers this way. Beginning with Saadat Hasan Manto, the list is long: Faiz, Jalib, Ustad Daman and, of course, everyone who belonged to the Progressive Writers’ Movement.

Few people know that in 1947 when the uprising in Kashmir against the Maharaja’s rule began, among the volunteers who went in to fight on the side of the Kashmiris was the teenager Ahmed Faraz. He said in a recent conversation that his heart bleeds at the military aggression to which the people of Waziristan and Balochistan have been subjected. He said what we know today as Azad Kashmir was not liberated by the Army but by Waziri tribes who went into the state to fight the Maharaja’s forces. It is a sad comment on this ungrateful nation that there is not even a plaque commemorating the valour of those tribesmen, hundreds of whom lost their lives in the strife-torn state. On the other hand, we now describe them as “raiders.”

Faraz told a BBC interviewer who kept grilling him about returning the Hilal-i-Imtiaz conferred on him, asking why he had kept it for two years, “Do you think it laid eggs in those two years?” He said he felt that he could not keep the award because it was given to him by a military regime, although many people had told him that it was an honour bestowed on him by the people of Pakistan. He said whenever the country has come under Army rule, it has suffered grievously, to the extent of being rent asunder, as in 1971. And why had he not written a poem like Mohasra ? Because he did not want to write the same poem again. “In Pakistan, things do not change and, consequently, the poems I wrote in the past have not become dated,” he replied.

Faraz is as great a wit as he is a poet. There are three or four Faraz stories I would like to narrate to lighten what is a grim piece of writing at a grim time in the sad history of our country. One day Faraz heard loud banging at his front door. He rose hurriedly to open it, only to see four or five bearded men in white skullcaps. “Can you recite the Kalima ?” one asked. “Why, has it changed?” Faraz said. Then there was this trip Faraz took to Karachi. Kishwar Naheed also happened to be in the city and on learning that Faraz was in town, phoned his hotel and a little while later arrived there with two of her women friends. They were hungry and asked for sandwiches. Faraz picked up the phone and called room service, “Please send up some sand; the witches are already here in my room.” And the classic Faraz story occurred when he was asked what difference there is between Pakistan as it was at birth and as it is today. “When Pakistan came into being, the president of the Muslim League was a man named Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Today it is Chaudhry Gujrat Hussain.” And here is a story Faraz told me in Islamabad once: A man is walking through a jungle on a dark night. He hears a rustling sound in the bushes and is paralysed with fear. “Who is it?” he asks in a tremulous voice. “I am an evil spirit,” comes the reply in a dulcet female voice. “Then come and take possession of me,” he answers.

How many people in Oklahoma have heard of Pakistan or General Musharraf, it will take a five-year old no more than five minutes to count. Oklahoma is the Midwest, the true heart of America, and those who live there do not really give much thought or care as to what goes on in areas east of the state. As for the rest of the world, it is not the first thought that comes to them as they get out of bed in the morning.

Therefore, when the daily Oklahoman came out with an editorial on Pakistan this week, saying authoritarian governments have a “limited shelf life and often end badly”, while reminding the United States that it “can’t champion democracy and block its results”, I felt as if a red line had been crossed. New York Times, yes, Los Angeles Times, yes, Washington Post, yes, but when the Oklahoman joins the fray with a cat call of its own, it can only mean our man is in trouble.

To reinforce my point, let me state that the great big event in the state of Oklahoma as I write this is not a change of government in Pakistan or a change in policy in Washington, but the annual BBQ Cook-Off and Juneteenth Festival to be joined by BBQ contestants from all over the state and Texas to compete for the title of ‘Master of the Pit’ with cash awards and trophies for each winning category entry.

Add to that a most preposterous explanation of why people in Pakistan are out in the streets trying desperately to kiss goodbye to the General. It comes in the form of a letter to the Wall Street Journal from American historian Arthur Herman, who has dreamt the theory that people hate Musharraf because he is a Muhajir. I have heard quite a few in my time but seldom have I heard something as outlandish as this. Someone said our public relations people might be at work here. If that be so, I can only suggest to Ambassador Gen. Durrani to fire them all and hire someone who knows which way the cookie is crumbling.

To make it clear where Herman is coming from, let me quote what he wrote last March: “Unlike the French in Algeria, the United States is in Iraq not in order to retain a colony but to help create a free, open and liberal society in a part of the world still mired in autocracy and fanaticism. Will we stay long enough to defeat the jihadists, to engage Iraqis in the process of modern nation-building, and to ease the transition to a free society? Or will we quit before the hard work is done, leaving this vital part of the world to become an al Qaeda sanctuary, bathed in chaos, anarchy, and blood? As the polls suggest, a large constituency at home is waiting to learn the answer to this question, and so is a much larger constituency abroad. But time is running short.” So there you have it. The Bush Doctrine: Democracy through Invasion.

I had a chat with Stephen Cohen, who returned from Pakistan the other day, to gather his impressions of what is going on. Of all the South Asia experts in this town, he is the most astute and knowledgeable. His association with Pakistan dates back to the 1970s and his history of the Pakistan Army some consider a classic study. He once said, “The Pakistan Army cannot run Pakistan, but it won’t let anybody else run it.”

But before he would talk about anything else, he wanted to say how impressed he was with the tremendous reconstruction effort mounted by the Pakistan Army to rebuild and rehabilitate what was so utterly devastated by the earthquake last year. He said unless one flies over those areas, one simply can have no idea of the scale of the calamity. “Mountains moved,” he added. He had great praise for Gen. Nadeem Ahmed who has overseen the massive effort. He called him a “go-to guy”.

Cohen said the destruction caused by the earthquake will be nothing were there to be a nuclear accident, a Pakistani or Indian Chernobyl. “India and Pakistan really have to think about that.” But what about politics? Cohen thinks the time has come for Pakistan and the US to make clear to one another what each can do and what it can’t. The US wants Pakistan to catch every Al Qaeda operative, grab every member of the Taliban, provide access to Dr AQ Khan, normalise relations with India, reform the education system and so on. Pakistan can do some of those things but not others, because they are either too hard or there are other difficulties. “So what is needed is regular dialogue to clearly understand what the areas of agreement are and what the areas of agreement are not.”

And what about Gen. Pervez Musharraf? Cohen feels that he needs to be more compromising than he is. “His natural ally is the Pakistan People’s Party, not the Pakistan Muslim League. The PPP and the Army are naturals.” He found the establishment in Islamabad shaken by the events that followed the chief justice’s removal. The government’s behaviour has been erratic, he felt, and there is a sense of unease that has descended on the country since the Karachi killings. Cohen pointed out that Gen. Musharraf has done some good things, including realigning relations with India and showing flexibility on Kashmir. If he goes, those things could be reversed.

He feels that the Army lacks a long-term strategy. At the same time, the politicians, given their track record, have to show competence. They just can’t say: Give it us and all will be well. The Army does not trust politicians and it lacks patience. But it must not judge everything according to its own yardstick. I asked Cohen what he was most worried about. “Institutions, which have been all but destroyed. That’s what has got to be rebuilt,” he replied.

May I suggest that if my friend Mushahid Hussain’s suggestion about a grand conference of all politicians is accepted by the General — unlikely though that is — Steve Cohen be invited as the lunchtime speaker on the first day because he understands the Pakistan Army and Pakistan’s politics better than all the Aristotles Gen. Musharraf has surrounded himself with.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

Chacha FE Chaudhri, the doyen of press photographers not only in Pakistan, but in this part of the subcontinent as well, is 98 years old. “He is in his nervous nineties,” his son, Cecil Chaudhri, 1965 Pakistan Air Force war hero, said to me as I sat chatting to Chacha, who was sitting upright. “Nineties, yes,” I said, “nervous, no.” Chacha agreed. He also showed me an X-ray of his repaired arm – he fell some months ago – which had so many nails in it that I suggested he consider opening a hardware store.

Till he broke his arm, Chacha was living all by himself in his Jail Road house, refusing to move in with Cecil, who is principal of St Anthony’s, where Chacha once taught. “I am fine where I am and I like things my own way,” Chacha would say. He still hopes to get back to 7/10 Jail Road where he has lived for over 50 years, though his children have other ideas. One trouble with old age is that your bones get brittle. My father, a doctor, used to say, “When you get old, please don’t fall.” Well, easier said than done, but sound advice it remains.

Chacha was taking pictures and having them published long before there was a country called Pakistan. He worked freelance, and a good deal of his work appeared in the Illustrated Weekly of India and the leading dailies of the day. He was the first press photographer proper that Lahore knew and he was much in demand. It was only natural that he was among the first to be offered a job at The Pakistan Times (PT) by Mian Iftikharuddin. Chacha was always on the scene before anyone else, and while other photographers were still on their way to the happening – public meeting, fire, accident, spring flower show, whatever – Chacha would be seen going in the other direction because he had already shot his stuff. He never wasted time. Nor did he suffer those who materialise from nowhere when a press photographer is about to fire his shutter.

I recall one protocol officer based in Lahore who would always walk into the middle of a group that was about to be photographed. I was once at the Lahore airport to cover the arrival of a British minister – the year was 1968 – with Chacha. As he began to focus his camera (autofocus was still many years in the future) to take a group, the protocol officer parked himself right in the middle. Chacha put his camera down on the ground, walked across, grabbed the fellow by the collar and said in Punjabi “ Toon tai aidhar ho.” It was understood that you did not mess with Chacha.

In those days Chacha had a Quickly, which it would be poetic exaggeration to describe as a motorcycle. It was actually a cycle pretending to be a motorcycle, and an extremely precarious thing it was once it got going on the road. I have done many dangerous things in life but none more dangerous than riding in the pillion seat – which really was no seat – with Chacha. That Quickly was famous around the city and well recognised as Chacha’s mount. Chacha was a member of the 77 Club – I wonder if it is still around – and when feeling generous, he would take some of us there for a drink. We all owed money to Chacha and every time we would try to touch him for some more, he would want the earlier sum returned but after delivering himself of a long sermon on the evils of borrowing, he would agree to another small advance, on condition that it be returned in time. He talked tough but he was a soft touch. We knew it and he knew it.

Chacha told me of an exchange he once had with Mian Iftikharuddin in the early years of PT’s publication. It so happened that Chacha had been asked to go to Gujranwala to cover a meeting of Mian Iftikharuddin’s Azad Pakistan Party. Chacha never turned up because, as he told the Progressing Papers Limited (PPL) owner when asked, he had “more important” events to cover “right here in Lahore.” Mian Iftikharuddin, rebuffed in front of several people, said something to Chacha that Chacha, being a Jat, was not prepared to take from anyone, even from the man who owned the newspaper he was employed by. So Chacha said to Mian Iftikharuddin, “ O Mian, mein teri naukri nahin karni.” (O Mian, I am not going to work for you.) And he walked out and went home. Early next morning, Chacha’s wife woke him up. Out there on the street was Mian Iftikharuddin in his car, come to apologise and take Chacha back. When Chacha told him to get lost because he was not going to work for him anymore, Mian Iftikharuddin retorted, “ Ley phair Chaudhri mein vi dekhna vaan too keenvain chudd kai jaana vain.” (Alright Chaudhri, I shall see how you are going to quit.) Chacha would not relent, but finally melted when his wife urged him not to send Mian back “empty-handed.” Such were newspaper owners once and such were some of those who worked for them. The Pakistan Times was a fraternity, and there was a spirit of comradeship that made that newspaper one of Asia’s best, which was why it was killed when the first martial law descended on Pakistan.

Chacha, two short of his hundredth birthday, retains his razor-sharp memory. I am sure he even remembers the twenty or thirty rupees I owe him, though I must say he did not ask for it last time we met. However, one should not celebrate too early; his memory for such things is elephantine. Every newspaper in Lahore sends Chacha a free copy, and his morning is spent reading them all. He also keeps a tab on old PPL friends and always has news. Once I recall Chacha saying in exasperation after yet another one of us asked him for a “little something” using the liquour permit he had been issued as a “good Christian”: “Someone get me out of here. I am getting a bit tired of these Muslims.” But let me add that he never let a “thirsty” Muslim stay thirsty.

The government of Pakistan has decorated Chacha twice, but what he has been given is far less than what he deserves. Now that it is more of a distinction not to be pinned with a Pride of Performance medal, the one Chacha was given some years ago is inconsistent with his contribution to photo journalism and his service to the profession. Chacha deserves a much higher honour and I am prepared to let Gen. Musharraf get away with a few if he pins on Chacha the honour that he ought to have. Munoo Bhai once said to me that one reason the State of Pakistan had failed to do right by Chacha was because people such as the two of us were raising hosannas from his corner. It will be nice to have Munoo Bhai proved wrong. In the meantime, dear Chacha, watch that one outside the off stump and don’t fall trying to cut it away.

The crisis in Pakistan remains the prime concern and the sole topic of conversation in the community of Pakistani-Americans here. One man said the other day, “Munir Niazi had it right.” Then he recited that famous verse of his where the poet wonders if this city, which is his metaphor for Pakistan, is under some strange spell, considering that the quicker the steps it takes, the slower is its progress. Another said, “What kind of a country are we! Since I was a boy, this is all I have seen. Trouble, trouble and when you think it is over and done with, well, more trouble.”

The good years that Pakistanis remember can be counted on the fingers of one hand. One crisis follows another. One bad government makes way for something even worse. One strongman promises the nation the moon, is pushed aside and before one can say “Charlie’s aunt”, another strongman with medals on his chest, all won in peace time, takes his place, wearing the same paid of jackboots. Faiz died hoping that the day of the common man was at hand. We continue to recite his song of freedom, dreaming of the day when thrones will be flung in the air and crowns will be rolled on the ground.

Here in Washington, I have yet to run into anyone from the think tanks or the administration-linked community with an interest in Pakistan and much knowledge of it, based on both scholarship and experience, who would place his or her money on the longevity of the regime in Islamabad. Ask a question about Gen. Musharraf and you are peppered with phrases such as “meltdown”, “last throes” and even “last hurrah”. A man who looked so formidable just a couple of months ago no longer appears formidable.

“It is a question of time, and time is running out fast,” one person whose judgment in the past has turned out to be right, said to me the other day. His answer to the question “how fast?” was, “Hard to say, but sooner, not latter.”

Another friend, who is an astrologer, says the period of Gen Musharraf’s highest vulnerability began on June 5 and will end on June 20. “But he is not out of the woods till September, assuming nothing untoward happens between now and then.” Astrologers, tealeaf readers and spirit masters no rational person should trust, but one has to admit that sometimes they do manage to hit the bull’s eye.

But back at the farm, as reported by various newspapers, Gen Musharraf in his meeting with the leading lights of his party, the Pakistan Muslim League-Q — popularly associated with a certain utensil to be found at given facilities it will be indelicate to identify — plus his several dozen ministers, most of whom he would fail to recognise even in the noonday sun, harangued them for having left him in the lurch and drawn in their horns and slunk into their holes when he needed them most.

According to one report, “Musharraf deplored that out of, what he termed 1,000 provincial/federal ministers, parliamentary secretaries and chairmen standing committees, he could not see even ten of them speaking in his defence. ‘I see the party nowhere. You people are not mobilised,’” he declared. He told them to get out there and defend the government and not leave it to him to fight every fight by himself.

Gen Musharraf being a soldier is a student of military history, but not history, even recent history, and even our own history, otherwise he would not have expressed surprise at his No Show party in whose support he has held more meetings than the Bara Khanas he has attended in his forty-three years of military service. What he told those he thought were his loyal party men was more or less what the Field Marshal said of his party in 1968-69. The day his government was removed by Gen Yahya Khan, there was not even a two-anna member of his party to be seen anywhere in Pakistan, from Cox’s Bazar to Torkham. The day Yahya took over, Ustad Daman the great wrote: Gya Ayub te aaya Yahya/Saray mil-ke gao mahiyya/Jee vay meria dhol sipahiya.

Like a bad poet, I do not want to quote my own verses, but for once that indulgence I seek. A few days after the fall of the Field Marshal, I wrote a column in The Pakistan Times headlined ‘PML Oh! PML’ It began, “Recently some public-spirited citizens organised a search party for the purpose of verifying the present whereabouts of the Pakistan Muslim League. In the biggest operation of its kind, the searchers combed hills, valleys and plains for some trace of the Party that was. They found nothing. It was like looking for El Dorado. There was absolutely no clue. The search party even went to Swat, only to come back a few days later with smuggled nylon socks and Japanese transistors, but no PML.

“And while the whole nation is going berserk with worry as to the PML’s welfare and present whereabouts, I write these lines: ‘Dear PML, If you read this, please come back. No one will scold you. Even your little piggy bank of Rs 3 crore is safe with the nation. You can come back and take it and then with this money in your pocket, you can buy as many lollypops as you like.’ “

Well, as they say: The more things change, the more they remain the same.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

I think I first met Tahir Mirza in 1962. He must still have been working at the Civil and Military Gazette (Civil), but he could well have been at the Pakistan Times. I am not really sure. The Civil closed in 1963 and everyone working there found himself on the street. Naseer A Sheikh, the textile magnate who had bought it for its property value, had the temerity to boast that he had saved both the newspaper’s files and the plate nailed to a wall that said, “Rudyard Kipling worked here,” followed by the years when he did. Forty-four years later, nothing is known either of the files or the plate.

I met Tahir through my friend Shujaullah, who, having tired of teaching English at Cadet College, Hassan Abadal for a few years had found work as a sub at the Civil . Zuhair Siddiqi was also at the Civil as was the eccentric cartoonist, Qazi, who would place the next day’s cartoon in original on an easel on the roadside for one and all to see. Those who used to roam the Mall, a truly thandi sarak in those days, will remember Qazi’s “Yankee throws feast” cartoon that got the CID and other unpleasant outfits after him.

The first thing that struck me about Tahir was his looks. They were those of a movie star. What also struck me was his gentleness. In all the years I knew him, I never saw him angry or upset, nor did I ever hear him raise his voice. He had the temperament of a saint. I also never heard him say a harsh thing about anyone, though there were some who deserved every four-letter word you could lob at them.

When I met Tahir, I was a journalist trapped in the body of an income tax officer who had found himself doing work for which he had neither talent nor interest. It took me a few years to get free of the government of Pakistan and become a reporter. One of the great joys of finally being in a newspaper – and the Pakistan Times at that – was working with Tahir Mirza, who was one of the assistant editors and editorial writers. He also did the letters page on which I had been quite active, even from my hometown, Sialkot. The only correspondent who wrote more letters to the Pakistan Times than me was the legendary Hakim Syed Irshad from Gujrat. He had written so many letters to the Pakistan Times that on the demand of his fans, he published them in a book. I recall crossing swords with him once or twice but Hakim was the champ of the letters column.

I used to live with my brother in the Lahore cantonment because his battalion, of which he was 2-I-C, or second-in-command in Fauji parlance, was stationed there. We used to have great parties there – Eduljee and Sons being within hailing distance of the place. Tahir was one of the regulars. At one of the parties I remember at the cantonment place – just a set of rooms, which still stand – we were served cocktails complete with cherries in delicate silver-stemmed mess glassware. Raja Tajammul Hussain, who as Commissioner North Zone was the income tax king of an area stretching from Bahawalpur to Peshawar, said after having passed on a dozen or so cherries to a friend he had brought, “So that was dessert, now where is the hooch?” Eduljee, as always, obliged and on credit too. God bless those Parsi gentlemen!

Television came to Pakistan in 1964 with three or four pilot stations set up by the Japanese company, NEC. The man who brought television to the country was none other than Altaf Gauhar for which he has been given no credit. Aslam Azhar was the head of the Lahore station, and he used to live in Gulberg at the intersection of the Gulberg and Zafar Ali Roads. There would be late evening gatherings at Aslam’s place where we would sit on the open rooftop enjoying the evening breeze and that ice cold elixir. Nasreen, Aslam’s wife, was Tahir’s first cousin, hence our link to Aslam.

At the Pakistan Times, we would sometimes go to Tahir’s house in Samnabad where we would always be greeted by his father, Prof Waheed Mirza, acknowledged as the foremost authority on Amir Khusro. Tahir’s cousin, Commander MH Askari, also lived in Lahore, and even after he went to Ghotki to work for Esso Fertilizers, Lahore remained his base. He was, of course, the son of Mirza Muhammad Saeed, who taught Prof Ahmed Shah Bokhari, whose first and only book, the classic Patras ke Muzameen, is dedicated to him with these words, “I dedicate this book to my respected teacher Professor Mirza Muhammad Saeed sahib Delhavi who gave this book a look-over and rid it of several mistakes. I am proud of the fact that to this day I continue to receive his guidance.” So that was the stock Tahir Mirza came from, a family of learned and civilised men of high culture and gentlemanliness.

There was much excitement among us when Tahir married Parveen who came all the way from Saharanpur and remained his close friend and companion the rest of his days. She also had unlimited patience when it came to such of Tahir’s “ awara-gard ” friends as us.

At the Pakistan Times, our assistant editors besides Tahir were: AT Chaudhri, IA Rehman, Jamil Ahmed, Ahmed Azeez Zia and the debonair Muhammad Idrees. And our editor was the unflappable Khawaja M Asaf, who with a few deft touches could turn a pedestrian piece of writing into something quite wonderful. There was no better sub in the business.

I left Pakistan in the early 70s but was reunited with Tahir when he came to work for the BBC Urdu service in 1978. I left London for Vienna and Tahir went to the Gulf to work for one of the English dailies. Then he returned to Lahore where Mazhar Ali Khan was about to launch the weekly Viewpoint. Faiz Ahmed Faiz, learning of Tahir’s presence, took him aside and said, “Tahir akhbar naveesi karni hai ke naukri karni hai?” “ Ji, Faiz sahib akhbar naveesi,” he replied. “ Tau phir Mazhar ke saath aa jao.” And that was where Tahir worked for many years on a salary that was hardly sufficient to keep body and soul together. Old Progressive Papers Ltd hands, IA Rehman and Shafqat Tanvir Mirza had also joined Mazhar Ali Khan’s team as had Comrade Hussain Naqi.

And never closer was our association than when Tahir came to Washington as a Dawn correspondent from 2000 to 2003. We spent time together, went to press conferences and briefings and shared everything. If I missed something I would ask Tahir if he could slip me what he had filed. Tahir left to become editor of Dawn, whose Lahore edition he had earlier pioneered and consolidated. He is gone but anyone who ever came across him, even briefly, can only have remembered him with respect and affection. I only hope that what they serve in heaven is the real McCoy.

I am sure I was not the only one to raise an eyebrow when I read our affable ambassador here, Mahmud Ali Durrani, describe India in an interview published by USA Today as a “role model” for Pakistan. Since he is the only Pakistani ambassador I know who actually answers emails and returns phone calls (capital offences in the Pakistan foreign office if not the entire government of Pakistan), I asked him if he had been correctly quoted.

He replied, “As you can see the interview is abridged, they have said that. They have made a number of mistakes. This is totally out of context. I had said that Pakistan will eventually beat India in its democratic credentials as well as economic development. They did not mention that. They also missed some other important stuff. You can however fault me in saying that Indian democracy has fared better than ours.”

While the rest of us can shoot our mouths off whenever we wish — and we do that all the time — ambassadors have to measure every word that leaves their lips.

My friend Hayat Mehdi, one of the most brilliant of our diplomats, now living in Vienna, once said to me that if you see an old gentleman slowly making his way to the UN General Assembly rostrum, arriving there, polishing his glasses with his handkerchief and then pulling out a piece of paper from his pocket to read out just two lines, don’t think it is because he does not know English. He does that because he has been authorised to speak only those two lines and no more. He wants to get it right.”

So that is my unsolicited advice to Ambassador Durrani. I would also like to tell him what Zulfikar Ali Bhutto once said to one of his ministers who had made some off comments to the press, “Remember, you don’t have to answer every question asked of you.”

Talking of ambassadors, I have seen and known a few in my time but seldom have I run into one with a more clear, honest and incisive mind than former US diplomat Chas Freeman, who for ten years has led the only American think tank in Washington that looks at the Middle East with a pair of glasses not manufactured in Tel Aviv. Freeman was US ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War and served on all continents except Latin America and Australia. He was the principal American interpreter during President Nixon’s historic 1972 visit to China, Gen. Yahya Khan’s only good deed. So if you run into him, don’t try any Chinese on him, or even Arabic. He knows them all.

The other day, he spoke to James Zogby, an Arab-American who has tried for years to bring some balance to America’s one-sided Middle East policy. Asked what he thought of President Bush recently getting an Iraq resolution through Congress on the lines he desired, Freeman replied that he wasn’t surprised at all. The issue had been framed in terms of supporting the troops. “Nobody ever asks, ‘Support the troops to do what? What mission are the troops there to accomplish? And when would we know they had accomplished it?’ When you phrase the matter that way — Support the Troops — everyone has to line behind it. So it is a clever way of evading the basic question, which is who are we fighting? What is it all about? Is there any hope of bringing off anything that remotely resembles success?”

Freeman said there is no military solution in Iraq. The military understand that and have understood that from the beginning. It is now pretty clear that the Iraqis are not capable of crafting a political solution. They see their politics as a zero-sum game. It is a fatal game for a lot of them. America, he said, does not have a strategy in Iraq and “Support the Troops” is not a strategy; it is a political imperative. There is going to be no progress in Iraq.

He said Iraq is unlikely to break up because none of its neighbours wants it to, because if it does, the consequences for them as nation states would be pretty dire. He added, “We have given Iran an enormous amount of influence in Iraq and destroyed Iraq as a balance to Iran in the region.” By trying to isolate Hamas, the US has left the elected government in Palestine no alternative but to turn to Iran. Iran now has an opening to Sunni-Arab movements and a foothold in Palestine, which is likely to continue.

Freeman, when told of Al Gore’s characterisation of the Iraq war as the “worst blunder” in America’s recent history, said, “I don’t think it is the worst blunder in recent history. I think it is the worst blunder in our entire history … This has basically subjected our alliances to something close to destruction. It’s alienated our friends. It’s cost us our international prestige and our following. We can’t lead any more. In a very ironic way, it has devalued the deterrent values of our military power because it’s shown the limits of military power. So I think the net effect of this is really quite catastrophic.”

Freeman said the US has strayed from its own traditions and violated its constitutional norms. At home, the rule of law has been abandoned to some extent. And the US is no longer respected abroad. “We don’t talk about the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions. We engage in kidnappings and torture, apparently, and lock people up in Guantanamo with no charge.” Then he added, “We need to make it clear that we don’t believe that we are exempt from the rules that we seek to apply to others. We will live by them too.” He said leadership is not about military power. “It is about the power to persuade.” The weak of the world have no confidence in law and so they have to get a gun.

And to a question about Israel, Freeman said Iran is not crazy that it should nuke Israel and risk obliteration because Israel has hundreds of nuclear bombs. Iran, he explained, wants nuclear weapons because “we and Israel keep threatening to attack it”. Insecurity is not Israel’s problem, he said. “Their problem is they don’t know how to make peace”. They don’t want to make peace with the Palestinians: they want to pacify them.

There was a time when we too had some like Chas Freeman in our foreign service. But that was a long time ago.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

Kishwar Naheed has never been known for keeping anything back, nor for being reticent when she felt like speaking her mind. The book she has just published is not her first foray into biographical writing. Some years ago, she wrote one in the form of a letter to a daughter she never had. It was in a way the story of her own life and the life her unborn daughter would have had to live through had she come into this world. As was to be expected, she left many of those she mentioned hopping mad. In a world and society that is run and dominated by alpha males, she has held her own, much like her friend Madam Nur Jehan. These two women were feminists before feminism became fashionable.

Nur Jehan once told me that she had become Nur Jehan because of her own hard work. Kishwar Naheed can say the same and no one will disagree. A rebel in a household dominated by old-fashioned values for which the Urdu speaking gentry from old Uttar Pradesh was known, she decided as a teenager that she was going to live life in a different way. She shocked her conservative family by leaving home to marry Yusuf Kamran, whom she had met as a student and with whom she had fallen in love. They married without the permission of their parents and were chased around town by their enraged elders. At one point, Yusuf almost gave way under family pressure and was ready to return to the fold, but Kishwar was not. She had decided not to succumb to social and family pressures, which actually amount to moral blackmail. The young couple, both poets, stayed together and although like most Pakistani men, Yusuf considered his roving eye a male prerogative, Kishwar stayed firmly anchored to her home, her job and her two children, both boys, whom she raised almost single-handedly.

Her book Shanasayyaan Ruswaayaan – I poorly and inadequately translate as “friendships and scandals” – is dedicated to two of her women friends: Sheen Farrukh and Shehnaz Imam, which brings me as good an opportunity as any to recount a priceless Ahmed Faraz story reported by Kishwar in her book. Once in Karachi, which Faraz was visiting, Kishwar, Sheen Farrukh and Firdaus Haider went to see him at his hotel. He asked them to come up. “Would you like to eat something?” he asked. “Sandwiches,” they replied. Faraz picked up the phone and said to room service, “Please send up some sand; the witches are already here in my room.” And two more Faraz one-liners, reported by Kishwar. The late poet Salim Shahid had just three of his front teeth left. As he entered a room, Faraz shouted, “Here comes the man with three wickets.” In China with Masood Ashar, when told that while the hosts had served tea, it had come without cheeni or sugar, Faraz suggested, “There are so many Cheenis walking around. Pick one up and put him in your cup.”

Kishwar’s book is as much about her as about her friendships with some of the most famous and eminent poets, writers and artists of our time. I do not know of anyone who has known so many of them with such intimacy, a tribute to the openness and warmth that are Kishwar’s hallmarks. While she has praised them profusely and often lyrically – had she not been a poet, she would have been a novelist – she has not hesitated to identify feet of clay, when she spotted them. About Sufi Ghulam Mustafa Tabussum, she writes, “Sufi Sahib had had the singular honour of spending time in Iqbal’s company. So confident was Iqbal about Sufi Sahib’s knowledge and understanding of Persian that sometimes he would ask him to verify if the use of a certain Persian word or expression was in order.” Once when Faiz, his student at Government College, insisted that Caucasus was part of the Soviet Union, Sufi Sahib said, “You have given even the Caucasus to Russia.” He loved the company of friends, and his doors were always open to them, as was his heart and his immense scholarship that he wore with such ease.

It was Faiz who got Kishwar her first job. She had just married and the young couple was almost on the street, ostracised by their families and handicapped by their equally poor friends. It was Faiz who asked Mir Naseem Mahmood to hire Kishwar as Assistant Editor of a village aid journal called Daiyhaat Sudhhar. Faiz was a person of few words. Once as Kishwar kept badgering him about not saying no to anyone who invited him to visit his home, Faiz kept smiling and smoking away. Finally, as Kishwar kept going on and on, Faiz said, “OK, now keep quiet.” Nur Jehan, Kishwar recalls, once dropped into Sufi Sahib’s Samnabad home, saying she wanted to meet his mother. Sitting next to the old lady in the kitchen, Nur Jehan said, “Amma, wouldn’t it be great if I were to marry Sufi Sahib? He would spoil me and feed me with his own hand and at bedtime, he would say to me, ‘Now go and sleep in your own room.’” After her heart bypass, Nur Jehan threw a big party in Lahore where she asked Munir Ahmed Sheikh, who had also undergone the same procedure, what precautions the doctors had suggested. “Never to get into a tight embrace with anyone,” he replied. “Why meet anyone in that case?” Madam asked.

Here is Kishwar Naheed on Iftikhar Arif, “When Iftikhar was in London, his stories were most entertaining. For example, he would say that on the Underground with him was TS Eliot’s niece and the day before that, Churchill’s. When he returned to Pakistan, his job became his overwhelming passion. And of late he has joined the Society of Presiders,” that being the name given to those who spend much of their time presiding over any function to which they are invited.

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