In the last thirty years the number of people in Pakistan who pray regularly and attend collective prayers in mosques has risen three-fold. So have the number of mosques, madressas, Islamic evangelical organizations and religious programming on TV - and yet the rates of rape (including child rape), drug addiction, public humiliation of women has steadily maintained an upward trend 

We love myths. We love them because it makes us feel good. It makes us feel good because they are largely untrue.

But we as a nation and polity are not the only ones using certain myths to balm our tainted prides, or worse, inflate shrunken egos.

Nevertheless, we have turned the act of using myths to construct whole histories and laws, mainly those to do with religion and the west.

This hasn’t made us better people, and neither has this act inspired young generations to help Pakistan become a vibrant contemporary player in international politics, economics and cultural pursuits.

Instead, this act (or art?) of using fancy myths to deflect certain bitter truths has been jaundicing our world view in which we are constantly measuring the world in a cringing ‘us and them’ manner, isolating ourselves in the process and then having the audacity to term this isolation and xenophobia as ‘Sovereignty.’

If one was to compile the many religious, social and political myths that we use to build our understanding of everyday life, the numbers would be startling. So due to space constrains here, I have chosen three myths that one most often comes across in Pakistan.

The first comes in the form of a sweeping declaration: ‘Doh char ko phansi laga do sub theek ho jaoiy ga; ya aik Imam Khomeini aa jai tu sab theek ho jain gey …’

(Hang a few people [mainly politicians], and everything will be okay; or if Pakistan too can get an Imaam Khomeni, things will get okay …).

Such statements first began doing the rounds soon after the 1979 Iranian (Islamic) Revolution. For some odd reason in those days one heard this more from taxi drivers.

However, it soon became common among students belonging to various right-wing student organizations and eventually among the ‘petty bourgeoisie’ traders and shop-keepers.

I remember the first time I heard such a statement came from a taxi driver in 1981 when I was still at school. He belonged to the shia Muslim sect and began his tirade by first praising the Iranian revolution and then switching to Pakistan by suggesting that we too required a man like Khomeini.

General Ziaul Haq’s dictatorship was in its fourth year and he had been introducing harsh laws that his clergy brigade termed as ‘Islamic.’

So a fourteen-year-old me asked the taxi driver why would he want a violent Islamic revolution in a country where an all-powerful military man was already imposing strict ‘Islamic laws?’

The taxi driver did not answer my question. In hindsight it is now somewhat clear that the kind of declaration that he made is usually born from an obvious frustration felt among the poor and the working classes in a country sullied by rampant corruption, glaring economic inequalities, a stagnant judicial system, sexual repression and a retarded intellectual discourse on patriotism, religion and morals.

However, by the time this declaration became a mainstay of the petty-bourgeoisie shopkeepers and traders, the frustration in this class in this context had more to do with the petty-bourgeoisie’s apprehensions against a political process (mainly democracy) that was feared to, in one way or the other, sideline the trader classes who were not an integral part of this process – at least not till the rise of Nawaz Sharif and his PML-N in the early 1990s.

Though the hang ‘em all myth among certain sections of the poor and the working classes in Pakistan has a frustrated ring of nihilism to it in which a volatile messiah would arrive to wipe out everyone who isn’t a taxi driver or a factory worker, the truth is, those giving the example of the Iranian revolution failed to notice just how futile it was in its attempt to ‘cleanse the Iranian society.’

One (pro-West and secular) autocracy (the Shah) was simply replaced by another autocratic set-up, but this time based on religion, even though elections to a new national assembly were regularly held but in which only those approved by the revolution’s hierarchy were allowed to run.

Secondly, apart from the fact that millions of young Iranians were rolled out to fight a useless war (and die) against Saddam Husain’s Iraq, millions more (from all classes) were executed by the Khomeini set-up between 1981 and 1988.

Thousands of Iranians were hanged/shot. What did that achieve? Well, apart from safeguarding Iran’s new ‘revolutionary’ aristocracy and elite, it did not make Iran a more equitable, just and prosperous society. And neither did it make it more pious as such.

In the mid 1980s when certain foreign journalists criticised Iran’s Islamic regime for failing to arrest the country’s economic downslide, Khomeini replied that the revolution was not made to lower the prices of vegetables.

So there.

Also, the poor and the working class Pakistanis who’d been dreaming of a Khomeini also did not notice the fact that Khomeini’s Islamic revolution was mainly financed and supported by Iran’s urban lower-middle-classes or the petty-bourgeoisie. The Iranian working classes on the other hand were mainly being supported and represented by various left-wing organizations.

Thus, it made more sense for Pakistan’s petty-bourgeoisie to fantasise about a Sunni version of a Khomeini, rather than the working-classes.

Myths about how large scale hangings/executions can cleanse societies are generated by either frustration or simple intellectual laziness. And such myths are more rampant in societies who are stuck on creating scapegoats to blame their economic, political and social misfortunes on the ‘others.’

It’s like a mentally disturbed man who finds things like psycho-analysis too straining and embarrassing and instead goes for an instant fix by desiring shock therapy, not knowing that this therapy also has the capability to turn him into a vegetable.

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There is nothing in the Muslim holy book the Qu’ran that suggests the above. Yet, one can find a number of holy men saying this. The problem I think lies in the scholarly institution of what are called the ‘hadith’ (reported traditions and saying of the Islamic Prophet).

‘Muslim modernists’ have gone to great lengths in either advocating a more critical assessment of the hadith or some have even completely rejected the idea of using the hadith in formalizing laws and social mores.

They rightly suggest that not only were the hadith compiled and documented more that 150/200 years after the arrival of Islam, many of them were concocted to propagate the religious legitimacy and stands of various monarchs associated with the Abbasid Caliphate.

So, it can be said that when a cleric suggests that God made women to satisfy the needs of men, the cleric is either relating his own desire or simply using a controversial hadith, which he then presents not as a report (that is likely to have been concocted) but as something that is divine.

Many Muslim feminists correctly point out that such myths are inspired by the works of ancient Muslim jurists who used the hadith (more than the Qu’ran or human reason) to formulize ‘Islamic laws’. Also, almost all of these jurists were men. Men steeped in the patriarchal traditions of Arabia that predated the arrival of Islam.

One of these traditions was to treat women as an object that was to be controlled because they were supposedly intellectually weaker than men.

A woman even attempting to equal a man’s intellectuality and physicality in society or the work place was to be feared and ‘corrected.’ She was to be eliminated as an active economic, cultural, political and social player and partner and relegated to the four walls of her house only allowed to bear the men’s children and satisfy their emotional and physical needs.

She is also seen as a tempter and wrecker of men’s fragile egos and sensibilities and as many clerics and pious Muslim men would remind you (through a hadith and not the Qu’ran) that is why the Prophet alluded that ‘there would be more women in hell than men.’

Yes, no rest for the wicked.

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Finally I come to the third most common myth spouted so sweepingly in our land of the pure: ‘The West lacks morals.’

Question is if western countries and peoples really do lack morals, why aren’t they a mass of chaos like most African and Asian countries? Why have they gone on to be become economic and military powerhouses where, ironically, people from poorer (but more moral-conscious) want to stay, work and play?

Or are those who claim that the west lacks morals suggesting that only immoral nations can achieve modern economic, political and cultural progress?

If so, then why would God help these immoral people achieve such prosperity and progress?

Of course, such questions are conveniently ignored by a lot of ‘anti-immoral-west’ Pakistanis. Or, their answers are usually laced with superficial and make-belief hogwash that smacks of sour grapes.

They couple material progress with moralistic fall-outs. That the west has achieved economic and political progress at the expense of failing morals.

Yet, countries like Pakistan whose state, governments and religious lobbies have been tightening the noose of imposed moral-ism in the public and political sphere for the last many decades, have had to face some of the most obscene crimes committed by man against man.

In the last thirty years the number of people in Pakistan who pray regularly and attend collective prayers in mosques has risen three-fold. So have the number of mosques, madressas, Islamic evangelical organizations and religious programming on TV - and yet the rates of rape (including child rape), drug addiction, public humiliation of women (cases of women being paraded naked in the streets for revenge) and, of course, the fact that Pakistanis are at the top in the list of people who search for sex sites on Google, has steadily maintained an upward trend.

Our public face and claim of being a moralistic and pious people has actually worsened us as a nation of Musalmans. We are a nation of Muslims who fail to see our own glaring moral failings but are quick to point an accusing finger at the moral state of the west.

If one asks such accusers as to why the growth of religiosity in Pakistan hasn’t made it a better place, one is sure to face two, rather farcical, answers.

One of them has something to do with Pakistanis not following ‘true/real Islam,’ and the other is that Pakistani society is being culturally invaded and corrupted by the west (and India).

But, and especially regarding the Muslims of the subcontinent, one is bound to face numerous interpretations of ‘true Islam.’ Sunnis have their own, shias their own, and then there are further Sunni sub-sects (Deobandi, Barelvi, Ahl-e-Hadees, Ahl-e-Qu’ran, the political-Islamists, ‘Muslim modernists,’ et al), each one of them believes it knows the religion’s true dictates and essence and the rest are ‘misguided,’ if not downright heretical (Shia, Ahmadiyya, Islamili).

There can never be a consensus between these sects especially on the question of ‘true Islam.’ This is not a problem (but is explained as one). Instead of being seen as this being just a part of the ethnic, religious and sectarian diversity that Pakistan boasts, it is seen as an embarrassing failure of Islam being an entirely heterogeneous, singular monolithic force.

Nevertheless, a weakness or a simple accommodative matter of diversity, who is to decide what is that ‘true Islam’ that would rid Pakistan from the cluttered blob of moralistic hypocrisy and chaos it has become?

Tough question, so why not find an easy way out and blame the West. It is not our sectarian diversity that is making our state and governments fail to wrap Pakistan into a singular state and clergy approved Islamic whole, it is the West’s immorality that it is exporting to Pakistan that is making us sound and behave in such a divided and immoral manner.

This is a case of intellectual idiocy and collective defeatism that is glorified as being some brilliant insight. In truth by offering such devious explanations we are just cushioning our economic, political and social failures and falls with the help of some delusional consolations suggesting that we are at least better than the West in terms of moral

Nadeem F. Paracha is a cultural critic and senior columnist.                                                                                                           .