Daily Times

Spinning a good yarn is important. Story telling is increasingly being dismissed as futile. It is especially tragic given the fact that we have a strong history of storytelling. The Pakhtun culture, for instance, was largely an oral one with a rich tradition of storytelling. The Qissa Khwani Bazaar, in fact, owes its name to this tradition. Story telling is different from lying, of course. Looking around me, it seems as if paranoia and the lying quotient have increased. We like to distort facts, build ugly structures of lies, cement them with paranoia and bigotry and then consume it as our truth. Story telling is, of course, different. It reveals itself as fiction drawing upon every day realities and contributes to a generation’s narrative. Our formal and informal social media are all guilty of not telling these often and loudly enough.

The evolution of the South Asian fiction writer in English initially was a welcome one as at long last some stories could be told to an increasingly yuppie English speaking youth, which was divorced from its surroundings. While one may critique some of the stories told, for instance Fatima Bhutto’s In The Shadow Of The Crescent Moon, which has couples kissing on the streets of MirAli, what is important is that her version of the story has been told. During the past decade, we have lost more than 50,000 Pakistanis. Stories of the families of these 50,000 need to be told to our children. I doubt they will understand the past decade, for who can make any sense of madness? However, it is important that our children at least listen to what happened in the form of testimonials and narrations.

A group recently did just that: it interviewed mothers of victims and perpetrators of violence. Mothers run family affairs and act as the nucleus in their families. It is also true that mothers are able to detect the early warning signs of radicalisation in their children. However, it is still debatable whether mothers have been able to successfully counter violent extremism within their families. A number of efforts are being made on the international level to include families, particularly mothers, in developing counter-violent extremist narratives. The appearance of Aicha el-Wafi, the mother of Zacarius Moussaoui, a convict in the 9/11 attacks, and Phyllis Rodriguez, the mother of a victim of the 9/11 attacks in a TED talk was a leading example where the mother of a convict and the mother of a victim became powerful symbols of forgiveness and dialogue.

It is also a fact that in Pakistan young boys have joined the ranks of militants after being motivated by their mothers or other family members. In Swat, it is a documented fact that mothers not only donated their jewellery to fund the so-called jihad that the Taliban were waging, but also sent their sons to join their ranks. The main reason behind such a change in behaviour was the fiery speeches delivered by Maulana Fazlullah, famously known as Mullah Radio. He purposely targeted women because they made up the majority of listeners, as men mostly left their homes for work. Maulana Fazlullah incidentally also took up arms after being encouraged to seek vengeance by his mother.

The interviewees were mothers who had lost their children to violence but there were also mothers who had lost their sons due to their involvement with violent outfits. Both groups of mothers were asked different sets of questions and their answers provided conclusive evidence of the lives their children lived. Mothers of victims have had messages for those who were behind their loss and all of them reacted differently when asked about the kind of treatment they expect for the perpetrators. Similarly, mothers of perpetrators have had different responses to the questions asked. However, the one thing in common between the responses of the two groups was that both of them were grieving the loss of their loved ones.

The mothers of perpetrators of violence interviewed have had their reasons for supporting their children. They were either unaware of the activities of their children or were heavily manipulated in the name of religion, leading to a belief that their children were actually following the directives of religion by carrying out such activities. Interestingly, some of them firmly believed that, despite the allegations against their children, they were innocent and had been targeted by the state. For instance, the mother of a perpetrator named Shaukat, who is serving time in jail, had inversely posed a query, “Has peace prevailed in Pakistan after Shaukat’s arrest? Terrorism is still ongoing, why has this not stopped? Even though my innocent son is in jail?…Unfortunately, no one gets justice over here…Only God and the government can curtail terrorism. No one else has the capacity to do so.”

Thirty-year-old Mubarak Solangi became a victim of manipulation according to his mother. Solangi often used to visit mullahs (clerics) in his area and, with time, the frequency of the visits increased. Mubarak’s mother had already identified that the mullahs her son was roaming around with were “false mullahs” who had nothing to do with the teachings of Islam. She could feel the negative impact of these mullahs on her son, and tried to stop him. However, Solangi did not listen to her and eventually ended up in prison. On the suspicion of terrorist activities, he was taken by security agencies and is still serving jail time. His mother, unlike other mothers, is not in denial over her son’s actions.

While testimonials of terrorist victims and their families have been highlighted to an extent, it is important to also hear the psychologically complex narrative of the families of terrorists, for different reasons but certainly the most important being: never again.

The writer is a development consultant.
She tweets at @GulminaBilal and can be
reached at coordinator@individualland.com