It has been a year as I wrote here since I was almost assassinated. I have already posted the tribute to Mustafa who died in the March 2014 attack. Here are a few other stories that were published recently.
“It has been a year since I lost a close associate, an employee, a friend. After I miraculously escaped a carefully planned denouement, there was much to celebrate: the chance to live, the experience of having defied death. But this living has come with a death at its very centre. Young Mustafa, who had still to experience life, was deprived of that. What can it be called? An accident? An assassination? Crossfire? Or the sheer randomness of death?..”
Rumi says he still receives threats. “After I criticized the violent ideologies of extremist groups, two different Twitter users responded, threatening that a fatwa would soon be issued calling for my death,” he told me, citing just one example of a response to tweets he had posted. “Near the end of July, when I highlighted 10 problems with current day Pakistan, including its laws that discriminate against religious minorities, I received the following message: ‘My sources telling me they’ll reply of each tweet with bullet, 10 tweets so far and 10 bullets.’ “
For now, Rumi plans to stay in the U.S. “I am terrified of what might happen if I return to Pakistan,” he told me.
Rumi longs every day to go back and walk freely on the streets of Lahore, but at the same time he is terrified of what might happen if he returns. And he is regularly reminded of the threats in Pakistan. “Other journalists, my friends, and my family have all warned me that they believe I will be tortured or killed if I return.” Albeit from afar, Rumi continues his fight against extremism and to promote an open, tolerant society.
A year on, living in the US, some may think Raza is leading a life of comfort. But that’s far from the truth. He told me last week, “It has taken me some time to register that my life is not the same. Impacted by trauma, I have continued with my work minus the broadcast bit.” When I asked him why he is afraid, he said he was “petrified that someone may just get hurt on my account and for the time being I cannot take the risk until the state dismantles the militant networks and assures people like me of protection and that freedom of expression is allowed without bullets reaching you”.
I can understand his anguish, but feel terrible that people like Raza have to leave the country. He certainly was more than a conventional journalist. He was affiliated with think tanks, managed one for some time, a public intellectual and someone who was heavily engaged with youth activists across the country.
I am grateful to Abdul Majeed Abid for this lovely piece – much of which is overly generous –
“Why don’t English-language journalists say the same things on the national media as they write in their columns or say at literary festivals?” In his usual self-effacing style, Khaled sahib responded: “It is a difficult task. You should remember what happened when a colleague started saying the same things on the national media that he was writing for TFT. He was shot at and had to flee the country to save his life.”
Khaled sahib was, of course, referring to my friend, elder brother, and mentor, Raza Ahmad Rumi. “He’s just the wrong kind of Pakistani – the kind that is killed nowadays”, to quote Raza’s childhood friend, Ali Dayan Hasan.”Abdul piece is entitled The Wrong Kind of Pakistani – last year Ali Dayan wrote a long essay with the similar title which more than about me is the larger state of my country:
The tragedy is that the ‘moderate’, the empowered and the affluent, are brazenly, smugly complicit in the mass cull of people and voices. The insurmountable obscenity is the ease with which the ‘respectable’ can move from offering you cups of tea to rejoicing in the hateful, dehumanizing gaze of the killer upon you. It is the dead-end where blaming the victim is an act of compassion.
If you condemn targeted killings of Shias, goes the logic, then you must surely be Shia yourself. If you are not, you are a suicidal attention-seeker. You deserve even less sympathy than the Shia who could not help being killed because unlike him, you asked for it.
Raza Rumi asked for it.
Alas, this is how it is. As I keep on saying, things will change. They can’t remain the same. Inshallah.
Khaled sahib was, of course, referring to my friend, elder brother, and mentor, Raza Ahmad Rumi. “He’s just the wrong kind of Pakistani – the kind that is killed nowadays”, to quote Raza’s childhood friend, Ali Dayan Hasan.”Abdul piece is entitled The Wrong Kind of Pakistani – last year Ali Dayan wrote a long essay with the similar title which more than about me is the larger state of my country:
