Stabbing Lions in the Skull is the path to Salvation

look at this picture.

no really, take a look at it.

are you suppressing a giggle, or perhaps recalling the awesome article on cracked.com that showcased this once?

this picture, and i am not mincing my words here, explains why the burqa/hijab and its politics are such a huge issue in our modern world.

no really, take a look at it, and you should see be able to see it.

still don't get it, do you?

let me tell you a story.

there used to be two tribes, one in the east and one in the west.

the men of both tribes would gather every day to perform their rituals. in the east, they would inhale gas. in the west, they would imbibe liquids.

the men of the east said that our faith is in something that can not be seen or measured readily, but can be felt. so our ritual centers around gas, because it is what exemplifies our faith.

the men of the west said that our faith is in something we can see and know and measure, so our rituals are based on liquids.

one day the men in the east realised that the tribes of the west had built big buildings and fancy roads and phones you could touch instead of tap, and it made them very upset.

some of them thought, hey, why not give this liquid idea a try. so with heads filled with up with gases they started to give this liquid thing a shot

but other men of the east got really pissed, so pissed that they started filling themselves up with gas until they blew up. they didn't realise that they were in on the liquid too, because their denial was so powerful.

interestingly, the women of the east had no choice on the matter but to keep up the rituals that had always existed.

one year the tribe in the west started running out of its liquid, and suddenly there was great commotion and despair. some of them shouted that the men in the east had probably finished off all their liquid, siphoning it into their dirty gaseous minds. all hell broke lose, as the tribe vowed to get their liquid back, and to make sure that no gas-guzzling easterner would ever get to sip any liquid until they provided permission.

cue chaos and confusion.

cue, this picture.

why do i keep returning here? well, i had seen this image a few times on the web, and my reactions had ranged from the incredulity of being confronted with pakistanica, to embarrasment at our tackiness, to titlation based on my desire to feel different. but i'd never quite understood it.

then, i visited the british museum, and suddenly i saw this, and it floored me.

to be honest, i actually saw a version of this image where the king was actually stabbing the lion through the skull with a dagger, but even here, you can make out the fight with the lion resulting in a stab wound for the beast.

suddenly, as cracked.com would say, something punched my brain in the face. the sultan rahi poster was not some example of deranged pakistani violence fantasies, or the poster that hate mailers send to PETA.

it made a very strong and obvious point - this image is of a hero.

heroes in all mythologies kill lions to prove their valour. in one image, that poster tells me everything i need to know about who sultan rahi is, and the moral world he inhabits.

now, perhaps it seems like a huge leap to link the persepolis image with the pakistani one as either ends of a tradition, but i have reasons.

you may claim i am simply doing so to root this piece of faux-art onto a venerable tradition. you may even say that the reason i do so is to find a rooting in history for my country and its culture, which suffers from such absurd amnesias in definig its own past.

but i am doing it because it makes sense. it makes sense because of trucks.

truck art has become this symbol and motif of showcasing non-terrorist pakistan.

its this idea that 'we have culture too', although most people who use it do it to add some ethnic flavour to their own ideals. they do it without ever understanding it, but only showcasing it like a circus shows a bearded woman.

infact, if i may say so, truck art is the most exoticized pakistani object after mathira's body.

what makes things interesting is if you try and investiage why trucks in pakistan are decorated the way they are, you find something revelatory.

almost every aspect of truck art, from the way those giant d-shaped crowns are created, to the patterns and motifs inscribed, to the very idea of decoration itself, stems from traditions in islamic art.

essentially, artistic traditions organic to this area and region which have just morphed from buildings and canvases onto truck bodies.

which is why the sultan rahi poster itself fits in with the persian king - both of those are part of certain ideas and traditions.

what is worrying is that i had no idea about any of this.

and i'm not alone here.

we've all found ourselves in the position where we are unsure whether to take gulps of gas or shots of liquid. and by we, i don't mean western-boot licking liberals, i mean all the tribesmen of the east, because when you use a mobile phone to blow up the infidels, well you're using the products of liquid faith.

but as we rushed to bathe ourselve in liquid, we did not consider that perhaps liquid and gas could have a synthesis, or that gas may have something to say about liquid or vice versa. so eager were we to reap the benefits of liquid that we felt the best way forward was to pretend gas never existed.

which is why a 27 year old film graduate had no way of understanding the imagery of a local film, because that whole world view had been replaced a long time ago.

and unfortunately, while the men of the east gave up their traditional forms of dressing and their traditional occupations and thoughts, they could never really let go of the idea of tradition itself. they just reduced it to certain symbols that proved to themselves that they were still a gas.

and so, cue the hijab, cue halal kfc, cue men dressed in jeans and working in investment banks who feel that women who don't cover up are asking to be raped.

in this post 9/11 climate of mosques floating upon grounds of zero and sikhs being thrashed for their turbans and newspaper comics becoming nuclear bombs, we find ourselves in an odd position.

the west doesn't 'hate' us, it just doesn't get us.

and they don't get us because we don't get ourselves. the reason we don't get ourselves is because we don't know what was ours to begin with. like this image.

i'm not trying to make this a pedantic debate about islam and the west, or the perils of modernity, and i am certainly not advocating a return to the stone ages.

what i am trying to say, is that when you and i don't know what sultan rahi is doing stabbing two lions in the head, its not because we were never interested in that lollywood crap to begin with, but because we have no clue how to decode and interpret the symbols that are organic to us.

because somewhere in the past few centuries, we oscillated between trying to buy into modernity and trying to retain our own identity. and in doing so, we made the disastrous decision to ape the liquid drinkers in the areas we needed to, and spurn their logic when their ideas meant our own privilieges would be threatened. that meant that our own traditions and logic and worldviews literally vanished in thin air, leaving us gasping for breath.

and in today's world, where suddenly all of us - from the talib in swat to the student in swarthmore, are finding ourselves like the kawa with the peacock feathers, we have no idea where to turn and what to look at. because what we see, we don't understand.

and if we can't understand our own selves out, no amount of development funds, sympathetic op-eds, well meaning NGOs and facebook protests can save us from our self-inflicted destruction.