The indexical ʿAamir Liaquat

The passing away of the Janus-faced ʿAamir Liaquat calls, in myriad ways, for an inquiry into the indexical role that Liaquat played over the last two decades of his life. At once an object of fascination and repulsion, charisma and incoherence, immensely local and incredibly global, Liaquat arose out of, and was perhaps the most visible manifestation of, the particular brand of Islamic modernism that the Pakistani state discourses and practices have championed since 1947. Liaquat was a mirror in which diverse strata, across different times, sought to locate their own selves. He is worth remembering for his many endeavours and for his many ills— a comical genius at his finest, and a mob-inciting firebrand at his worst, or perhaps it is the other way around.

In his famous trichotomy of signs, Charles Sanders Peirce distinguished between the symbol, the icon, and the index. Each sign, he argued, was contingent upon particular relationships between the signifier and the signified. The symbol, Peirce noted, was a thoroughly arbitrary relationship between the signifier and the signified, such as the one between words and meaning. The icon, Peirce continued, was different because of the physical resemblance the signifier bears to the signified, such as the one between an illustration and the actual object being illustrated. The index, Peirce observed, was differentiated still from the symbol and the icon because here the signifier is physically related to the signified, such as the smoke that arises after a fire, or the selfies that we take of ourselves. The indexical is thus distinguished from the symbol and the icon through physical contagion: Peirce harkens us to Frazer’s laws of contagion and anticipates Douglas’ observation about contagion, purity, and pollution. To call Liaquat a symbol of this, or an icon of that, is to underestimate the potency that he indexed, a potency that arose out of a contagion with long standing and deeply entrenched ideological structures, especially around the categories of the ‘religion’, the ‘individual’, and the ‘public’.

To wit, the massive transformations underway in 19^th century North India— whether it was the colonial impressed birth of the Hindu and the Muslim nations, through historical works such as those of Mill, Elphinstone, and Elliot or whether it was the overhaul of the epistemic, legal, and political institutions post-1857— gave rise to an unprecedented circulation of a hitherto new category of identification, ‘religion’. The intra-tradition disputations, whether textual or performed, saw the crystallization of specific maslaks, such as the Deobandis, the Barelwis, the Ahl-i Hadith, the Ahmadis, the Aligarh movement, Farangi Mahall, Nadwa, and the Twelver Shiʿa. Each of these aforementioned traditions distinguished itself from its immediate competitors, through differing ideas and practices around the subject of reform. As but one example, the debate over how ‘reform’ is to be carried out illustrates the important distinctions between these groups. For the Deobandis, it was the madrassa, the educational institution par excellence. For the Aligarh movement, it was the Macaulay infused, utilitarian understanding of education as purely instrumental. For the Barelwis, ‘reform’ lay in the protection of local customs and practices, and in defending their shrines in a world that was rapidly become suspicious, if not hostile, towards such cultures.

Fast forward to the early 2000’s liberalization of television stations under Musharraf, and re-imagine the earliest memories you have of ʿAalim Online, a show that took the viewers by storm and cultivated an immediate and loyal audience. The logic undergirding a show such as ʿAalim Online, and the grammar utilized by a host such as Liaquat, found such favorable reception because they emerged out of, and fed back into, the very peculiar strand of Islamic modernism, a bastard child of the Ahl-i Hadith and the Aligarh movement, that the Pakistani state had espoused since its inception. That is, the state had— through its education syllabi, through its formal and informal rhetoric, through its legal acts, and through its courts— concocted a strand of Islam that argued for a complete lack of mediation between a devotee and the deity. This privileging of ‘direct’ access had the effect of marginalizing each of the traditions that took mediation (the Deobandi ʿulamaʾ are mediators in this sense of the word) or intercession (Barelwi pirs, Shiʿa imams, Ahmadi caliphs) as central to their self-understanding. Traditions that cut out such modes of being— like the Ahl-i Hadith, or Aligarh movement— thus emerged as fountainheads for many figures influential and prominent in Pakistani state narratives’ myopic understandings of history.

When ʿAalim Online hosted representatives from different traditions, it re-enacted a contemporary, if fairly diluted and subdued, form of the 19^th century polemical exchanges that were all the rage in North India and Panjab. On the TV show, however, it was Liaquat that held the reigns. His oversight into the show ranged from design, production, hosting, editing, and subsequent discussions of who to invite back and who to steer clear of. This insistence on, at the one hand, being physically near men trained in a madrasa or authorized at a foreign seminary, but, on the other hand, evoking a language of ‘reason’ and ‘logic’ and ‘unmediated access’, and ultimately being the only authoritative voice on a given show evinces the triumph of a discourse in which those who seek a mediated access have been frozen out of the spoils of victory. Liaquat, despite being in the vicinity of men trained professionally in Arabic, Persian, fiqh, tafsīr, ḥadīth, etc. possessed the same self-confidence that hundreds of thousands of his viewers also posses when they speak about ‘religion’, or history, or Islam, or any other matter under the sun. Liaquat was indexical because he was the state’s ideal Muslim subject, incarnated in a body, mingling with the ‘old’ but always moving towards, and indeed being the face of, the ‘new’.

At the same time, Liaquat’s many other activities raised questions that were harder to answer, if only because answering them meant an uncomfortable introspection for those enamored with, or disgusted by, Liaquat. His political career charts a fascinating trajectory, with its beginnings in an ethnically inspired political party, and its culmination, with his death, in a ‘national’ party. Liaquat lived the disenchantment of throngs of Urdu-speaking middle-class residents of Karachi, whose newer generations frowned upon the ‘shady’ dealings of the party that their very own parents and grandparents had heartily supported. The tantrum Liaquat threw, shortly before his death where he insisted on meeting the Prime Minister in-person, captures well the political aspirations of the many loyalists of the ‘national’ party, settling for a short-term, but immediately satisfying victory, over and above anything longer and more substantial.

Liaquat’s game show antics foregrounded passioned debates, across multiple media, over the interplay of devotion and drama. Perhaps because of the media in which these shows were debated (social, print), and perhaps because of the code in which these debates were articulated (English), Liaquat was portrayed, from the get-go, in thoroughly negative terms that are colored by a petty bourgeois understanding of, and preoccupation with, ‘aesthetics’, ‘morality’, and ‘dignity’. Liaquat’s marital (mis)adventures, similarly, became talking points not because of what they entailed, but because of the brazenness with which Liaquat placed his marital affairs in the public realm. The public craved the intimate details of his marriages, much as it craved the entertainment that Liaquat rendered on national television day after day. And yet, to accept this craving boldly and openly, was a line that few dared cross. The public lived through Liaquat, and he, perhaps, through the public.

Truly a one-of-a-kind showman, the indexical ʿAamir Liaquat.