Khuda Kay Liye: a searing critique

I did not intend to but am forced to start with this. Watching Khuda Kay Liye in a plush multiplex in the capital reminded me of another piece of searing political drama—Black Friday. The audience reacted with such mirth and vile that one felt nauseous. They sniggered at a man being tortured by Americans saying, ‘These Muslims deserve it.’ Was I amazed, shocked? Neither. The sensibilities of a so-called educated class are suspect to say the least. The finest thing about Khuda Kay Liye, Pakistani filmmaker Shoaib Manzoor’s ambitious take on the current political scenario in the Islamic world and Western hegemony is that it begins with music and ends with music. Within the larger debate of fundamentalism and extremism pervading Pakistan, the film narrates the tragic story of a family torn apart by the endless and devastating scourge of a disintegrating world order. It is about Mansoor and Sarmad, blood brothers who belong to an upwardly mobile, elite Pakistani family. Both are musicians. They play to the gallery, they love their music. Symbols of a modernizing world, English-speaking, and hence the object of hate in the conservative, fundamentalist sections of the Pakistani society. And Sarmad succumbs. To the blatant venom-spewing Maulana Tahiri. A radical, the Maulana drills hate into his very being. ‘Islam mein mausiki haraam hai,’ says Tahiri. Sarmad falls deeper, stops singing, questions his older brother who still swears by music, defies his family and leaves home to accompany the mullah into the depths of jihad. Meanwhile, Sarmad’s cousin, Mary (or Mariam) – a British-Pakistani in love with a Brit youth – arrives in Pakistan with her father, who is bent on getting his ‘wayward’ daughter married off to a true Muslim to prevent her from getting into an alliance with the firang man. The man is worried to death about the purity of the Islami nasl being in danger! And who does he want as his daughter’s groom? Her cousin, Mansoor. But as luck would have it Mansoor proceeds to the United States for higher studies in musicology and leaves behind a forced marriage between Sarmad – by now a real jihadi, complete with the Islamic attire including the headgear – in the rugged backdrop of the frontier areas. Mary is shattered, she hates her father, hates her cousin (now husband) and everyone else around her. By now Mansoor has settled down in the United States, and found himself a gori girlfriend. Of course, they plan to get married. Then 9/11 happens to the world—the event that shattered the lives of an unimaginable number of people all over the globe, be it Afghanistan or Iraq, Morocco or Egypt, no one was spared America’s wrath, most of it misplaced and misconstrued. Mansoor is arrested on the night of his wedding and taken away by the US police. The pain sets in. Mansoor’s incarceration in the US torture cell are the most chilling sequences in the film. It is no hold’s barred, one is reminded of the horrors of Abu Ghraib. However, the sequence that defines Khuda Ke Liye is so telling, one is caught between a guffaw at America’s foolhardiness and a tear at the condition of an innocent man held in an American hellhole for no fault of his. A raid at Mansoor’s house yields an old abandoned taweez. But of course, the chief investigator has no idea what it is. He tears it open and finds a scrap of paper with a grid, a common sight in dargahs and mazaars’s across South Asia—the blessed pieces of paper that so many of us carry with us as divine protection against the evils of the world. Our super-intelligent American, of course thinks the grid is a map of New York. And here’s more, he picks out the numbers 9 and 11 written in two squares, encircles them, and holds it as evidence of Mansoor’s involvement in the 9/11 attacks. The quantum of torture increases. Relentless and never-ending, the young aspiring musician ends up in a mental rehabilitation centre—paralysed, bruised, broken, and speechless. While Mansoor is facing the wrath of the American (in)justice system, Sarmad is busy fighting a fruitless battle against the marauding American forces in Afghanistan and his own inner demons which pull him back, prevent him from killing another human being. Mary, his wife by force in the meantime has succeeded in sending a letter to her British lover. She receives help. The British government gets involved in a legal battle to get Mary back to England. The girl by now is a mother, the result of a forced copulation. Sarmad too decides to go back. The courtroom sequences are brilliantly written, especially the monologue delivered to such amazing perfection by Nasiruddin Shah. From the right of a woman in Islam to walk out of a marriage to the Prophet’s love for music, Shah dispels myths with a panache never seen before. Pakistani star Shaan is superb as the tortured Mansoor and so is Fawad Khan as the confused Sarmad. The young man’s return to music – his first love – is well-crafted. Mary, free from a life of bondage, presented with a bright future in Britain, returns to the frontier areas to set up a school for little children whose love for ‘Englis’is unparalleled.