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| Cultural Diplomacy | | 3/4/2010 8:29:00 AM | Email this article • Print this article |
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| Pakistani Folk Festival Photo by Samina Quraeshi |
| "Pakistan is its people, not its government. . . . Pakistan's internal diversity is as much its key to success as it is an instrument of its failure."
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American Idol is changing the world.
by Christine Parrish
Feature Writer
A video-clip on YouTube shows a pretty young woman dressed in red-and-gold pop-star finery that glitters in the stage lights. She climbs on the star-shaped stage as the young audience starts clapping in time with the music, even before she starts singing. They are so with her. Eleven million television viewers stand ready to text in their votes on their mobile phones, and they are so totally with her.
Who would have thought that "American Idol," the television sensation (based on the British show "Pop Idol") that has captured the largest television audiences for the past five years, could be so successfully exported to Afghanistan?
The Afghanis crowding the rooms of relatives to watch the show on televisions in villages north and south are Pashtun and Hazara and Uzbek. They are cosmopolitan and middle-class urbanites from Kabul, and peasant farmers from the dry hills. One third of the country of Afghanistan has tuned in. They aren't watching "American Idol"; they're watching the local brand: "Afghan Star."
"I'm going to tell you, 'American Idol' is changing the world," said former American ambassador Cynthia Schneider, a foreign service expert on cultural diplomacy. Schneider was an informal guest speaker at the February 2010 Camden Conference, which focused on Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.
"Afghan Star" is in its fifth season.
"They go all over Afghanistan to audition," said Schneider. "It is a complete and total meritocracy. Think about that. That is a very radical concept in a tribal culture: anybody can make it on talent. It becomes a platform for women to succeed publicly. Women are in the finals. The winners are selected by voting... it's the most perfect election in Afghanistan. People campaign for candidates, so it encourages civic participation. And they aren't singing American pop songs; they are reviving Afghan music traditions. One third of the population watches the finals."
"So what is the American role?" asked Schneider. "They don't need us, obviously, to show them how to do this. Our role is to create space to make this possible. The very same government we are supporting (in Afghan-istan) is harassing, censoring, and trying to shut down the independent media."
Cultural diplomacy, a feature of American foreign policy from the end of WW II until the Clinton administration, has been essentially unfunded since the early 1990s, according to former Ambassador Nicholas Burns, who moderated the Camden Conference.
Samina Quraeshi, a Pakistani artist who was also a speaker at the 2010 Camden Conference, shared a sense of optimism with Schneider about the role pop culture, traditional culture, new media, and technology can play in forging cultural connections and cultural depth in her home country.
In a time when a brand of fundamentalist Islam that was imported from Saudi Arabia is taking over Pakistan like a strangling vine, Quraeshi believes that Pakistan's true identity is rooted in its own cultural history and traditions, which are much more inclusive and loving.
"There are 18,000 to 20,000 madrasas across Pakistan that have altered the landscape," said Quraeshi, noting that Saudi Arabia funds many madrasas, or religious schools for boys. They offer free room and board to students, making it an attractive offer for poorer families. But they also offer a one-sided fundamentalist and politicized approach to Islam that is becoming dominant.
"Their cultural narrative is that Arabs and Muslims are victims of an imperialist Zionist and Western conspiracy, aided by reactionary regimes in the Arab world, with the goal of exploiting oil riches and keeping Muslims backward and not strong, because if they were, it would be dangerous for Western and Israeli interests," said Quraeshi.
These emotional calls of jihad appeal to the 50 percent of the population of Pakistan that is under the age of 18, and, she said, "This narrative has to be replaced."
From the old Sufi traditions of whirling dervishes in a mystical form of Islam who still travel Pakistani villages to the new indigenous films that question radicalism, from television shows and music, the social narrative is strong and growing, said Quraeshi, but has limited resources.
She said that it is in this realm that the United States can effectively support internal efforts to break the fundamentalist stranglehold that has turned Islam from a religion into a bloody political ideology. Not by exporting American culture, but by supporting efforts to revive indigenous culture and bridge the differences between what are now competing groups.
Pakistan seems like a country divided into groups fighting for pieces of the country and power in the capital, with rigid ideologies strapped on like suicide belts. But Quraeshi thinks the differences between groups can play to the country's strengths, not just its weaknesses.
"Pakistan is its people, not its government," said Quraeshi. "Pakistan's internal diversity is as much its key to success as it is an instrument of its failure."
Just as compelling as the idea of fundamentalism is the Pakistani sufi-rock star Salman Ahmad, who is treated just like a rock star by the boys in the madrasas he visited in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province. His book Rock and Roll Jihad, about embracing music, not guns, as a tool of holy endeavor, and the film about him, "The Rock Star and the Mullahs," have gained widespread popularity in Asia and the West.
"In the Pakistani villages, music is everywhere," said Quraeshi. "It is not an accident that's what the extremists want to take away, because when you take away culture, you have no sense of yourself. You're tabula rasa, a clean slate, and that's what they want."
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