The Curious Case of the Left Liberals

It is interesting, these labels.

The Centrist, Rightist, Leftist, Marxist, Fundo all these categories that we have created to identify various diasporas of people. I have been toying with political theories in my own naïve way and rested on the conclusion; based on available facts, that in most cases my ideologies confer with the leftists and the liberals, hence I must be one of the creed. However, every year I am subjected to scrutiny and a lot of raised eyebrows by my fellow leftists. The reason to them is fairly simple; left liberals cannot worship deities. Religion and rituals have no place in a world of hard facts.

And so it is, this saga starts with the dawn of the Ramadan moon; for in every way otherwise I conform to your usual urban leftist’s idea, of what it is like to be; well an “urban leftist” in Islamabad. So its Ramadan and we meet and the usual questions, “you are fasting? why You still believe in Santa Clause and Cookie Monster?”, or “ it’s because you grew up in the 80’s Pakistan, Zia’s Pakistan and you are oh so confused still about religion, cause your head is poisoned with State controlled syllabus”….

I don’t know or care about the labels, really. My ideology of life can range from anything to everything, what I practice is my selection of values and beliefs that work for me. The one thing I understood about the Liberals was this, freedom to be who you want to be, belief in the right of the person. I understood that they are people who are open to ever changing ideas about everything in life, open to new cultures and tolerant of differences in others. They believed in the right of the individual to express one’s self in any way possible, so far so good. But why these Islamabadi liberals are threatened by my personal choice to practice religion baffles me. It will be far more acceptable to them if I do drugs to deal with the shit in life, but pray…lo and behold, is next to treason. Some of them, I believe, actually think it’s a very middleclass and unfashionable thing to practice any form of religion(which btw has nothing to do with being a leftist or not). The skeptic’s however, will throw in my face many arguments as to why I am completely deluded in my beliefs.

My question is very simple, if I am not threatened by their secular humanist way of life, how come my beliefs are unsettling to them. How vain to think that we have figured it all out, have all the facts lined up; when science is a process of continuous questioning and discovery. Everything is possible, because our beliefs make it so. If my praying gets me through my anxieties, depressions and keeps me calm without a dose of anti depressants and pain medication, how can it be bad in any way? .Besides,a truly open mind would be open to myriad of ideologies of life, just because you don’t believe in something doesn’t mean it isn’t true for the believer.

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane, by those, who could not hear the music- Friedrich Nietzsche