Who is a liberal?

Defining that elusive and misunderstood term

It was amusing to read, what can only have been a cub reporter’s assessment of the President’s speech, when he, Mr Zardari, denounced the movie recently made by an American, at the UN. The reporter writes: ‘These bold and candid utterances of Asif Ali Zardari have satisfied the people in Pakistan including those who would mistake Zardari’s party, PPP, as the party that symbolizes liberalism.’ Ouch.

I wish people would refrain from speaking for all the people of Pakistan because last time I checked I am definitely a Pakistan person, a liberal one, and I may or may not agree with a self-appointed spokesperson. Definitely I disagree in this case because I remain eminently dissatisfied with Mr Zardari and his party, while agreeing (if reports are accurate) that the movie was probably unwise, distasteful, and blasphemous, as far as my beliefs are concerned.

Actually that reporter is not alone, many people in this country have a deep-rooted misconception about certain words and ‘liberal’ is just one of them. ‘Secular’ is another, and the list is long and includes some tantalising words such as ‘religious’, ‘patriot’, and of course that bastion of Pakistani culture, ‘honor’.

There is a quote by Thomas Sowell, economist, social theorist, political philosopher, and author that, ‘If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, it would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today.’ He talks, of course, of the wider world. In today’s Pakistan, determinedly straddling centuries, the word ‘liberal’ is synonymous with a person who does not speak madrassah. I apologise for falling into the crime of stereotyping (a habit I normally dislike) with this way of using the word ‘madrassah’, but there’s no doubt that it saves explanations when required.

There are times when one is in danger of falling into another quoted definition of ‘liberal’, which is that ‘a liberal is a person too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel,’ perhaps because there are so many definitions of ‘liberal’, although none appears to be as damning as the one most commonly held in this country.

Without going into the Latin, ‘liberal’ in the dictionary is synonymous among others with the words ‘abundant’, ‘advanced’, ‘progressive’, ‘avant-garde’, ‘generous’, ‘eclectic’. Politically the word is used in conjunction with the political ‘left-wing’.

I find it too generous when ‘liberal’ encompasses the word ‘Catholic’, at least there was little liberal about the Catholic nuns at school, but it gets closer to the heart of its meaning when it includes the word ‘free’.

Free, its closest definition is based on the concept that all human beings are free and no man is another man’s master; the opposite is slavery. However, no man is ‘free’ to trample on the rights of others or do whatever he pleases. That is a definition of ‘chaotic’. It is this that in Pakistan is confused with liberty along with the word ‘non-conformist’, another definition of liberal.

‘Non-conformist’, at the extreme end of the liberal scale means a dissident, a freak, malcontent, separatist, or (hold your breath): a misbeliever. But to define a liberal as a ‘freak’ or ‘misbeliever’ is stretching the definition in the same way as to define a Muslim as a terrorist. Most of the time a liberal is a good thing, just as most of the time a (true) Muslim is a good person (there I go, setting conditions to my own side in an argument).

So to revert to the issue of that movie in passing, a liberal is a person who does not agree with the views presumably expressed in the movie ‘Innocence of Muslims’ (I wouldn’t know, I haven’t seen it). Yet, being liberal, he is able to understand that everyone does not hold the same views on every issue, and his response is tempered by this understanding. A non-liberal, on the other hand, is a person who violently disagrees with the said movie and is willing to break and kill to push his point. The response of the liberal thus defined is more likely to result in such movies being relegated to the rubbish heap where they belong just as any amount of destruction caused by the other is likely to give them undue importance.

An ‘opportunist’ on the third hand is a person who boards any ride that goes his way; it is this label under which you will find the President of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, although there are those in his party who would rather walk.

The writer is a freelance columnist. Read more by her at http://rabia-ahmed.blogspot.com/