How the Pakistani migrants adjusting to new realities: a perspective

As imperialism destroys one country after the other, the phenomenon of primitive accumulation and accumulation through dispossession by destruction is swiftly taking over the countries of global South hence migration to the West has become a regular feature.

Labour is trying to follow capital but on latter’s draconian terms. Let’s examine how the Pakistani migrants are adjusting to the new realities.

In Australia and Europe Pakistani expatriates can be divided into two groups. People escaping from Zia’s wrath were mostly progressives and they sought asylum only because life in their country was made impossible for them.

Being progressive, they assimilated in the system without much ado. The post-Zia wave brought a variety of people which can be divided into two groups.

After the fall of the Soviet Union and later after 9/11, the wave of expatriates was either religiously conservative and suspicious of western culture or outright liberal. Their prime focus was to accumulate money by working in inclement conditions or by involving themselves in businesses.

The conservatives stuck together to build ideologically fictive religious and cultural identities.

Mosque or places of worship provided them a sense of identity and satisfied the nostalgia of homelessness. In the alienated culture the process of ghettoization promoted the sense of religious superiority and helped them introduce Sharia in their private lives, and if possible, in the system as well. Saudi influence was apparent not only through their dress code but also through their anti-Palestinian ideology.

Lack of economic opportunities, deterioration in cultural norms and stifling obscurantism in their native countries with pronounced insecurity, pushed the other segment abroad—the young, educated migrants who sought refuge in atheism or anti-Islamism.

Impressed by western Orwellian democracy and so-called liberty without economic freedom they found their catharsis in Orientalism.

Their Islamophobia is not the consequence of any socio-economic analysis of the objective conditions but is based on stereotyping Islamic icons and personalisation. For Adorno these are the symptoms of an authoritarian personality, “a first step to psychotic thinking, a crucial characteristic of the fascist character”. Incidentally, this fascist trend remains common to both groups.

Akin to neo-cons in the US, the newly born expatriate ex-Muslims, teeming and blaming Islam are finding all defects in its ideology forgetting that political Islam was the creation of US-Saudi nexus, admitted by Muhammad bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. “Even the tribes”, Eqbal Ahmed says, who “were given flags and turned into imperial petrol pumps”, were picked up by British and the French once the Ottoman empire collapsed.

These apparently ‘bright’ and ‘enlightened’ minds indoctrinated by the West, with their shallowness, blindly follow it without critical analysis. “Islam is judged to be a fraudulent new version of some previous experience, in this case Christianity”, Edward Said says. A threat to modernity while travelling back in time to medieval era, where women were objectified as sexual objects and patriarchy reigns supreme. For Freud patriarchy is closely associated with capitalism; instead it is attached to Islam, and both are unequivocally condemned. Woman in capitalism is pornified as a commodity.

“Religion” Marx says, “is the sigh of oppressed creature”. “Islam’s novelty and its suggestiveness are brought under control so that relatively nuanced discriminations are now made that would have been impossible had the raw novelty of Islam been left unattended.

The Orient at large, therefore, vacillates between the West’s contempt for what is familiar and its shivers of delight in—or fear of—novelty” (Edward Said).

“The purpose of the Western Cultural industry is to be on the alert to ensure that the simple reproduction of mind does not lead on to the expansion of mind” Horkheimer adds, “According to pragmatism, truth is to be desired not for its own sake but insofar as it works best, as it leads us to something that is alien or at least different from truth itself”.

Nevertheless, Muslim history, to the tragic delusion of liberals, tells us a different story. During the twentieth century, Muslim countries had little or no trace of fundamentalism. They were inherently secular and largely socialist. The Bandung Conference proved the point.

With multiple factors playing their decisive role, the expatriates of both extremes, finally end up developing an imbalanced personality.

The reasons are obvious, as Gramsci points out, “In pure Marxism, men taken as a mass obey economic necessity and not their own emotions. Politics is emotion; patriotism is emotion; these two imperious goddesses merely act as a façade in history. …the history of people throughout the centuries is to be explained by the changing, constantly renewed interplay of material causes. Everything is economics”.

Self-preservation and adjustment in cut-throat capitalism turn expatriates into robots. Five days of intense labour takes away the critical thinking. “Those who devote their lives to earning a living” Marcuse says, “are incapable of living a human existence. Those who create jobs create minds first”. During the suppression of Palestinians, the repressive apparatus of the Western states has relentlessly assaulted the civil and political liberties of the people.

The survival of the individual depends on voluntary consent to the dominant force hence the expatriates fall in line with the coercive hegemonic apparatus.

For Marcuse “under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty to choose between black and white “can be made into a powerful instrument of domination. The range of choice open to the individual is not the decisive factor in determining the degree of human freedom, but what can be chosen and what is chosen by the individual”.

In the case of Islam, the lexicon is changed. The language speaks for itself. “Say the word ‘terror’ and a man wearing a keffiyeh and mask and carrying a Kalashnikov immediately leaps before one’s eyes”. Edward Said says, “To a degree, the image of a helpless, miserable-looking refugee has been replaced by this menacing one as the veritable icon of Palestinian.”

Penning a long letter to one of his daughters, Laura, Marx said, among other things, that “For the Muslims there is no such thing as subordination. …Nevertheless, they will go to rack and ruin without a revolutionary movement.”

Let’s not forget that immediately after independence from the Dutch colonial rule; the Indonesian Communist party under Sukarno was the third largest Communist party in the world after the Soviet Union and People’s Republic of China. Sudan’s Communist Party was asserting its power but the intervention of CIA aborted its efforts to take over the state. South Yemen was a communist state.

Tudeh, the Iranian Communist Party, was a leading force in the Iranian revolution. Communist Party of Iraq won power when Col. Abdul Kareem Qassim led the coup and ousted King Faisal— a puppet imposed by British French nexus.

The overthrow sent shock waves through the spines of spineless monarchies of the Middle East, the US cronies, awarded with thrones for their betrayal of Ottoman Empire, and extremely unpopular among their people, found themselves vulnerable.

They were disposable entities and were allowed to go where they belonged —to the dustbin of history. However, the CIA started to destabilize Iraq and within a few years Qassim was assassinated by a countercoup backed by its agents.

Soon the era of Baathists started. Saddam was the last secular, semi-socialist head of state, later labelled as a sponsor of Al Qaeda was liquidated as was the Babylonic civilization and one million innocent civilians.

Turkey under Mustafa Kemal and even later remained a secular state, as was Albania, a secular, socialist one under the leadership of Enver Hoxha. Algerian movement of independence was started by the Algerian Communist Party— later banned by the French colonial state— and the Algerian People’s Party. It won independence under the National Liberation Front, a socialist organisation.

Not to forget the Saur revolution of Afghanistan that changed the dynamics of the entire region. It wasn’t the revolution itself, a process of changing the destiny of the masses, but the intrusion of the CIA, Mossad, ISI and the Arab Petrodollar which destroyed Afghanistan, and Pakistan for a century if not for eternity, giving rise to fundamentalism in both country, and permanent Bonapartism in the latter.

The fallacy of Soviet aggression is as baseless as America’s mantra of spreading democracy and not its hegemony in the world. It wasn’t a Soviet intervention but an internal tussle between the communist forces and the reactionary Daud regime. The latter ousted the king, Zaher Shah, and Afghanistan became a republic.

Once the communists took over in a bloodless coup, and the revolutionary changes started taking shape, Zbigniew Brzezinski’s doctrine of engaging and trapping Soviets into Afghanistan came into play.

However, the Soviets did not invade Afghanistan; on the contrary, they were invited by the Afghan revolutionary government to help them thwart US intervention. The rest is history.

If today Islam is in the hands of fascists or fundamentalists, it is because of the US and the western imperialist allies.

How the Assad government has been toppled after a decade of crippling sanctions and wars imposed by the US while last nail in the coffin was fixed by the efforts of Israel-Turkey-Qatari nexus which brought an Al Qaeda terrorist with million-dollar bounty on his head.

The man is not only welcomed by the US president but offered a platform in the UN as well. It speaks volumes about the hypocrisy of those who are the architects of terrorism across the globe.

This highlights a forgotten fact alluded to by Gramsci that people are product of history and not of nature. If the fundamentalists “can be seen as particular kinds of human beings who have been produced not by civilizations or religious frenzies and fatalities but by histories”, Aijaz Ahmed says “then one can at least begin to attend to these histories”.

Let’s not forget, those who hold the means of production hold the key to managing the superstructure. Religion in the hands of rich will be used to whack the working class and once held by the proletariat will scourge and expropriate the expropriators— the bourgeoisie.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2025