Performers fight Taliban by poking fun

LAHORE

While Pakistan’s military pounds the Taliban in the rugged mountains of Waziristan, another battle is being fought in the country’s theaters and on television against the Talibanization of Pakistani culture and identity.

The weapons: humor and satire.

Yunus Butt, 45, who has been penning comedy scripts for almost 20 years, has launched a comedy show based on a spoof Taliban TV channel. It features a female singer whose back is always toward the camera and marks the time with bullets striking a bell.

“I believe humor is an art of living,” Mr. Butt said. “Talibans don’t laugh because they are very serious people. In fact, saying anything light about the Taliban is taboo, which is why I began this show, to humanize the Taliban, to poke fun at them and to demystify them.”

Mr. Butt said poking fun at the Taliban is the best way of fighting them. “If we can get the masses to laugh at them, we will defeat them,” he said. “Thanks to state television glorifying them in the past, public opinion remains in their favor. That’s what we need to fight.”

Mr. Butt’s show, which airs on Geo television, can be likened to a cross between “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” and David Letterman’s late-night offering. It has received its share of threats, Mr. Butt said, from anonymous callers and letter writers. “The Americans also expressed their concerns over episodes which poke fun at U.S. policy,” he said.

Madiha Gauhar writes plays that cater to a smaller audience but generate a great deal of publicity. The daughter of a prominent woman activist, she helped found Ajoka theater in 1983. The nonprofit venture stages performances on social issues, generating discussion and controversy; it charges no admission.

The theater recently put on a festival of plays called Theater for Peace. The highlight was a play called “Burqawa-gazna” in which all the performers - male and female - wore burqas, the shroudlike garment with a mesh face covering that the Taliban and ethnic Pushtun traditionalists oblige women to wear.

“The play is a critique of this new emphasis of covering up,” Ms. Gauhar said. “It pokes fun at Talibanization and the fundamentalism sweeping our society.”

The play was banned two years ago by the provincial government, but Ms. Gauhar continues to stage it to show that the burqa and the veil have little to do with religion and are the products of feudal and patriarchal values. “Even this time around, we received some complaints from the Punjab government, but my aim is simple,” she said. “Come what may, the show must go on.”

Ms. Gauhar said productions like this one counteract Urdu-language media that “glorifies the Taliban and makes them out to be true Muslims. Plays like Burqawaganza demystify this myth and provoke discussion and debate.”

The cultural battle against the Taliban has its own martyrs: Maulvi Sarfraz Naeemi, a cleric who spoke out against the Taliban and became the victim of a suicide bomb, and journalist Musa Khan, who was fatally shot in Swat for reporting Taliban excesses.

A performing-arts festival in Lahore last year that featured artists from around the world was bombed, and a cafe that regularly featured live music was attacked. Commercial theaters across Lahore also were targeted early this year.

Ms. Gauhar’s husband, playwright Shahid Nadeem, also has encountered anger and threats.

Story Continues →