by NADEEM F. PARACHA
Recently a reader sent me a link to a YouTube video titled ‘Disco Molvi.’ The video showed some members of the ritualistic Sunni Barelvi sub-sect indulging in some kind of a highly animated dance. It was a fascinating sight. Nevertheless, the dance is not what really whetted my curiosity. It was the title of the video, ‘Disco Molvi’ that the reader used to define the spiritual boogie that caught my attention. This term is not a new one at all. It’s been around for quite a while now. According to Shaukat Nasir, a former student of the University of Karachi (between 1975 and 1979), ‘Disco Molvi’ was a tongue-in-cheek expression that was first coined by progressive student activists at the University of Karachi (KU) sometime in the late 1970s. It was mockingly used to describe the more modernly attired and beardless members of the right-wing Islami Jamiat-i-Taleba (IJT). ‘In those days,’ says Shaukat, ‘even some Jamati members also had girlfriends. They would dress in western clothes and listen to modern pop and Indian music, but were still committed to propagate Jamat-i-Islami’s philosophy. We began calling such IJT activists Disco Molvies!’ Shaukat added, smiling widely. The term is also believed to have been a spin-off of a sarcastic phrase ‘Maulana Whiskey’ that was coined by IJT members in the Punjab to describe the allegedly whiskey loving former Jamat-i-Islami (JI) leader, Maulana Kausar Niazi. According to Bilal Kidwai, a former member of the IJT (in the late 1970s) at Lahore’s Government College, it was members of IJT at the Punjab University who coined the term ‘Maulana Whiskey’ for Niazi when (in 1969) he decided to quit JI and join Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s socialist/secular Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP).’ However, in an interview that he gave to India Today in 1989, prolific author and former left-wing student activist, Tariq Ali, claimed that this term was actually coined by Z A. Bhutto himself. “Kausar Niazi was called Maulana Whiskey by Bhutto in the 70s,” Ali told India Today, while talking about how Niazi abandoned Bhutto in 1977 and began taking part in the anti-Bhutto movement headed by right-wing religious parties. “He (Niazi) was either drunk or surrounded by dancing girls and then began masquerading as the guardian of Islam,” Ali chuckled. Shaukat Nasir is not sure who came up with the term, Maulana Whiskey: “I personally think it were the Jamaties who after being incensed by Maulana Kausar Niazi’s decision to quit JI and join PPP, taunted him with this title. But it is also true that Bhutto sahib started calling Niazi Maulana Whiskey when he decided to quit the PPP and join the JI’s protests against Bhutto sahib’s government in 1977.” Interestingly, the term, even if coined by the IJT members alone, eventually became part of the still on-going tradition in Pakistan where clerics are ridiculed through satire and jokes. Between the emergence of the term ‘Maulana Whiskey’ (in the early 1970s) and ‘Disco Molvi’ (possibly in 1977), another term in this context became popular. It was ‘Maulana Hippie.’ Hippies – a freewheeling cultural phenomenon that emerged in the West in the 1960s – spread out in the rest of the world when hippies began travelling to non-western countries to look for the kind of ‘spiritualism’ that they believed their post-industrial societies had eschewed. Hippie trends and fashions – long hair, colourful, ‘non-bourgeois’ clothing, ‘mind expansion’ (mainly through hallucinogenic drugs), free-form music, peace, communal living, anti-war activism, etc. – made their way into Pakistan as well.
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