Selective Islam ... An article by Imran Khan (1998)
Source:http://www.mybitforchange.orgMy Generation grew up at a time when colonial hang up was at its peak. Our older generation had been slaves and had a huge inferiority complex of the British. The school I went to was similar to all elite schools in Pakistan, despite becoming independent, they were, and still are, producing replicas of public school boys rather than Pakistanis. I read Shakespeare which was fine, but no Allama Iqbal.
The Islamic class was not considered to be serious, and when I left the school I was considered amongst the elite of the country because I could speak English and wore western clothes. Despite periodically shouting Pakistan Zindabad at school functions, I considered my own culture backward and Islam an outdated religion. Amongst our group if any one talked about religion, prayed or kept a beard he was immediately branded a Mullah. Because of the power of the Western media, all our heroes were western movie or pop stars. When I went to Oxford already burdened with this hang up from my school days, things didn’t get any easier. In University not just Islam but all religions were considered anachronism. Science had replaced religion and if something couldn’t be logically proved it did not exist. All supernatural stuff was confined to themovies. Philosophers like Darwin who with his half-baked theory of evolution was supposed to have disproved the creation of men and hence religion.
Moreover, the European history had an awful experience with religion, The horrors committed by the Christian clergy in the name of God during the Inquisition had left a powerful impact on the western mind.
To understand why the west is so keen on secularism, one should go to places like Cordoba in Spain and see torture apparatus used during Spanish Inquisition. Also the persecution of scientists as heretics by the clergy and convinced the Europeans that all religions are regressive. However, the biggest factor that drove people like me away from religion was the selective Islam practised by most of its preachers. In other words, there was a huge difference between what they practised and what they preached. Also, rather than explaining the philosophy behind the religion, there was an over emphasis on rituals. I feel that humans are different; to animals whereas the latter can be drilled, humans need to be intellectually convinced. That is why the Qur’an constantly appeals to reason. The worst of course, was the exploitation of Islam for political gains by various individuals or groups. Hence, it was a miracle I did not become an atheist.
The only reason why I did not was the powerful religious influence wielded by my mother on me since my childhood. It was not so much out of conviction but love for her that I stayed a Muslim. However, my Islam was selective, i.e. I accepted only parts of the religion that suited me. Prayers were restricted to Eid days and occasionally on Fridays, when my father insisted on taking me with him. If there was a God I was not sure about it and certainly felt that he did not interfere with my life. All in all I was smoothly moving to becoming a Pukka Brown Sahib. After all I had the right credentials in terms of the right school, university and above all, acceptability in the English aristocracy, something that our brown sahibs would give their lives for. So what led me to do a lota on the Brown Sahib culture and instead become a desi? Well it did not just happen overnight. Firstly, the inferiority complex that my generation had inherited, gradually went as I developed into a world class athlete. Secondly, I had the unique position of living between two cultures. I began to see the advantages and the disadvantages of both the societies. In western societies, institutions were strong while they were collapsing in our country. However, there was an area where we were and still are superior, and that is our family life. I used to notice the loneliness of the old-age pensioners at Hove Cricket ground (during my Sussex years). Imagine sending your parents to Old Peoples’ Homes! Even the children there never had the sort of love and warmth that we grew up with here. They completely miss out on the security blanket that a joint family system provides. However, began to realise that the biggest loss to the western society and that in trying to free itself from the oppression of the clergy, they had removed both God and religion from their lives. While science can answer a lot of questions, no matter how much it progresses, two questions it will never be able to answer: One, what is the purpose of the existence and two, what happens to us when we die? It is this vacuum that I felt created the materialistic and the hedonistic culture. If this is the only life then one must make hay while the sun shines and in order to do so one needs money. Such a culture is bound to cause psychological problems in a human being, as there is going to be an imbalance between the body and the soul. Consequently, in the USA, which has shown the greatest materialistic progress and also gives its citizens the greatest human rights, almost 60 per cent of the population consult psychiatrists. Yet, amazingly in modern psychology, there is no study of the human soul. Sweden and Switzerland, who provide the most welfare to their citizens, also have the highest suicide rates; hence, man is not necessarily content with material well being he needs something more. Since all morality has it roots in religion, once religion was removed, immorality has progressively escalated since the 70′s. The direct impact of it is on thefamily life. In UK, the divorce rate is 60 per cent, while it is estimated that there are over 35 per cent single mothers. The crime rate is rising in almost all western societies, but the most disturbing fact is the alarming increase in racism. While science always tries to prove the inequality of man (recent survey showing the American Black to be genetically less intelligent than whites) it is only religion which preaches the equality of man. Between ’91 and ’97, it was estimated that total immigration into Europe was around 520,000, and there were racially motivated attacks all over, especially in Britain, France and Germany. In Pakistan during the Afghan war, we had over four million refugees, and despite the people being so much poorer here and in the NWFP, they suffered a considerable loss in their standard of living as a result of the refugees yet, there was no racial tension, No wonder, last year in Britain, religious education was reintroduced into schools.
There was a sequence of events in the 80′s that moved me towards God. As the Quran says: “There are signs for people of understanding”. One of them was cricket. As I was a student of the game, the more I understood the game, the more I began to realize that what I considered to be chance was, in fact, the will of Allah, the pattern which became clearer with time. But it was not until Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses that my understanding of Islam began to develop. People like me who were living in the western world bore the brunt of anti-Islam prejudice that followed the Muslim reaction to the book. We were left with two choices: fight or flight. Since I felt strongly that the attacks on Islam were unfair, I decided to fight.
It was then I realised that I was not equipped to do so as my knowledge of Islam was inadequate. Hence I started my research and for me a period of my greatest enlightenment. I read scholars like Ali Shariati, Mohammad Asad, Iqbal, Gai Eaton, plus of course, a study of the Holy Quran.
I will try to explain as concisely as is possible, what “discovering the truth” meant for me. When the believers are addressed in the Quran, it always says, “Those who believe and do good deeds.”
In other words, a Muslim has dual function, one towards God and the other towards fellow human beings. The greatest impact of believing in God for me, meant that I lost all fear of human beings. The Quran liberates man from man when it says that life anddeath and respect and humiliation are God’s jurisdiction, so we do not have to bow before other human beings. As Iqbal puts it:
Wo aik Sajda jisay tu giran samajhta hai,
Hazaar sajdon say deta hai aadmi ko nijaat.
Moreover, since this is a transitory world where we prepare for the eternal one, I broke out of the self-imposed prisons, such as growing old (such a curse in the western world, as a result of which, plastic surgeons are having a field day), materialism, ego, what people say and so on. It is important to note that one does not eliminate the earthly desires, simply that instead of being controlled by them, one controls them.
By following the second part of believing in Islam, I have become a better human being. Rather than being self-centred and living for the self, I feel that because the Almighty gave so much to me, in turn I must use that blessing to help the less privileged. By following the fundamentals of Islam rather than becoming a Kalashnikov-wielding fanatic I have become a tolerant and a giving human being who feels compassion for the under-privileged.
Instead of attributing success to myself, I know it is because of God’s will, hence humility instead of arrogance. Also, instead of the snobbish Brown Sahib attitude towards our masses, I believe in egalitarianism and strongly feel against the injustice done to the weak in our society according to the Quran, “Oppression is worse than killing.” In fact only now do I understand the true meaning of Islam, if you submit to the will of Allah, you have inner peace. Through my faith, I have discovered strength within me that I never knew existed and that has released my potential in life: My educationprogramme that I intend to announce in March is far more ambitious than the cancer hospital project.
I feel that in Pakistan we have selective Islam. Just believing in God and going through the rituals is not enough one also has to be a good human being. I feel there are certain western countries with far more Islamic traits than us, especially in the way they protect the rights of their citizens, or for that matter their justice system. In fact some of the finest individuals I know live there. What I dislike about them is their double-standards in the way they protect the rights of their citizens and yet considercitizens of other countries as being somehow inferior to them as human being, e.g. dumping toxic waste in the Third World, advertising cigarettes that are not allowed in the west and selling drugs that are banned in the west. One of the problems facingPakistan is the polarisation of two reactionary groups. On the one side is the westernised group that looks upon Islam through western eyes and has inadequate knowledge about the subject. It reacts to any one trying to impose Islam in the society and wants only a selective part of the religion. On the other extreme is the group that reacts to this westernised elite and in trying to become a defender of the faith, takes up such intolerant and self-righteous attitudes that are repugnant to the spirit of Islam.
What needs to be done is to somehow start a dialogue between the two extremes. In order for this to happen, the group on whom the greatest proportion of our educational resources are spent in this country must study Islam properly. Whether they become practising Muslims or believe in God is entirely a ;personal choice; as the Quran tells us that there is “no compulsion in religion.” However, they must arm themselves with knowledge as a weapon to fight extremism. Turning up their noses at extremism is not going to solve the problem.
The Quran calls Muslims “the middle nation”, i.e. not of extremes. The Holy Prophet (PBUH) was told to simply give the message and not worry whether people converted or not, therefore, there is no question in Islam of forcing your opinions on any one else. Moreover, we are told to respect other religions, their places of worship and their prophets. It should be noted that no Muslim missionaries or armies never went to Malaysia or Indonesia. The people converted to Islam due to the high principles and impeccable character of the Muslim traders. At the moment, the worst advertisement for Islam are the Muslim countries with their selective Islam, especially where thereligion is used to deprive people of their rights. In fact, a society that obeys fundamentals of Islam has to be a liberal one.
If our westernised class started to study Islam, not only will it be able to help our society fight sectarianism and extremism, but it will also make them realise what a progressive religion Islam is. They will also be able to help the western world by articulating Islamic concepts. Last year, Prince Charles accepted that the western world can learn from Islam during his speech at the Oxford Union. But how can this happen if the group that is in to best position to project Islam gets its attitudes from the west and considers Islam backward? Islam is a universal religion and that is why our Prophet (PBUH) was called a mercy for all mankind.
The Imran Khan Phenomenon
Is Pakistan’s cricket star-turned-politician for real?
BY ARIF RAFIQ | JANUARY 12, 2012 Foreign Policy
In 1992, with his cricket career at its twilight, an aging Imran Khan boldly pledged that the Pakistani national team would win the World Cup for the first time. In March of that year, before a packed stadium in Melbourne, Pakistan defeated former colonial master England, taking the cup and shocking the world of cricket. Khan returned home with a trophy in his hands, enshrined forever as a national hero.
These days, Khan leads another group of underdogs: a political party known as the Pakistan Tehreek-e Insaf (PTI). Last September, Khan made a familiarly bold prediction: PTI, which has only won a single National Assembly seat in its 15-year history, will sweep the next general elections. PTI, Khan says without a semblance of doubt, will rid Pakistan of corruption, endemic poverty, and violence -- and eventually bring the country to what he sees as its rightful place on the world stage.
Since his retirement from cricket, Khan has been devoted to social work and politics. Inspired by his mother's death, he founded the world-class Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital and Research Center, trusted and respected by Pakistanis of all stripes. Khan's political career, however, has been another story. PTI, despite the initial hype and fanfare, never really took off. Its founding members left the scene early on, and Khan was regularly outsmarted by wilier politicos.
A solitary Khan would regularly lambast the political class on Pakistan's many talk shows. Critics dismissed him as the darling of the country's television anchors and the electorally irrelevant "burger-baby" and "mummy-daddy" types (i.e. coddled, Westernized, rootless, upper-middle class youth). Political satire shows lampooned him as a raving, repetitive political loser.
In 1992, with his cricket career at its twilight, an aging Imran Khan boldly pledged that the Pakistani national team would win the World Cup for the first time. In March of that year, before a packed stadium in Melbourne, Pakistan defeated former colonial master England, taking the cup and shocking the world of cricket. Khan returned home with a trophy in his hands, enshrined forever as a national hero.
These days, Khan leads another group of underdogs: a political party known as the Pakistan Tehreek-e Insaf (PTI). Last September, Khan made a familiarly bold prediction: PTI, which has only won a single National Assembly seat in its 15-year history, will sweep the next general elections. PTI, Khan says without a semblance of doubt, will rid Pakistan of corruption, endemic poverty, and violence -- and eventually bring the country to what he sees as its rightful place on the world stage.
Since his retirement from cricket, Khan has been devoted to social work and politics. Inspired by his mother's death, he founded the world-class Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital and Research Center, trusted and respected by Pakistanis of all stripes. Khan's political career, however, has been another story. PTI, despite the initial hype and fanfare, never really took off. Its founding members left the scene early on, and Khan was regularly outsmarted by wilier politicos.
A solitary Khan would regularly lambast the political class on Pakistan's many talk shows. Critics dismissed him as the darling of the country's television anchors and the electorally irrelevant "burger-baby" and "mummy-daddy" types (i.e. coddled, Westernized, rootless, upper-middle class youth). Political satire shows lampooned him as a raving, repetitive political loser.
In 2005, Sheikh Rashid Ahmad, then a backer of military ruler Pervez Musharraf, mocked Khan and patronizingly offered to help him win a seat "anywhere he wants." Fast forward six years ahead, and Sheikh Rashid, seated next to Khan on live television, was ingratiatingly referring to the ex-cricketer as a "brother" and meekly asking him for help in winning a few seats in the next elections.
Once an electoral non-entity, Khan's PTI could potentially win dozens of National Assembly seats in the next polls -- hence the Pauline conversion of opportunists like Sheikh Rashid. Already, PTI has upended the détente between the two major political powers -- the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) and the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) -- and put both on the defensive. PTI might become the country's third-largest party, giving it the power to determine who heads Pakistan's next coalition government. Khan, no longer a political joke, is a potential kingmaker positioned to prove the doubters wrong once again.
Pakistan's political class began to take PTI seriously last fall as the party organized a series of large rallies in Punjab, the country's largest province and home to its most competitive elections. In late October, PTI beat all expectations and gathered more than 100,000 people in Lahore, the home turf of the PML-N. The jalsa, or gathering, was a smartly choreographed and nationally televised spectacle, featuring religious conservatives, students from the city's elite schools, and well-to-do housewives. Together, they listened to rousing speeches by politicians and musical performances by the country's top pop artists, and sang the national anthem. An article in the web edition of Pakistan's Express Tribune declared, "Imran Khan's 'tsunami' sweeps Lahore." In Lahore, Khan proved he was able to mobilize large numbers of potential voters in a key constituency, signaling to political free agents that his party has a fundraising and logistical network that can get out the vote on Election Day.
Despite his newfound success, the core of Khan's message has remained the same over the years. He has railed against what he describes as a corrupt, venal political class and an invasive, bullying America. In 1996, he called Asif Ali Zardari, then Pakistan's first husband, the country's "biggest disease." He continues to describe Zardari, now the president, as a major impediment to Pakistan's progress. In 2004, Khan opposed Pakistani military operations in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, warning that once a war with the local tribes begins, "the entire army will be stuck in the tribal areas forever". In 2011, he was instrumental in forging a consensus statement at an all-parties conference that called for talks with the Taliban.
With tensions rising with the United States and a faltering economy, Khan is striking a chord in Pakistan unlike ever before. Pakistanis, ravaged by the scourge of terrorism during the decade after 9/11, saw themselves as casualties of America's war in Afghanistan. Now, after an ugly downturn in U.S.-Pakistan relations in 2011 -- including the humiliating Abbottabad raid to capture Osama bin Laden -- many believe America's actual target is Pakistan itself.
Khan's supporters see him as the most credible advocate for ending Islamabad's support of America's wars in Pakistan and Afghanistan. While other politicians have publicly condemned U.S. action in Pakistan, WikiLeaks cables demonstrate that they tend to speak more approvingly to U.S. officials in private. In contrast, Khan seems to have delivered the same message to the street and the State Department.
At the heart of PTI's sudden rise is the confluence of an effective narrative, a charismatic and credible evangelist, and fortuitous timing. As Pakistan's ties with the United States have worsened, so have problems with its economy and government. The consumer price index is close to the teens, putting great strain on the average Pakistani's finances. The state-owned airlines, railways, and steel mills bleed billions of dollars a year. Prolonged electricity blackouts have continued for their sixth straight year, hammering local industries.
To fix all this, Khan promises to make Pakistan an "Islamic welfare state" where the government promotes justice and equity, is devoid of corruption, and offers social services to the poor. Pakistan, Khan says, should emulate non-Western economic success stories, such as Mahathir Mohammed's Malaysia, Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Turkey.
For his supporters, Khan is a symbol of what can go right in a country that has seen so much wrong. And he is seen as a leader who has promised victory when the odds were against him and has regularly come through in the clutch. When Khan announced his plans to build a cancer hospital, it was dismissed as "unworkable idea," according to Pakistani commentator Tariq Bashir. But "like Imran Khan's cricketing career," Bashir writes, the institution has become a "surprising success stor[y]."
With anti-incumbent sentiment running high as voters blame the country's two largest parties for the ugly status quo, Khan is the perfect candidate for Pakistanis sick of the usual suspects or skeptical about whether democracy even works for Pakistan. The two major parties are seen by many as having been tried, tested, and failed. The PPP rules at the center, while the PML-N runs Punjab, the largest province. Each has had two previous shots at running the country since 1988.
PTI has shaken up Pakistani politics. Since the Lahore rally, PTI's rivals have tried to emulate the party's use of social media, youth outreach, and even the musical interludes during speeches. Some reports even claim that the PTI challenge has forced the country's two major parties to reposition and mutually obstruct Khan's advance.
Meanwhile, droves of electable politicians, including three former foreign ministers, have defected from Pakistan's major political parties to join the PTI. The new entrants include many members of the previous army-backed government under Musharraf, causing the PTI central vice president to resign in protest.
Khan says he can't find angels to join PTI. He's right. For years he sought unsuccessfully to build the party from the bottom up. When he founded his party, he pledge to bring in a new class of politician to supplant the "predatory" politicians who have "sieged" Pakistan's system.
But Pakistani voters tend to be pragmatic rent-seekers, siding with the candidate they feel will most effectively channel state resources their way. Khan needs politicians with a track record of winning. The party also benefits from the experience brought by an influx of established politicians, who can help add depth to the party's policy agenda.
And yet, however necessary, PTI's recruitment of established politicians challenges its claim that it is in pursuit of tabdeeli, or change. It will have to leverage Khan's leadership and clean image to counterbalance the growing perception that it is old wine in a new bottle. If PTI fails to do so, it will find it difficult to hold on to young and upper-middle class supporters, traditional non-voters who see Khan as their favorite anti-politician politician.
In the coming weeks and months, PTI will develop its election manifesto. This will be an opportunity for Khan and company to explain how they will address Pakistan's structural weaknesses. PTI will have to articulate its plans to increase government revenue and reduce federal debt, salvage sinking government-owned corporations, lower dependence on natural gas and increase the efficiency of the electricity grid, attract foreign direct investment and boost domestic economic growth, deal with militants who do not lay down their arms and continue their war against the state, and find a place for Pakistan in a rising Asia -- beyond making endearing platitudes to China.
None of Pakistan's problems can be solved overnight. They require not just bold leadership, but quiet skills developed with political experience, such as the ability to assemble coalitions and build consensus. As much as Khan rails against the system, in the event PTI leads the next governing coalition, he will need allies in the bureaucracy, military, and parliament to push his agenda through. Democracy skeptics and politicians who have jumped on the PTI bandwagon could leave as quickly they have joined. And Khan's political opponents might lack the capability or will to solve Pakistan's problems, but they are certainly able to prevent him from doing so.
Imran Khan describes his party's rise as a "tsunami" engulfing the nation's politics. For the first time, PTI will likely have the numbers to influence government policy after elections are held sometime this year. With political success comes great responsibility. If Khan and PTI fail to rise to the challenge, their tsunami will be nothing but a natural disaster.
Khan the man
The Economist
Mar 15th 2012,
THE road in, from the outskirts of Islamabad, Pakistan's capital, at first seems unlikely to lead to the home of a rising political figure and cricket star. A country lane winds through fields, beside a lake, then twists and turns through half-finished houses and up a steep hillside. Only when you pass through a pair of tall, metal gates, along a drive of neatly trimmed conifers, do you come across a large hacienda-style home of courtyards, a tiled roof and high ceilings. Imran Khan is fond of mirrors and keeps three hunting rifles mounted above one fireplace. The view from his terrace, over sloping garden where large, friendly dogs roam, is tremendous.
For all its charm, it is a large, echoing sort of place, in which a single man might rattle around. Perhaps that is why Mr Khan prefers to spend his time elsewhere, campaigning, raising funds for his philanthropic deeds (a cancer hospital for the poor; a university) or travelling abroad for cricket punditry.
Pakistani politicians tend to be peculiarly isolated. Mr Khan, to his credit, has relatively little security and is more willing than most to plunge in among supporters. This stands in sharp contrast to the leading political figures of the two main parties. Asif Zardari, the president and leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party, almost never leaves his presidential home, other than to take a helicopter to the airport when leaving the country. The danger of assassination is real in Pakistan, and the more cunning politicians have concluded that paying for strong party structures is the way to win elections—much more so than risking the style of personal campaigning that exposed Benazir Bhutto to her murderer in 2007.
Many of Pakistan's richest people—including its obscenely wealthy politicians—in any case choose to party, marry and holiday abroad (Dubai is a favourite destination). Mr Khan, who is charming, confident and relaxed in international company, could fit easily into such activity. Yet at the same time he is rather earnest, determined, he says, to bring about a near revolution in Pakistan: to make politicians (and others) into honest taxpayers, to strike deals with extremists to end violence, and to break Pakistan's unhealthy dependence on foreign (mostly American) aid. It may be hard to conclude that Mr Khan is simply an idealist. Some of his stances, such as his explicit refusal to condemn a blasphemy law that is used to persecute religious minorities, smack of political calculation or worse. Mr Khan is also ready to associate himself with some dubiously conservative, even extreme, religious figures. Yet his aspirations—to improve the lot of ordinary Pakistanis and to strengthen the country's institutions—go far beyond the usual desire of political figures who seek to grab and hold power for the sheer sake of looting funds. That is one reason why many Pakistanis
I Must Be Doing Something Right.
By PANKAJ MISHRA
Published: August 19, 2012
On a cool evening in March, Imran khan, followed by his dogs, walked around the extensive lawns of his estate, sniffling with an incipient cold. ''My ex-wife, Jemima, designed the house -- it is really paradise for me,'' Khan said of the villa, which sprawls on a ridge overlooking Himalayan foothills and Pakistan's capital, Islamabad. ''My greatest regret is that she is not here to enjoy it,'' he added, unexpectedly poignantly. We walked through the living room and then sat in his dimly lighted bedroom, the voices of servants echoing in the empty house, the mournful azans drifting up from multiple mosques in the city below.Khan, once Pakistan's greatest sportsman and now its most popular politician since Benazir Bhutto, exuded an Olympian solitude that evening; it had been a long day, he explained, of meetings with his party's senior leaders. The previous two months, he said, had been the most difficult in his life. His party was expanding amazingly fast and attracting ''electables'' -- experienced men from the governing and main opposition parties. But the young people who constituted his base wanted change; they did not want to see old political faces. ''I was being pulled apart in different directions,'' Khan said. ''I thought I was going mad.''
Khan's granitic handsomeness, which first glamorized international cricket and has sustained the British media's long fascination with his public and private lives, is now, as he nears 60, a bit craggy. There are lines and dark patches around his eyes. The stylishly barbered hair, thinning at the top, is flecked with gray, and his unmodulated baritone, ubiquitous across Pakistan's TV channels, can sound irritably didactic.
''The public contact is never easy for me,'' he said. ''I am basically a private person.''
The moment of melancholy confession passed. Leaning forward in the dark, his hands chopping the air for emphasis, Khan unleashed a flood of strong, often angrily righteous, opinions about secularism, Islam, women's rights and Salman Rushdie.
That month he had canceled his participation at a conference in New Delhi where Rushdie was expected, citing the offense caused by ''The Satanic Verses'' to Muslims worldwide. Rushdie, in turn, suggested khan was a ''dictator in waiting,'' comparing his looks with those of Libya's former dictator, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.
''What is he talking about%3F What is he talking about?'' Khan started, ''I always hated his writing. He always sees the ugly side of things. He is -- what is the word Jews use? -- a 'self-hating' Muslim.
''Why can't the West understand? When I first went to England, I was shocked to see the depiction of Christianity in Monty Python's 'Life of Brian.' This is their way. But for us Muslims, the holy Koran and the prophet, peace be upon him, are sacred. Why can't the West accept that we have different ways of looking at our religions?
''Anyway,'' Khan said in a calmer voice, ''I am called an Islamic fundamentalist by Rushdie. My critics in Pakistan say I am a Zionist agent. I must be doing something right.''
Those adept at playing Pakistan's never-ending game of political musical chairs have begun to take note of Khan. His party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (Movement for Justice, or P.T.I., as it is called), has never won more than a single seat in Pakistan's 342-member National Assembly. But a recent Pew opinion poll reveals Khan to be the country's most popular politician by a large margin, and his growing appeal has drawn together two rivals from the establishment parties -- the suavely patrician figure of Shah Mehmood Qureshi, Pakistan's foreign minister from 2008 to 2011, and Javed Hashmi, an older street-fighting politician from Punjab, Pakistan's politically dominant province -- who are now, in Khan's hastily improvised hierarchy, vice chairman and president of the P.T.I. respectively.
Khan's campaign strategy is simple: he has promised to uproot corruption within 90 days, end the country's involvement in America's war on terror and institute an Islamic welfare state. His quest for a moral Pakistani state and a righteous politics is clearly informed by his own private journey. Famous in the 1980s as a glamorous cricketer, he is at pains to affirm his Islamic identity in his new autobiography, ''Pakistan: A Personal History.'' A rising politician's careful self-presentation, the book fails to mention his friendship with Mick Jagger, his frequenting of London's nightclubs in the 1980s and other instances of presumably un-Islamic deportment, like the series of attractive women with whom he was linked by racy British tabloids. It does devote one chapter to Jemima Goldsmith, the daughter of a wealthy British businessman, Jimmy Goldsmith, whom he married in 1995 -- he was 43, she was 21 -- but this serves largely as a backdrop for his early, self-sacrificing immersion in politics.
His political enemies in Pakistan, he writes, used Jemima Khan's partly Jewish ancestry to depict him as a Lothario with dubious Zionist affiliations -- attacks that, Khan claims, made Pakistan a taxing place for Jemima and eventually led to their divorce. The marriage ended in 2004. Khan's two sons now live with their mother in London, but he and his wife have remained friends. In an article in The Independent, Jemima revealed that khan stays with her mother, Lady Annabel Goldsmith, when in London, and noted that Khan told her not to worry about how their marriage is depicted in the book: ''You come across as you always wanted to -- Joan of Arc.''References to Allah's grace cropped up early on in Khan's public utterances, but they multiplied as he struggled to break into Pakistani politics. He now casts himself as the archetypal confused sinner who has discovered the restorative certainties of religion and is outraged over the decadence of his own class. ''In today's Lahore and Karachi,'' he writes, ''rich women go to glitzy parties in Western clothes chauffeured by men with entirely different customs and values.'' His avowals of Islam, his identification with the suffering masses and his attacks on his affluent, English-speaking peers have long been mocked in the living rooms of Lahore and Karachi as the hypocritical ravings of ''Im the Dim'' and ''Taliban Khan'' -- the two favored monikers for him. (His villa is commonly cited as evidence of his own unalloyed elitism.) Nevertheless, Khan's autobiography creates a cogent picture out of his -- and Pakistan's -- clashing identities. There is the proud young man of Pashtun blood born into Pakistan's Anglicized feudal and bureaucratic elite -- an elite that disdained their poor, Urdu-speaking compatriots. There is the student and cricketer in 1970s Britain, when racism was endemic and even Pakistanis considered themselves inferior to their former white masters. Then we meet the brilliant cricket captain who inspired a world-beating team; the D.I.Y. philanthropist who pursued his dream of building a world-class cancer hospital in Pakistan; the jaded middle-aged sybarite who found a wise Sufi mentor; the political neophyte who awakened to social and economic injustice; and finally the experienced politician, who after 15 years of having his faith tested by electoral failure is now convinced of his destiny as Pakistan's savior.
The day before our evening walk on his estate, I sat in the living room of Khan's Moorish-style villa, where Pakistan's future was being plotted by young men in designer shalwar kameezes and sunglasses, huddled mock-conspiratorially in small groups, and older politicians sprawled on sofas on the long veranda. The country's broiling summer was approaching, and violent street protests over power failures had erupted in many Pakistani cities, adding to the general unease fed by a floundering economy, gang warfare in Karachi, sectarian killings of Shiites, the C.I.A.'s drone attacks in the northwestern tribal areas and the drip-drip of revelations about a defiantly venal ruling class.
Khan was running nearly three hours late for a rally in the northwestern town of Mianwali -- one of his mass-contact campaigns that had in recent months galvanized his tiny party. But no one at the villa seemed at all worried by the delay. After all, Khan is offering nothing less than revolution of the kind that has swept the Arab world, a ''tsunami,'' in his own ill-chosen metaphor.
After many attempts, he has succeeded in provoking a popular response now, perhaps because Pakistan's institutions are suffering their deepest crisis of legitimacy. Contempt-of-court charges were filed this year against two prime ministers. And the debased ancien r?me Khan rails against is gaudily personified by Pakistan's leaders past and present: Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the military dictator from 1999 to 2008, who now lives in exile in London and Dubai; the current president, Asif Ali Zardari, who after the assassination of his wife, former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, conveniently unearthed her last will declaring him her political heir, then appointed his teenage son, Bilawal, chairman of his party, the Pakistan Peoples Party (P.P.P.); and Nawaz Sharif, who, exalted to prime-minister in 1990 by Pakistan's all-powerful military establishment and then banished by it into long exile in 1999, has re-emerged as the leader of the country's main opposition party, the Pakistan Muslim League -- Nawaz (PML-N).
Outside on the veranda, the P.T.I. chieftains, Qureshi and Hashmi, were confabulating with Hamid Mir, an influential TV anchor -- he interviewed Osama bin Laden both before and after 9/11 -- with a checkered political history. Once known for his links to Pakistan's military-intelligence complex, Mir has lately reinvented himself as a critic of the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (I.S.I.) -- the country's dreaded intelligence agency, accused by the United States of supporting anti-American militants in Afghanistan. Army rule ostensibly ended with the enforced departure of Musharraf in 2008, but the men in uniform, according to Mir, were still manipulating things behind the scenes.
Snatches of the conversation between Mir and the P.T.I. chiefs drifted through to the living room. Mir was saying that Khan's party must dispel the growing impression that it was an I.S.I. front. Mir failed to mention that it was he who tweeted recently that the head of the I.S.I. at the time, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, was responsible for the text messages many politicians received asking them to support Khan.Suddenly, the many separate conversations in the living room and veranda ceased, Qureshi and Hashmi stood to attention and even Mir, who hosted Khan often on his TV show ''Capital Talk,'' looked a bit star-struck, as the P.T.I. leader finally bounded in, all coiled energy and purpose.
Khan had returned late from a rally in Sialkot the previous night, but his gym-toned frame, encased in a dark gray shalwar kameez, radiated the supreme assurance of an athlete configured for routine success. In 2009, I ran into him on a flight from Lahore to London and was impressed by his unflagging drive. Widely regarded then as a miserable failure in politics, he seemed eager to claim proximity to powerful men and large events. During a visit to the United States the previous year, he met with Senator Joe Biden, then the chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, and told him how the long opposition to the American war in Afghanistan stoked extremism in Pakistan. He said he expected Barack Obama to understand that the Pashtun tribes, fighting foreign occupiers of their land, would never be vanquished. He understood their mind-set: after all, he himself belonged to a Pashtun tribe.
Khan's intense nationalism, aroused on cricket fields in the late '70s when darker-skinned cricketers from the former British Empire finally began to beat white teams regularly, was whetted in the 1990s by the anti-West rhetoric of Asian leaders like Malaysia's Mahathir Mohamad and Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew, and then by the post-9/11 perception that the United States had bribed and bullied Pakistan into its misconceived war on terror and was now controlling the country's internal affairs. ''The Musharraf years were so shameful,'' he told me. ''The Westoxified Pakistanis have been selling their souls and killing their own people for a few million dollars. And then the Americans come in with shady deals to bring Benazir Bhutto back and let crooked people like Zardari go scot-free. I was so disgusted, and if I hadn't been in politics I would have left Pakistan.''
Moving now through the crowd of his supporters gathered at his estate, Khan struggled to adopt the politician's pose of humility. After quick salaam aleikums, he sprang across the villa's courtyard to his gleaming black S.U.V., Mir, Hashmi and Qureshi struggling to keep pace with him. Within minutes, the convoy led by Khan's Land Cruiser was hurtling down the hill on narrow, potholed roads, past walled mansions and small dark shops, to the highway to Rawalpindi and the tribal borderlands of Mianwali.
I sat with Anila Khawaja, Khan's British-born international media ''coordinator.'' A vivacious woman in her early 40s, Khawaja was one of the many expatriate Pakistanis either bankrolling or volunteering for Khan's political campaign. They, along with the tony youth of Lahore and Karachi, hold up one end of Khan's diverse fan base that also includes lower-middle-class youth from small Punjabi towns and the tribal regions of the northwestern Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province. ''Imran speaks our language,'' Khawaja told me in her British-accented English.
But it was becoming clear that few other people in his party did. I had heard about her constant struggles with the P.T.I.'s frustratingly inefficient, all-male organization, and the heartburn generated among Khan's stalwart supporters by the rapid promotion of such opportunistic late-joiners as Hashmi and Qureshi. Khawaja had wanted me to travel with Khan to the rally in Sialkot but was overruled by her male seniors. They wanted Khan to themselves at all times, crowding into his car, jostling to be photographed next to him at his rallies.
I had heard similar complaints from other members of the party: that the P.T.I. was a one-man show, with a superstar chairman self-absorbedly pied-pipering a gaggle of squabbling egos and craven flatterers. For the moment, however, any anxieties about lack of internal democracy were balanced by the routinely renewed spectacle of mass support for the P.T.I. In between tweeting from Khan's account (''Such beautiful scenery!''), Khawaja pointed excitedly to the crowds of young men on motorcycles that awaited us at the approaches to small towns along our route; waving the green-and-red flag of the P.T.I., they raced Khan's car at dangerous speeds, trying to catch his eye.
Driving to Khan's rally in Sialkot from Lahore the previous day, I saw car and motorcycle convoys that extended for miles, freezing traffic whenever they stopped. The forests of posters and banners in passing bazaars all featured Khan, photoshopped with Pakistan's revered founding fathers, the poet and philosopher Muhammad Iqbal and the politician Mohammed Ali Jinnah, and dressed in a variety of clothing, from solemn high-collar jackets to Western bluejeans and leather jackets. Drowning out the faded signs and symbols of Pakistan's other political parties, they pointed to Khan's extravagant spending in anticipation of the general elections, scheduled for next year.
Big money had clearly arranged for the buntings. But it had not paid for, not entirely at any rate, the crowds in Sialkot; and the P.T.I. had failed to anticipate their size and intensity. I squeezed into the stadium where the rally was held by the narrowest of gates, tearing my shirt in the mini-stampede and curtailing the arc of a policeman's offhandedly swung baton. Most of the young rallygoers, dressed in counterfeit brand-name jeans, T-shirts and sneakers, had traveled to Sialkot on their own, unlike some of their upper-middle-class peers in Lahore and Karachi, who were bused into Khan's massive rallies in October and December. They sat patiently through the long and often boring warm-up speeches, waiting for Khan's turn at the microphone, and then did not fail to cheer their hero's own lackluster invocations of the country's founding fathers, Iqbal and Jinnah.alking to the young fans, I discovered an almost-mystical reverence for Khan. Many of them were cricket enthusiasts who recalled Khan's exploits with awe, especially his captaincy of the team that won Pakistan the Cricket World Cup in 1992 -- the country's greatest sporting success. They also knew of his philanthropic work -- the cancer hospital in Lahore and a university near Mianwali. Pressed on policy specifics, they went blank, claiming that an honest leader like Khan was all that was needed to turn Pakistan around, and it could be done in 90 days.
For many in this new generation of Pakistanis -- more than 60 percent of the population is below age 25 -- there is little choice between the untried and evidently incorruptible Khan and such repeatedly discredited leaders as Zardari and Sharif. His long and uncompromising opposition to American presence in the region not only pleases assorted Islamic radicals; it also echoes a deep Pakistani anger about the C.I.A.'s drone attacks, whose frequency has increased under the Obama administration. Expatriate and local businessmen, tormented by the stagnating economy (while neighboring India has boomed), line up to donate money for his massive rallies (though Khan himself does not believe, he told me, in ''neoliberal capitalism''). Many rich Pakistanis, like Walid Iqbal, the Harvard-educated, Porsche-driving grandson of Pakistan's spiritual founder, whose embrace of the P.T.I. in November had, he told me, made ''national news,'' see Khan as someone they themselves would like to be: devoutly Muslim, proudly nationalist, sophisticated, successful. Meanwhile, Pakistan's private media, which include several raucously partisan news channels, help obscure Khan's obvious handicaps -- the P.T.I.'s lack of a political base in large provinces like Sindh, a P.P.P. stronghold -- with extensive coverage of his made-for-television rallies. And it is not inconceivable that the army and the I.S.I. -- or elements within -- have spotted a likely winner and potential partner. Najam Sethi, the editor of a prominent English-language weekly, The Friday Times, which for years ran a satirical column titled ''Im the Dim,'' told me that various known sympathizers of the I.S.I. had asked him to support Khan.
Like all populist politicians, Khan appears to offer something to everyone. Yet the great differences between his constituencies -- socially liberal, upper-middle-class Pakistanis and the deeply conservative residents of Pakistan's tribal areas -- seem irreconcilable. The only women I could see during the Sialkot rally were on the remote stage, wives of local politicians and businessmen, the sun glinting off their big sunglasses. At the rally in Mianwali, huge clouds of dust kicked up by tens of thousands of men bleached the reds and greens of the flags and banners, and the speeches alternated with earsplitting eruptions of P.T.I.'s theme music, Dil Nek Ho Neeyat Saaf To Ho Insaf Kahay Imran Khan (''A good heart and pure intentions will deliver justice, says Imran Khan''). Reports later emerged of many women at the rally, but I could only see one, on the overcrowded stage. She was a P.T.I. activist, another recent convert, belonging to one of the feudal and clan networks that still largely determine who will vote for whom in Pakistan's elections. There were many such local impresarios of bloc voting: the uncle of one politician I spoke to defeated Khan in his very first election in 1997; he had now brought, he claimed, a 25-kilometer-long convoy of supporters from his tribe to the rally. These traditional middlemen of Pakistani politics were all keen to catch the eye of the TV anchor Hamid Mir, who sat in the front row, seemingly untroubled when the speakers pointed to his presence as an endorsement of the P.T.I.
Khawaja, covering her head with a thin shawl she said she had packed especially for conservative Mianwali, kept working Khan's twitter feed: ''Such enthusiasm esp from youth! P.T.I.'s wave rides high!'' Khan himself seemed aloof from the cheering crowds and the party members keen to be near him as he sat, in reading glasses, marking up his speech. Given the setting, a region adjacent to the tribal areas where the C.I.A.'s drones are perennially hovering, I expected more rhetorical onslaughts against the United States and loud avowals of Islamic piety. (Next month, Khan plans to lead a massive protest march through Waziristan, accompanied by women from the antiwar American group Code Pink, as well as armed members of Pashtun tribes.) Khan, who claims that Obama is ''worse than Bush,'' has been known to pray in public during his rallies, and one of his party's many vice presidents had in recent days shared a platform with Hafiz Saeed founder of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, the terrorist organization implicated in the attacks on Mumbai in 2008. While Pakistan's death toll during its participation in the war on terror -- 40,000 -- was deplored, the harshest words were directed at Zardari, Nawaz Sharif and his brother Shahbaz Sharif. Their corruption scandals were brought up and then, unfairly, the brothers' recourse to hair transplants, which had plainly improved the looks of many of the politicians hovering around Khan.The sun, flame-red and huge behind the dust, had nearly set before Khan took the lectern. Abruptly, many began leaving. More surprising, the crowd onstage suddenly thinned. Hamid Mir, followed by a group of autograph seekers and politicians hoping to be on his show, made a particularly grand exit. Khan's groupies, having registered their proximity to their idol, were now trying to avoid the massive traffic pileups resulting from the wholly unsupervised exit of tens of thousands of rallygoers. ''It always happens,'' Khawaja told me later. ''People want to get close to him, and then they leave him all alone on the stage.''
Khan's disparate constituencies can make for some strange bedfellows. Senior members of his party have shared a platform with Difa-e-Pakistan (Pakistan Defense Council), a coalition of extremist groups that includes anti-Shiite militants as well as promoters of jihad against India and America. Khan looked exasperated when I brought up allegations about his party's links to the I.S.I. and Islamic extremists. ''It is these Westoxified Pakistanis who call me 'Taliban Khan,' '' he said, using his favorite description for Anglicized Pakistanis of his own class. ''But how can they compare me with these uneducated boys of the Taliban or connect me to mullahs? If you read my book, you will find that the Islam I relate to is Sufi Islam. Our policy is to talk to all political players. These so-called extremists in Pakistan should be brought into the mainstream; if you marginalize them, you radicalize them.'' (After the Americans began negotiating with the Taliban in Afghanistan, he told me with some satisfaction that they should have done so a long time ago.)
There was another small explosion of anger when I asked him about his stance on women's rights. Khan refused in 2006 to support reforms to the so-called Hudood Ordinance, which exposes rape victims to charges of adultery unless they can produce four males who witnessed their violation. Khan claims he voted against the reform bill as a protest against Musharraf and would repeal the Hudood law altogether if elected. Many liberal-minded Pakistanis still worried about his positions, I told Khan.
''Morons!'' he exclaimed. ''First you have to guarantee basic social and economic rights before you get to gender rights! What is the point of these NGO workers showing up in conservative tribal areas wearing bluejeans?!''
He then turned to his party's prospects. The conspiracies against him were mounting, he said. In Lahore, he had received extensive live coverage; the Sialkot and Mianwali rallies were shown only briefly on the private television channels. Both Zardari and Sharif were putting pressure on the media. ''They are getting scared,'' Khan said. ''They can see that the tsunami is coming.''
Fortunately, he did not need to rely so much on the compromised TV channels. ''The social media is changing Pakistan,'' Khan said. Most Pakistanis had a mobile phone. They were signing up for Twitter and Facebook in the millions. Direct access to voters meant that the P.T.I. could ignore the old constituency politics of appeasing the middlemen. ''I always knew,'' Khan said, ''that a mass movement would take the P.T.I. to power, not wheeling and dealing with power brokers.''
Still, could he dispense with their help entirely? The newspapers were full of stories of discord between Hashmi and Qureshi and of discontent among older members of the P.T.I. Khan pondered the question and then said: ''Today in the party meeting we made a breakthrough. We are going to have a membership drive and then elections through mobile phones. The youth want new faces. They can elect their own from the ground up. There has to be democracy in our own party before we bring it to the country. This is what we decided in the meeting today, and I feel liberated.''
Yet both the media elite that Khan says he can sidestep and the bloggers and tweeters who shape public opinion in the new media have been vocal in their criticism. ''He says we are working for Nawaz Sharif,'' Sana Bucha, one of Pakistan's leading anchors, told me. ''But how many rallies can we cover? The ratings for shows in which Khan appeared have already fallen; he is overexposed. He is worried of course because he knows that the media is becoming the most powerful entity in Pakistan now.''
Mehmal Sarfraz, a journalist I met in Lahore, said that Khan's young online supporters had ''fascist'' tendencies. Many of them viciously trolled her whenever she criticized Khan on her blog and on Twitter. (This is a common experience for Khan's critics. Two weeks after I spoke to Bucha, Khan appeared on her talk show, apologizing for how some P.T.I. supporters had harassed her online.) They were particularly angry, Sarfraz said, laughing, that Khan's critic was a hijab-wearing woman. She derided Khan's view of extremism in Pakistan as the offshoot of the American war on terror. ''These jihadists supported by the I.S.I. were in Kashmir well before 9/11. And why does Imran blame Zardari for the drone attacks when everyone knows that the president has no power and the military gave the Americans permission to use the drones? It is because the military and intelligence agencies are backing Imran.''
In the small world of the Pakistani elite, many were equally convinced of Khan's dubious allegiances. There were stories circulating about how he recently met the C.I.A. and MI6 in London, then about how the tsunami was being reversed. The head of the I.S.I., Khan's greatest supporter, retired in March; the military had decided to support the PML-N in the next elections; it was why the media were turning away from Khan. It was hard to navigate this murk of Pakistani politics, the frenetic conspiracy-theorizing and free-floating malice.
Some things did, however, seem truer than others. An academic who dislikes Khan said he was too egotistic to be manipulated by the military establishment. Many others voiced an apparent consensus that the long years of Musharraf's misrule and humiliations like the undetected American operation against Osama bin Laden had damaged the army's reputation and undermined its authority. It was why politicians like Nawaz Sharif, or journalists like Hamid Mir, felt emboldened enough to stand up to the men in uniform.
The army itself was changing under its chief of staff, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, a ''remarkable man,'' according to a senior Western diplomat. Battered by the previous decade of the war on terror, it was, the diplomat claimed, moving out of politics and shifting to a focus on economic growth and a new policy of d?nte, if not peace, with its old enemy, India. The novelist Mohammed Hanif had another interpretation of the army's chastened mood. As he told me, with a wry smile, ''They have no one left to lie to, no one left to betray.''
The next time I saw Khan, it was April and he had just returned from a trip to Turkey, where he met Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Khan's tweets, with their characteristic exclamation marks, kept me informed about his progress. ''Turkey today has embraced its past & moved forward as a confident nation proud of its history & present achievements. We can learn so much!'' He seemed more pumped up than usual, his pre-big-game go-get-'em zeal spilling over into repetitive praise for the Turkish leadership.
''Abdullah Gul and Erdogan -- they are such impressive people. I last went to Turkey on my honeymoon. In 15 years, they have totally transformed the country!''
''The most interesting thing,'' he added later ''is how they have controlled the army which ruled Turkey for such a long time. You can of course do that if you have moral authority invested in you by the people.''
We were driving to yet another rally, this one in Abbottabad (Khawaja had briefly triumphed over her male colleagues and managed to insert me in Khan's Land Cruiser). Khan sat next to the driver; I was placed between the two rivals, Hashmi and Qureshi. As we drove past the villa's wrought-iron gates, again late for the rally by nearly three hours, Khan said, ''Inshallah, we will make history today.'' ''Inshallah, Inshallah,'' Hashmi and Querishi repeated. It wasn't clear initially what they were referring to, but eventually it transpired that the hilly town of Abbottabad, which had become famous around the world as Osama bin Laden's last residence, the place where he settled into discreet domesticity with his multiple wives and was killed by American forces, could now re-enter history for hosting a massive P.T.I. rally.
The event also marked a return to the generous media coverage the P.T.I. had enjoyed. Many channels promised to cover the rally live, even though President Zardari was visiting India the same day after a long gap. It explained the buoyant mood in the car, and Khan's own cheerfulness. The mood was absorbed by the driver, who declined to pay at a tollbooth on the winding road to Abbottabad, gesturing to his V.I.P. passenger. As we moved off, Khan reprimanded the driver, good-humoredly: ''Tuu abhii se baadshah ho gayaa hai!'' -- ''You are already behaving like an emperor!''
Khan chortled over the fact that the previous week, President Zardari's son, Bilawal Bhutto, the 23-year-old chairman of the P.P.P., had apparently made a speech in English to his party members. ''The poor guy doesn't know any Urdu.'' Khan took a few swipes at various ''Westoxified'' Pakistanis sought after by deluded Westerners: the editor Najam Sethi (''State Department's man''); the journalist Ahmed Rashid (''totally bogus''). He then gossiped with Qureshi and Hashmi about the wealth of various politicians, like the former interior minister, Rehman Malik, a ''frontman for Zardari,'' who, they said, had a personal fortune of $300 million.
Khan tittered when I told him that many people thought of him as an I.S.I. frontman. ''The I.S.I.,'' he said, ''was unable to muster up an audience for even Pervez Musharraf's rally when he was in power. They cannot manufacture people's enthusiasm for change.'' As he spoke, three boys at a slow turn in the road ran toward his car, and Khan, gesturing to them, drawled, ''You can see the tsunami coming. It cannot be stopped.
''The man who says we are the I.S.I.'s creation,'' he added, ''is Nawaz Sharif -- and he himself was a creation of the I.S.I.!'' I felt Hashmi, once Sharif's close colleague, stiffen by my side.
While Khawaja was busy tweeting on his behalf from another car (''Route to Abbottabad a reminder of the intense beauty of our wonderful country! Green hues of plants, golden wheat, fruit trees -- God's gifts''), Khan continued his jaunty disparagements. ''The Americans are making such big mistakes. They should have tried Osama bin Laden like Saddam Hussein was; even the Nazis, who killed millions, received a trial.'' He kept returning to Turkey as an instructive lesson for Pakistan. ''At least their army actually fought and defeated European armies, and created a nation.'' Hashmi made a joke, which I couldn't really follow, about the Pakistani Army as the ''defender of faith.'' Both Khan and Qureshi laughed heartily.
As we drew closer to Abbottabad, some text messages on Khan's Blackberry punctured the cheerful mood. Khan was told that he couldn't speak before 5 p.m. if he wanted to avoid clashing with Zardari's photo-op in India. The rally itself, held in a sports stadium, was the usual bedlam, except that this time there was a large gallery filled with women.
I had already read Khan's speech, peering over his shoulder in the car; it was not much different from what he said in previous rallies. Like many in the audience, I left before 5 p.m., late in Abbottabad's valley, where darkness sets in early. On the way back to Islamabad, I stopped at a grocery store to buy some water. The owner, watching wrestling on his small television set, was a bit reluctant when I asked him to switch over to Khan's rally. ''Has Imran come?'' he asked. ''Is he speaking now? People have been waiting since noon.''
I told him the crowd was starting to disperse. ''Of course they will,'' he retorted. ''They have to travel long distances in the hills.'' He snorted when I said that the lateness of Khan's speech was due to the media's schedule. After some channel-hopping, I caught a brief clip of Khan at the rally repeating his gibe about Bilawal Bhutto's lack of Urdu. The depleted crowd, it seemed clear, was not going to make history for Imran Khan, or supersede Abbottabad's reputation as the town where a semiretired terrorist found marital bliss. But he seemed more relaxed than he was in Sialkot and Mianwali. The TV channels had clearly not betrayed him. And for once his groupies, spellbound by the cameramen, had not abandoned Khan onstage.
Imran Khan predicts 'a revolution' in Pakistani politics
Former national cricket captain vows to fight corruption and negotiate with the Taliban in address to 100,000 at Lahore rally Declan Walsh theguardian Sunday 6 November 2011.jpg)
Khan's granitic handsomeness, which first glamorized international cricket and has sustained the British media's long fascination with his public and private lives, is now, as he nears 60, a bit craggy. There are lines and dark patches around his eyes. The stylishly barbered hair, thinning at the top, is flecked with gray, and his unmodulated baritone, ubiquitous across Pakistan's TV channels, can sound irritably didactic.
''The public contact is never easy for me,'' he said. ''I am basically a private person.''
The moment of melancholy confession passed. Leaning forward in the dark, his hands chopping the air for emphasis, Khan unleashed a flood of strong, often angrily righteous, opinions about secularism, Islam, women's rights and Salman Rushdie.
That month he had canceled his participation at a conference in New Delhi where Rushdie was expected, citing the offense caused by ''The Satanic Verses'' to Muslims worldwide. Rushdie, in turn, suggested khan was a ''dictator in waiting,'' comparing his looks with those of Libya's former dictator, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.
''What is he talking about%3F What is he talking about?'' Khan started, ''I always hated his writing. He always sees the ugly side of things. He is -- what is the word Jews use? -- a 'self-hating' Muslim.
''Why can't the West understand? When I first went to England, I was shocked to see the depiction of Christianity in Monty Python's 'Life of Brian.' This is their way. But for us Muslims, the holy Koran and the prophet, peace be upon him, are sacred. Why can't the West accept that we have different ways of looking at our religions?
''Anyway,'' Khan said in a calmer voice, ''I am called an Islamic fundamentalist by Rushdie. My critics in Pakistan say I am a Zionist agent. I must be doing something right.''
Those adept at playing Pakistan's never-ending game of political musical chairs have begun to take note of Khan. His party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (Movement for Justice, or P.T.I., as it is called), has never won more than a single seat in Pakistan's 342-member National Assembly. But a recent Pew opinion poll reveals Khan to be the country's most popular politician by a large margin, and his growing appeal has drawn together two rivals from the establishment parties -- the suavely patrician figure of Shah Mehmood Qureshi, Pakistan's foreign minister from 2008 to 2011, and Javed Hashmi, an older street-fighting politician from Punjab, Pakistan's politically dominant province -- who are now, in Khan's hastily improvised hierarchy, vice chairman and president of the P.T.I. respectively.
Khan's campaign strategy is simple: he has promised to uproot corruption within 90 days, end the country's involvement in America's war on terror and institute an Islamic welfare state. His quest for a moral Pakistani state and a righteous politics is clearly informed by his own private journey. Famous in the 1980s as a glamorous cricketer, he is at pains to affirm his Islamic identity in his new autobiography, ''Pakistan: A Personal History.'' A rising politician's careful self-presentation, the book fails to mention his friendship with Mick Jagger, his frequenting of London's nightclubs in the 1980s and other instances of presumably un-Islamic deportment, like the series of attractive women with whom he was linked by racy British tabloids. It does devote one chapter to Jemima Goldsmith, the daughter of a wealthy British businessman, Jimmy Goldsmith, whom he married in 1995 -- he was 43, she was 21 -- but this serves largely as a backdrop for his early, self-sacrificing immersion in politics.
His political enemies in Pakistan, he writes, used Jemima Khan's partly Jewish ancestry to depict him as a Lothario with dubious Zionist affiliations -- attacks that, Khan claims, made Pakistan a taxing place for Jemima and eventually led to their divorce. The marriage ended in 2004. Khan's two sons now live with their mother in London, but he and his wife have remained friends. In an article in The Independent, Jemima revealed that khan stays with her mother, Lady Annabel Goldsmith, when in London, and noted that Khan told her not to worry about how their marriage is depicted in the book: ''You come across as you always wanted to -- Joan of Arc.''References to Allah's grace cropped up early on in Khan's public utterances, but they multiplied as he struggled to break into Pakistani politics. He now casts himself as the archetypal confused sinner who has discovered the restorative certainties of religion and is outraged over the decadence of his own class. ''In today's Lahore and Karachi,'' he writes, ''rich women go to glitzy parties in Western clothes chauffeured by men with entirely different customs and values.'' His avowals of Islam, his identification with the suffering masses and his attacks on his affluent, English-speaking peers have long been mocked in the living rooms of Lahore and Karachi as the hypocritical ravings of ''Im the Dim'' and ''Taliban Khan'' -- the two favored monikers for him. (His villa is commonly cited as evidence of his own unalloyed elitism.) Nevertheless, Khan's autobiography creates a cogent picture out of his -- and Pakistan's -- clashing identities. There is the proud young man of Pashtun blood born into Pakistan's Anglicized feudal and bureaucratic elite -- an elite that disdained their poor, Urdu-speaking compatriots. There is the student and cricketer in 1970s Britain, when racism was endemic and even Pakistanis considered themselves inferior to their former white masters. Then we meet the brilliant cricket captain who inspired a world-beating team; the D.I.Y. philanthropist who pursued his dream of building a world-class cancer hospital in Pakistan; the jaded middle-aged sybarite who found a wise Sufi mentor; the political neophyte who awakened to social and economic injustice; and finally the experienced politician, who after 15 years of having his faith tested by electoral failure is now convinced of his destiny as Pakistan's savior.
The day before our evening walk on his estate, I sat in the living room of Khan's Moorish-style villa, where Pakistan's future was being plotted by young men in designer shalwar kameezes and sunglasses, huddled mock-conspiratorially in small groups, and older politicians sprawled on sofas on the long veranda. The country's broiling summer was approaching, and violent street protests over power failures had erupted in many Pakistani cities, adding to the general unease fed by a floundering economy, gang warfare in Karachi, sectarian killings of Shiites, the C.I.A.'s drone attacks in the northwestern tribal areas and the drip-drip of revelations about a defiantly venal ruling class.
Khan was running nearly three hours late for a rally in the northwestern town of Mianwali -- one of his mass-contact campaigns that had in recent months galvanized his tiny party. But no one at the villa seemed at all worried by the delay. After all, Khan is offering nothing less than revolution of the kind that has swept the Arab world, a ''tsunami,'' in his own ill-chosen metaphor.
After many attempts, he has succeeded in provoking a popular response now, perhaps because Pakistan's institutions are suffering their deepest crisis of legitimacy. Contempt-of-court charges were filed this year against two prime ministers. And the debased ancien r?me Khan rails against is gaudily personified by Pakistan's leaders past and present: Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the military dictator from 1999 to 2008, who now lives in exile in London and Dubai; the current president, Asif Ali Zardari, who after the assassination of his wife, former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, conveniently unearthed her last will declaring him her political heir, then appointed his teenage son, Bilawal, chairman of his party, the Pakistan Peoples Party (P.P.P.); and Nawaz Sharif, who, exalted to prime-minister in 1990 by Pakistan's all-powerful military establishment and then banished by it into long exile in 1999, has re-emerged as the leader of the country's main opposition party, the Pakistan Muslim League -- Nawaz (PML-N).
Outside on the veranda, the P.T.I. chieftains, Qureshi and Hashmi, were confabulating with Hamid Mir, an influential TV anchor -- he interviewed Osama bin Laden both before and after 9/11 -- with a checkered political history. Once known for his links to Pakistan's military-intelligence complex, Mir has lately reinvented himself as a critic of the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (I.S.I.) -- the country's dreaded intelligence agency, accused by the United States of supporting anti-American militants in Afghanistan. Army rule ostensibly ended with the enforced departure of Musharraf in 2008, but the men in uniform, according to Mir, were still manipulating things behind the scenes.
Snatches of the conversation between Mir and the P.T.I. chiefs drifted through to the living room. Mir was saying that Khan's party must dispel the growing impression that it was an I.S.I. front. Mir failed to mention that it was he who tweeted recently that the head of the I.S.I. at the time, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, was responsible for the text messages many politicians received asking them to support Khan.Suddenly, the many separate conversations in the living room and veranda ceased, Qureshi and Hashmi stood to attention and even Mir, who hosted Khan often on his TV show ''Capital Talk,'' looked a bit star-struck, as the P.T.I. leader finally bounded in, all coiled energy and purpose.
Khan had returned late from a rally in Sialkot the previous night, but his gym-toned frame, encased in a dark gray shalwar kameez, radiated the supreme assurance of an athlete configured for routine success. In 2009, I ran into him on a flight from Lahore to London and was impressed by his unflagging drive. Widely regarded then as a miserable failure in politics, he seemed eager to claim proximity to powerful men and large events. During a visit to the United States the previous year, he met with Senator Joe Biden, then the chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, and told him how the long opposition to the American war in Afghanistan stoked extremism in Pakistan. He said he expected Barack Obama to understand that the Pashtun tribes, fighting foreign occupiers of their land, would never be vanquished. He understood their mind-set: after all, he himself belonged to a Pashtun tribe.
Khan's intense nationalism, aroused on cricket fields in the late '70s when darker-skinned cricketers from the former British Empire finally began to beat white teams regularly, was whetted in the 1990s by the anti-West rhetoric of Asian leaders like Malaysia's Mahathir Mohamad and Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew, and then by the post-9/11 perception that the United States had bribed and bullied Pakistan into its misconceived war on terror and was now controlling the country's internal affairs. ''The Musharraf years were so shameful,'' he told me. ''The Westoxified Pakistanis have been selling their souls and killing their own people for a few million dollars. And then the Americans come in with shady deals to bring Benazir Bhutto back and let crooked people like Zardari go scot-free. I was so disgusted, and if I hadn't been in politics I would have left Pakistan.''
Moving now through the crowd of his supporters gathered at his estate, Khan struggled to adopt the politician's pose of humility. After quick salaam aleikums, he sprang across the villa's courtyard to his gleaming black S.U.V., Mir, Hashmi and Qureshi struggling to keep pace with him. Within minutes, the convoy led by Khan's Land Cruiser was hurtling down the hill on narrow, potholed roads, past walled mansions and small dark shops, to the highway to Rawalpindi and the tribal borderlands of Mianwali.
I sat with Anila Khawaja, Khan's British-born international media ''coordinator.'' A vivacious woman in her early 40s, Khawaja was one of the many expatriate Pakistanis either bankrolling or volunteering for Khan's political campaign. They, along with the tony youth of Lahore and Karachi, hold up one end of Khan's diverse fan base that also includes lower-middle-class youth from small Punjabi towns and the tribal regions of the northwestern Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province. ''Imran speaks our language,'' Khawaja told me in her British-accented English.
But it was becoming clear that few other people in his party did. I had heard about her constant struggles with the P.T.I.'s frustratingly inefficient, all-male organization, and the heartburn generated among Khan's stalwart supporters by the rapid promotion of such opportunistic late-joiners as Hashmi and Qureshi. Khawaja had wanted me to travel with Khan to the rally in Sialkot but was overruled by her male seniors. They wanted Khan to themselves at all times, crowding into his car, jostling to be photographed next to him at his rallies.
I had heard similar complaints from other members of the party: that the P.T.I. was a one-man show, with a superstar chairman self-absorbedly pied-pipering a gaggle of squabbling egos and craven flatterers. For the moment, however, any anxieties about lack of internal democracy were balanced by the routinely renewed spectacle of mass support for the P.T.I. In between tweeting from Khan's account (''Such beautiful scenery!''), Khawaja pointed excitedly to the crowds of young men on motorcycles that awaited us at the approaches to small towns along our route; waving the green-and-red flag of the P.T.I., they raced Khan's car at dangerous speeds, trying to catch his eye.
Driving to Khan's rally in Sialkot from Lahore the previous day, I saw car and motorcycle convoys that extended for miles, freezing traffic whenever they stopped. The forests of posters and banners in passing bazaars all featured Khan, photoshopped with Pakistan's revered founding fathers, the poet and philosopher Muhammad Iqbal and the politician Mohammed Ali Jinnah, and dressed in a variety of clothing, from solemn high-collar jackets to Western bluejeans and leather jackets. Drowning out the faded signs and symbols of Pakistan's other political parties, they pointed to Khan's extravagant spending in anticipation of the general elections, scheduled for next year.
Big money had clearly arranged for the buntings. But it had not paid for, not entirely at any rate, the crowds in Sialkot; and the P.T.I. had failed to anticipate their size and intensity. I squeezed into the stadium where the rally was held by the narrowest of gates, tearing my shirt in the mini-stampede and curtailing the arc of a policeman's offhandedly swung baton. Most of the young rallygoers, dressed in counterfeit brand-name jeans, T-shirts and sneakers, had traveled to Sialkot on their own, unlike some of their upper-middle-class peers in Lahore and Karachi, who were bused into Khan's massive rallies in October and December. They sat patiently through the long and often boring warm-up speeches, waiting for Khan's turn at the microphone, and then did not fail to cheer their hero's own lackluster invocations of the country's founding fathers, Iqbal and Jinnah.alking to the young fans, I discovered an almost-mystical reverence for Khan. Many of them were cricket enthusiasts who recalled Khan's exploits with awe, especially his captaincy of the team that won Pakistan the Cricket World Cup in 1992 -- the country's greatest sporting success. They also knew of his philanthropic work -- the cancer hospital in Lahore and a university near Mianwali. Pressed on policy specifics, they went blank, claiming that an honest leader like Khan was all that was needed to turn Pakistan around, and it could be done in 90 days.
For many in this new generation of Pakistanis -- more than 60 percent of the population is below age 25 -- there is little choice between the untried and evidently incorruptible Khan and such repeatedly discredited leaders as Zardari and Sharif. His long and uncompromising opposition to American presence in the region not only pleases assorted Islamic radicals; it also echoes a deep Pakistani anger about the C.I.A.'s drone attacks, whose frequency has increased under the Obama administration. Expatriate and local businessmen, tormented by the stagnating economy (while neighboring India has boomed), line up to donate money for his massive rallies (though Khan himself does not believe, he told me, in ''neoliberal capitalism''). Many rich Pakistanis, like Walid Iqbal, the Harvard-educated, Porsche-driving grandson of Pakistan's spiritual founder, whose embrace of the P.T.I. in November had, he told me, made ''national news,'' see Khan as someone they themselves would like to be: devoutly Muslim, proudly nationalist, sophisticated, successful. Meanwhile, Pakistan's private media, which include several raucously partisan news channels, help obscure Khan's obvious handicaps -- the P.T.I.'s lack of a political base in large provinces like Sindh, a P.P.P. stronghold -- with extensive coverage of his made-for-television rallies. And it is not inconceivable that the army and the I.S.I. -- or elements within -- have spotted a likely winner and potential partner. Najam Sethi, the editor of a prominent English-language weekly, The Friday Times, which for years ran a satirical column titled ''Im the Dim,'' told me that various known sympathizers of the I.S.I. had asked him to support Khan.
Like all populist politicians, Khan appears to offer something to everyone. Yet the great differences between his constituencies -- socially liberal, upper-middle-class Pakistanis and the deeply conservative residents of Pakistan's tribal areas -- seem irreconcilable. The only women I could see during the Sialkot rally were on the remote stage, wives of local politicians and businessmen, the sun glinting off their big sunglasses. At the rally in Mianwali, huge clouds of dust kicked up by tens of thousands of men bleached the reds and greens of the flags and banners, and the speeches alternated with earsplitting eruptions of P.T.I.'s theme music, Dil Nek Ho Neeyat Saaf To Ho Insaf Kahay Imran Khan (''A good heart and pure intentions will deliver justice, says Imran Khan''). Reports later emerged of many women at the rally, but I could only see one, on the overcrowded stage. She was a P.T.I. activist, another recent convert, belonging to one of the feudal and clan networks that still largely determine who will vote for whom in Pakistan's elections. There were many such local impresarios of bloc voting: the uncle of one politician I spoke to defeated Khan in his very first election in 1997; he had now brought, he claimed, a 25-kilometer-long convoy of supporters from his tribe to the rally. These traditional middlemen of Pakistani politics were all keen to catch the eye of the TV anchor Hamid Mir, who sat in the front row, seemingly untroubled when the speakers pointed to his presence as an endorsement of the P.T.I.
Khawaja, covering her head with a thin shawl she said she had packed especially for conservative Mianwali, kept working Khan's twitter feed: ''Such enthusiasm esp from youth! P.T.I.'s wave rides high!'' Khan himself seemed aloof from the cheering crowds and the party members keen to be near him as he sat, in reading glasses, marking up his speech. Given the setting, a region adjacent to the tribal areas where the C.I.A.'s drones are perennially hovering, I expected more rhetorical onslaughts against the United States and loud avowals of Islamic piety. (Next month, Khan plans to lead a massive protest march through Waziristan, accompanied by women from the antiwar American group Code Pink, as well as armed members of Pashtun tribes.) Khan, who claims that Obama is ''worse than Bush,'' has been known to pray in public during his rallies, and one of his party's many vice presidents had in recent days shared a platform with Hafiz Saeed founder of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, the terrorist organization implicated in the attacks on Mumbai in 2008. While Pakistan's death toll during its participation in the war on terror -- 40,000 -- was deplored, the harshest words were directed at Zardari, Nawaz Sharif and his brother Shahbaz Sharif. Their corruption scandals were brought up and then, unfairly, the brothers' recourse to hair transplants, which had plainly improved the looks of many of the politicians hovering around Khan.The sun, flame-red and huge behind the dust, had nearly set before Khan took the lectern. Abruptly, many began leaving. More surprising, the crowd onstage suddenly thinned. Hamid Mir, followed by a group of autograph seekers and politicians hoping to be on his show, made a particularly grand exit. Khan's groupies, having registered their proximity to their idol, were now trying to avoid the massive traffic pileups resulting from the wholly unsupervised exit of tens of thousands of rallygoers. ''It always happens,'' Khawaja told me later. ''People want to get close to him, and then they leave him all alone on the stage.''
Khan's disparate constituencies can make for some strange bedfellows. Senior members of his party have shared a platform with Difa-e-Pakistan (Pakistan Defense Council), a coalition of extremist groups that includes anti-Shiite militants as well as promoters of jihad against India and America. Khan looked exasperated when I brought up allegations about his party's links to the I.S.I. and Islamic extremists. ''It is these Westoxified Pakistanis who call me 'Taliban Khan,' '' he said, using his favorite description for Anglicized Pakistanis of his own class. ''But how can they compare me with these uneducated boys of the Taliban or connect me to mullahs? If you read my book, you will find that the Islam I relate to is Sufi Islam. Our policy is to talk to all political players. These so-called extremists in Pakistan should be brought into the mainstream; if you marginalize them, you radicalize them.'' (After the Americans began negotiating with the Taliban in Afghanistan, he told me with some satisfaction that they should have done so a long time ago.)
There was another small explosion of anger when I asked him about his stance on women's rights. Khan refused in 2006 to support reforms to the so-called Hudood Ordinance, which exposes rape victims to charges of adultery unless they can produce four males who witnessed their violation. Khan claims he voted against the reform bill as a protest against Musharraf and would repeal the Hudood law altogether if elected. Many liberal-minded Pakistanis still worried about his positions, I told Khan.
''Morons!'' he exclaimed. ''First you have to guarantee basic social and economic rights before you get to gender rights! What is the point of these NGO workers showing up in conservative tribal areas wearing bluejeans?!''
He then turned to his party's prospects. The conspiracies against him were mounting, he said. In Lahore, he had received extensive live coverage; the Sialkot and Mianwali rallies were shown only briefly on the private television channels. Both Zardari and Sharif were putting pressure on the media. ''They are getting scared,'' Khan said. ''They can see that the tsunami is coming.''
Fortunately, he did not need to rely so much on the compromised TV channels. ''The social media is changing Pakistan,'' Khan said. Most Pakistanis had a mobile phone. They were signing up for Twitter and Facebook in the millions. Direct access to voters meant that the P.T.I. could ignore the old constituency politics of appeasing the middlemen. ''I always knew,'' Khan said, ''that a mass movement would take the P.T.I. to power, not wheeling and dealing with power brokers.''
Still, could he dispense with their help entirely? The newspapers were full of stories of discord between Hashmi and Qureshi and of discontent among older members of the P.T.I. Khan pondered the question and then said: ''Today in the party meeting we made a breakthrough. We are going to have a membership drive and then elections through mobile phones. The youth want new faces. They can elect their own from the ground up. There has to be democracy in our own party before we bring it to the country. This is what we decided in the meeting today, and I feel liberated.''
Yet both the media elite that Khan says he can sidestep and the bloggers and tweeters who shape public opinion in the new media have been vocal in their criticism. ''He says we are working for Nawaz Sharif,'' Sana Bucha, one of Pakistan's leading anchors, told me. ''But how many rallies can we cover? The ratings for shows in which Khan appeared have already fallen; he is overexposed. He is worried of course because he knows that the media is becoming the most powerful entity in Pakistan now.''
Mehmal Sarfraz, a journalist I met in Lahore, said that Khan's young online supporters had ''fascist'' tendencies. Many of them viciously trolled her whenever she criticized Khan on her blog and on Twitter. (This is a common experience for Khan's critics. Two weeks after I spoke to Bucha, Khan appeared on her talk show, apologizing for how some P.T.I. supporters had harassed her online.) They were particularly angry, Sarfraz said, laughing, that Khan's critic was a hijab-wearing woman. She derided Khan's view of extremism in Pakistan as the offshoot of the American war on terror. ''These jihadists supported by the I.S.I. were in Kashmir well before 9/11. And why does Imran blame Zardari for the drone attacks when everyone knows that the president has no power and the military gave the Americans permission to use the drones? It is because the military and intelligence agencies are backing Imran.''
In the small world of the Pakistani elite, many were equally convinced of Khan's dubious allegiances. There were stories circulating about how he recently met the C.I.A. and MI6 in London, then about how the tsunami was being reversed. The head of the I.S.I., Khan's greatest supporter, retired in March; the military had decided to support the PML-N in the next elections; it was why the media were turning away from Khan. It was hard to navigate this murk of Pakistani politics, the frenetic conspiracy-theorizing and free-floating malice.
Some things did, however, seem truer than others. An academic who dislikes Khan said he was too egotistic to be manipulated by the military establishment. Many others voiced an apparent consensus that the long years of Musharraf's misrule and humiliations like the undetected American operation against Osama bin Laden had damaged the army's reputation and undermined its authority. It was why politicians like Nawaz Sharif, or journalists like Hamid Mir, felt emboldened enough to stand up to the men in uniform.
The army itself was changing under its chief of staff, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, a ''remarkable man,'' according to a senior Western diplomat. Battered by the previous decade of the war on terror, it was, the diplomat claimed, moving out of politics and shifting to a focus on economic growth and a new policy of d?nte, if not peace, with its old enemy, India. The novelist Mohammed Hanif had another interpretation of the army's chastened mood. As he told me, with a wry smile, ''They have no one left to lie to, no one left to betray.''
The next time I saw Khan, it was April and he had just returned from a trip to Turkey, where he met Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Khan's tweets, with their characteristic exclamation marks, kept me informed about his progress. ''Turkey today has embraced its past & moved forward as a confident nation proud of its history & present achievements. We can learn so much!'' He seemed more pumped up than usual, his pre-big-game go-get-'em zeal spilling over into repetitive praise for the Turkish leadership.
''Abdullah Gul and Erdogan -- they are such impressive people. I last went to Turkey on my honeymoon. In 15 years, they have totally transformed the country!''
''The most interesting thing,'' he added later ''is how they have controlled the army which ruled Turkey for such a long time. You can of course do that if you have moral authority invested in you by the people.''
We were driving to yet another rally, this one in Abbottabad (Khawaja had briefly triumphed over her male colleagues and managed to insert me in Khan's Land Cruiser). Khan sat next to the driver; I was placed between the two rivals, Hashmi and Qureshi. As we drove past the villa's wrought-iron gates, again late for the rally by nearly three hours, Khan said, ''Inshallah, we will make history today.'' ''Inshallah, Inshallah,'' Hashmi and Querishi repeated. It wasn't clear initially what they were referring to, but eventually it transpired that the hilly town of Abbottabad, which had become famous around the world as Osama bin Laden's last residence, the place where he settled into discreet domesticity with his multiple wives and was killed by American forces, could now re-enter history for hosting a massive P.T.I. rally.
The event also marked a return to the generous media coverage the P.T.I. had enjoyed. Many channels promised to cover the rally live, even though President Zardari was visiting India the same day after a long gap. It explained the buoyant mood in the car, and Khan's own cheerfulness. The mood was absorbed by the driver, who declined to pay at a tollbooth on the winding road to Abbottabad, gesturing to his V.I.P. passenger. As we moved off, Khan reprimanded the driver, good-humoredly: ''Tuu abhii se baadshah ho gayaa hai!'' -- ''You are already behaving like an emperor!''
Khan chortled over the fact that the previous week, President Zardari's son, Bilawal Bhutto, the 23-year-old chairman of the P.P.P., had apparently made a speech in English to his party members. ''The poor guy doesn't know any Urdu.'' Khan took a few swipes at various ''Westoxified'' Pakistanis sought after by deluded Westerners: the editor Najam Sethi (''State Department's man''); the journalist Ahmed Rashid (''totally bogus''). He then gossiped with Qureshi and Hashmi about the wealth of various politicians, like the former interior minister, Rehman Malik, a ''frontman for Zardari,'' who, they said, had a personal fortune of $300 million.
Khan tittered when I told him that many people thought of him as an I.S.I. frontman. ''The I.S.I.,'' he said, ''was unable to muster up an audience for even Pervez Musharraf's rally when he was in power. They cannot manufacture people's enthusiasm for change.'' As he spoke, three boys at a slow turn in the road ran toward his car, and Khan, gesturing to them, drawled, ''You can see the tsunami coming. It cannot be stopped.
''The man who says we are the I.S.I.'s creation,'' he added, ''is Nawaz Sharif -- and he himself was a creation of the I.S.I.!'' I felt Hashmi, once Sharif's close colleague, stiffen by my side.
While Khawaja was busy tweeting on his behalf from another car (''Route to Abbottabad a reminder of the intense beauty of our wonderful country! Green hues of plants, golden wheat, fruit trees -- God's gifts''), Khan continued his jaunty disparagements. ''The Americans are making such big mistakes. They should have tried Osama bin Laden like Saddam Hussein was; even the Nazis, who killed millions, received a trial.'' He kept returning to Turkey as an instructive lesson for Pakistan. ''At least their army actually fought and defeated European armies, and created a nation.'' Hashmi made a joke, which I couldn't really follow, about the Pakistani Army as the ''defender of faith.'' Both Khan and Qureshi laughed heartily.
As we drew closer to Abbottabad, some text messages on Khan's Blackberry punctured the cheerful mood. Khan was told that he couldn't speak before 5 p.m. if he wanted to avoid clashing with Zardari's photo-op in India. The rally itself, held in a sports stadium, was the usual bedlam, except that this time there was a large gallery filled with women.
I had already read Khan's speech, peering over his shoulder in the car; it was not much different from what he said in previous rallies. Like many in the audience, I left before 5 p.m., late in Abbottabad's valley, where darkness sets in early. On the way back to Islamabad, I stopped at a grocery store to buy some water. The owner, watching wrestling on his small television set, was a bit reluctant when I asked him to switch over to Khan's rally. ''Has Imran come?'' he asked. ''Is he speaking now? People have been waiting since noon.''
I told him the crowd was starting to disperse. ''Of course they will,'' he retorted. ''They have to travel long distances in the hills.'' He snorted when I said that the lateness of Khan's speech was due to the media's schedule. After some channel-hopping, I caught a brief clip of Khan at the rally repeating his gibe about Bilawal Bhutto's lack of Urdu. The depleted crowd, it seemed clear, was not going to make history for Imran Khan, or supersede Abbottabad's reputation as the town where a semiretired terrorist found marital bliss. But he seemed more relaxed than he was in Sialkot and Mianwali. The TV channels had clearly not betrayed him. And for once his groupies, spellbound by the cameramen, had not abandoned Khan onstage.
Imran Khan predicts 'a revolution' in Pakistani politics
Former national cricket captain vows to fight corruption and negotiate with the Taliban in address to 100,000 at Lahore rally Declan Walsh theguardian Sunday 6 November 2011
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Imran Khan waves to supporters during a rally in Lahore which was attened by over 100,000 people. Photograph: K.M. Chaudary/AP
At the height of his cricket glory days, Imran Khan would visualise winning – standing on the podium, cup held aloft – and propelling Pakistan to victory. Last weekend, standing before a sea of supporters in Lahore, he had a similar epiphany about his political career.
"As I stood there, watching them, I knew the moment had come," Khan, who is the leader of the Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insafr party, said. "Now nothing can stop us. This is a revolution, a tsunami. We will not just win the next elections – we will sweep them."
Whether the former cricket captain can translate rhetoric into reality is hotly debated. Yet few doubt that last weekend's rally sent shockwaves across Pakistan's moribund political system.
Over 100,000 people crammed into a historic Lahore park. Many were middle-class Pakistanis – young, urban, educated – drawn by Khan's rhetoric and their anger at conventional politics.
"This is the emergence of a new force. The cry for change is resonating across Pakistan," said Ayaz Amir, a parliamentarian from rival Nawaz Sharif's party, who was there. "Young, old, professionals, women – I've never seen such people at a public meeting in Pakistan before."
The sight, Amir added, had "scared the living daylights" out of his own party.
But others are sceptical that Khan represents real change. "We've heard this rhetoric many times before," said Badar Alam, editor of Herald magazine. "I'm cautious about it. I don't know what agenda he is really promoting."
Khan is visibly buoyant. For years he has campaigned on a platform of what some call "anti-politics" – virulent criticism of the graft and patronage that infect Pakistani politics. Now, he says, he has been proved right.
Sitting on the veranda of his hilltop farmhouse outside Islamabad, he pointed across the city at the presidential palace. "[President Asif Ali] Zardari is a crook, nothing more," he said. "We've broken all records in corruption."
His plan for the economy is to "inspire" Pakistanis to pay tax – currently only 2% do so. "We just need to have some austerity and collect taxes. If we do that, we can balance our budgets," he said.
In power, Khan said, he would cut off American aid. "I want to be a friend of the Americans, not their lackey. Aid is a curse for a poor country; it stops you making the required reforms and props up crooks."
But perhaps most alarmingly for Pakistan's western allies – and some Pakistanis – Khan says he would negotiate with instead of fighting the Taliban militants who have been bombing Pakistani cities.
"Anyone who thinks this country will be taken over by Taliban are fools. There's no concept of a theocracy anywhere in the Muslim world for the past 1,400 years. If I came to power, I could end this conflict in 90 days – guaranteed."
Khan's choice of allies, many of them veterans of previous political dispensations, has also been controversial. Khan's foreign policy adviser, Shireen Mazari, is famously hostile to India; when editing a national newspaper she ran stories that branded British, Australian and American journalists as "CIA agents".
"I don't agree with her on everything. We give her hell on certain views," he says.
Yet Khan is defiantly proud that his newfound success is vindication against what he calls the "liberal, westernised elite" – wealthy, English-speaking Pakistanis who, he claims, are out of touch with the realities of their own country. "I call them coconuts: brown on the outside, white on the inside, looking at Pakistan through a westernised lens," he says.
His political views are firmly rooted in a particular view of Islam. He does not favour changes to the notorious blasphemy law – a virulent debate that led to the assassination of his friend Salmaan Taseer last January. "The time is not right. There would be bloodshed. We need to worry about other things," he says.
And he is careful to direct his barbs away from the powerful military, which controls relations with India, the US and the fight against the Taliban. Although Khan enthusiastically criticises [former president Pervez] Musharraf, who is now in exile, he has little criticism of the army chief, General Ashfaq Kayani.
"I have been critical of the generals in the past. I told them they are selling our blood for dollars," he says. "But this is not martial rule. It's up to our corrupt government to take responsibility." If he was in power and the army interfered, he says, he would resign. "We would go back to the people."
Khan enjoys a reputation for probity, having set up a cancer hospital in honour of his mother, who died of the disease. He also has a flash of glamour. A famous Pakistani pop band, Strings, opened last week's rally; supporters include his former wife, Jemima Khan, who attended a recent press conference in Islamabad to protest at CIA-led drone strikes in the tribal belt.
For some Pakistanis, Khan simply represents a protest against a moribund political system. "He's a bit of an idiot," said an architect from Lahore. "But he's better than the rest. I would vote for him."
To achieve his dream of becoming prime minister, Khan needs to convert his newfound popularity into seats in parliament (he has none, having boycotted the 2008 poll). To do so, he may have to recruit the same "corrupt" politicians to achieve a majority. "This is his most deadly flaw," says Herald editor Alam.
And time is short. Pakistan's next election is set for February 2013 at the latest, although a snap election is a possibility.
His party remains weak, he has few candidates and, crucially, many of his supporters have never voted before. Whether they will now, says Alam, is "perhaps the biggest unknown in Pakistani politics today."
Background
Although a self-styled "revolutionary", Imran Khan's politics are far from the fevered streets of the Arab Spring. The difference is democracy: whereas across the Muslim world, dissidents are fighting for the right to vote, Pakistanis already have it. But many dislike the leaders those elections have thrown up, hence the current upheaval.
President Asif Ali Zardari is an accidental leader, propelled into the job after his wife, Benazir Bhutto, was assassinated in December 2007. (Police indicted seven people for her killing last month, including two policemen, but the details remain murky.) Zardari has struggled to shake off the "Mr 10%" moniker – a reference to alleged corruption – while deteriorating economic and security conditions have plunged his poll ratings into the low teens.
But the main opposition challenger, Nawaz Sharif, has failed to capitalize on this misfortune. His N-league party, which controls the Punjab government, has grown unpopular for failing to contain an outbreak of dengue fever in recent months. Sharif is also estranged from the powerful military, which launched him into politics in the 1980s, due to his long-standing rivalry with Pervez Musharraf , the general who ousted Sharif from power in 1999.
The turmoil has emboldened challengers. One is Musharraf, who currently lives in exile in London, and has vowed to return to Pakistan next March. But the general faces numerous obstacles, including court prosecutions, security threats and opposition from the army leadership. The other is Khan, until recently viewed as a fringe player in national politics, seen most often on chatshows and protests against drone strikes.
All eyes are now fixed on senate elections next March, which should see Zardari's Pakistan Peoples Party take control of the upper house – and, possibly, pave the way for a second term as president for Zardari.
Imran Khan: the man who would be Pakistan's next prime minister
As he reaches 60, the Pashtun aristocrat who married into the height of British society says he is becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the legacy of colonialism. The cricketer turned politician talks in Islamaba
o Jason Burke
o The Observer, Sunday 4 March 2012
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'We need to be a friend of America, but not a hired gun. We will take no aid from them': Imran Khan at his home outside Islamabad. Photograph: Sam Phelps for the Observer
Imran Ahmad Khan Niazi, 59 years old, currently of Bani Gala village on the outskirts of the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, is certain of many things. He is certain that "a huge change" is coming to his country. He is certain, too, that a "revolution" is on its way. And even if he does not state it explicitly, he is certain that he will, within eight months to a year, win a landslide victory in elections to become Pakistan's prime minister. "When we are in power", he says these days, not "if we were in power".
When I arrive, Khan is sitting alone at a table in the garden of the house where he has lived since 2005. It is mid-afternoon, but the sun is low and the light is already fading. The house, built as a family home when he was still married to Jemima Goldsmith, sits on the crest of a ridge and commands a view of the foothills of the Himalayas, a large shimmering lake and the city of Islamabad. He is dressed entirely in black, working his BlackBerry.
The house has become part of Khan's political persona. There is the short journey through the increasingly scruffy villages and then up to the beautiful hacienda-style house with the dogs, the lawns, the swimming pool and the view. There is the image of the politician who currently leads all polls in the country, looking down from his hilltop on the city and the power that he seems set to seize. The vision of the uncorrupt outsider eyeing the distant den of iniquity that he is set to purge is simply too neat to ignore.
Consciously or otherwise, Khan does nothing to undermine the impression. He leads me briskly down to the edge of his land, steps up on to a large boulder overhanging the steep slope and points out the park which he saved from illegal development, and the new houses scattered across the shores of the lakes that are getting closer and closer to where we are standing. "Look at it," he says angrily. "There is no planning, no planning at all." He flings an arm out towards the serrated ridge of hills along the horizon. For, along with the certainty, there is righteous anger. This is directed at a number of different targets: a "corrupt political elite" who "plunder" Pakistan; strikes by American missile-armed unmanned drones against suspected Islamic militants near the Afghan frontier; the local "liberals" who condone the strikes; the lack of electricity crippling the country's economy; imperialists of old and neo-imperialists of today; the war on terror and its attendant human-rights abuses; multinational lending organisations; Washington; rich Pakistanis who avoid tax while their countrymen live in "multi-dimensional deprivation".
In Pakistan today, certainty and anger make a potent mix. The country, chronically unstable if astonishingly resilient, is not only suffering ongoing extremist violence but also terrible economic problems which are steadily wiping out any gains in prosperity made in previous decades. Over recent months Khan has held a series of huge political rallies, with crowds numbering more than 100,000. In terms of popularity at least, Khan and the party he founded 15 years ago, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (Pakistan Union for Justice), have made a major breakthrough.
In the brutal world of south Asian politics – where dynasties, patronage and frequently sheer muscle count more than policies or public support – this is a genuine achievement. In 1999 I spent several days with Khan and his partyworkers on the campaign trail in eastern Pakistan. The headline on my pessimistic piece was: "No Khan Do". These days few would risk such glib assessments of Khan's electoral chances.
The late 1990s, when Khan was making his political debut, were a raw time. The political scene in Pakistan was dominated by Benazir Bhutto, one of the most celebrated female politicians in the world, and her local rival, Nawaz Sharif. In 1999 the army stepped in through a bloodless and broadly popular coup. I saw Khan on and off occasionally over the subsequent years, but there was little to indicate that my earlier analysis was wrong. He was a legend in sporting terms – one of the best all-rounders in cricketing history – and increasingly well-thought of as a philanthropist, without doubt, but not a serious politician. A column in a local English-language political magazine relentlessly satirised the ambitions of "Im the Dim", and few disagreed.
Now Bhutto is dead, assassinated on 27 December 2007 by Islamic militants, and the old guard of politicians who have survived her, including her husband Asif Ali Zardari, president since 2008, are detested. Khan says he could take over – democratically, of course – at any moment, but he is biding his time. "We have the power to go out and block the government on any issue. But we will only have one chance and we have to be completely prepared." Back in the late 1990s, he tells me, politics was "like facing a fast bowler without pads, gloves or a helmet". Not any longer, he says.
Khan was born on 25 November 1952 into a wealthy and well-connected family in Lahore, Pakistan's eastern city. Ethnically he is a Pashtun, or Pathan, as British imperialists called the peoples concentrated along what once was known as the North-West Frontier. Educated at Lahore's Aitchison College, one of the most exclusive schools in Pakistan, the Royal Grammar School in Worcester and Oxford University, his early years were typical of Pakistan's anglicised upper classes. Khan reminisces about how his family home, Zaman Park, was surrounded by fields and woodland where he used to hunt partridge. "Now everything is built up; it's like living next to a motorway," he says. "The air pollution, noise pollution… It is terrible."
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Special delivery: playing at Lord’s in 1987. Khan made his Test debut against England in 1971 aged 18. Photograph: Bob Thomas/Getty Images
The shy teenager's precocious sporting talent took him rapidly into the national side: he made his Test debut against England in 1971, aged just 18. Eleven years later, after performances combining tenacity and flair, he was made captain of Pakistan. Khan's two autobiographies, All Round View (1992) and Pakistan: A Personal History (2010), both tell the story of his years as an international cricketer: the victories against the odds in front of the home crowd, the career-threatening injury overcome, the return from retirement at the age of 37, winning the World Cup – for the first and only time in Pakistan's sporting history – despite a ruined cartilage in his shoulder. It is only when in Pakistan, where the sport is a national passion, that the enormity of his sporting achievement is clear.
Neither book is forthcoming about his activities off the pitch, however. A string of rich, well-connected, beautiful women earned him a reputation as a playboy. Then in 1995 he married Jemima Goldsmith, daughter of the late billionaire Sir James Goldsmith. Aged only 21, she converted to Islam and moved to Pakistan. The couple soon had two sons.
"I had always wanted to marry a Pakistani, but I realised while I was playing cricket that sport at that level and marriage were not compatible," he says. "So I decided I'd only get married when I gave up sport." Khan twice announced his retirement: the first time, General Zia ul-Haq, then military dictator of Pakistan, persuaded him to reconsider, and the second time he returned to the team to help raise funds for Pakistan's first cancer hospital. His mother, to whom he wad been very close, had died of cancer in 1984 and in her memory he had decided to build a hospital which would offer free treatment to the poor. "The whole board [of the hospital] said I needed to keep playing so they could raise money. So I carried on until I was 39, and by then I was too old for an arranged marriage. I just could no longer trust someone else to find someone for me.
"So I found it very difficult," Khan continues. "The irony was I thought all the 25-year-olds were too young, and I was still looking when I met Jemima – and she was 21." The couple married in 1995 and divorced nine years later. "It would have had a greater chance of working if I hadn't been involved in politics or she had been Pakistani. Or if she could have got involved in the politics with me."
As one of his wife's grandfathers was Jewish, a noxious storm of abuse and conspiracy theories was unleashed. Pakistan is a country where antisemitism is so deep-rooted as to be remarkable only when absent. Local politicians targeted this "weak spot": spurious court cases, rabble-rousing editorials, underhand smears all contributed to make Pakistan a hostile environment for the young socialite heiress.
The construction of the cancer hospital and the leadership of his party consumed most of Khan's funds and time. "Because they attacked me and her, calling me part of the Jewish lobby, she couldn't get involved in politics and that was the beginning of it becoming more and more difficult. And she really gave it her best shot. I look back and think: could my marriage have worked? I think of the words of the prophet [Mohammed]: 'Don't fight destiny because destiny is God.' I believe the past is to learn from, not live in."
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'She really gave it her best shot': with his ex-wife Jemima on their wedding day in 1995. Photograph: Nils Jorgenson/Rex Features
He still gets on well with her family – when in London he stays with his former mother-in-law Lady Annabel Goldsmith – and has a "fabulous relationship" with his sons. A day or so after we meet, he is flying to London for three days for half term. "It's very important to spend time together. Children really need a mother and a father. They have different roles, but both are very important. This idea of having two men as parents. It's a nonsense."
Religion became important to Khan relatively late. He grew up, he says, surrounded by faith. His mother read him stories from the life of the Prophet Mohammed and at seven he was taught to read the Koran in Arabic by a visiting scholar. But as a young man, he was not devout. The return to faith came following his mother's illness and a profound personal interrogation, he says, prompted by the furore after the publication of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses. Wanting to defend Islam from what he saw as ignorant attacks, Khan began to read more widely about the religion.
These days his identity as a conservative, but not fundamentalist, Muslim has become part of his political programme and, in a way not often understood in the west, his political persona in Pakistan. Liberals in the country dismiss him as a mullah, literally a low-level cleric but figuratively an ignorant extremist, just, they say, without the beard that is the mark of the pious Muslim man. This, predictably, irritates Khan. His faith, he says, has been influenced primarily by the Sufi strand of Islamic practice, which emphasises a believer's direct engagement with God without the intercession of a cleric or scholar. Another major influence is Allama Iqbal, a poet, political activist and philosopher who died in 1938 and is considered one of the spiritual fathers of Pakistan. "Iqbal, who is my great inspiration, clashes with the mullahs," says Khan. "The message of all religions is to be just and humane but it is often distorted by the clergy."
For all the talk of tolerance, Khan's party has been keeping some strange company recently, sharing a platform, for example, with the Difa-e-Pakistan or Pakistan Defence Council. This is a coalition of extremist groups which wants to end any Pakistani alliance with the USA and includes people who not only explicitly support the Afghan Taliban but who are associated with terrorist and sectarian violence. At one recent rally of the council in Islamabad, I met members of Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan, a Sunni group which has murdered thousands of Shias, while around me hundreds chanted: "Death to America." Lashkar-e-Toiba, the organisation responsible for the 2008 attacks in Mumbai in India in which 166 died, is also part of the coalition. Mian Mohammed Aslam, the head of the Jamaat-e-Islami, a mass Islamist party similar to the Muslim Brotherhood in the Islamic world and dedicated to a similarly hardline, conservative programme, spoke warmly of "close relations" with Khan, even going as far as raising the prospect of an electoral pact with Khan's Tehreek-e-Insaf in the coming elections, when I interviewed him.
Khan says that as a politician he and his party need to reach out to everybody, but that does not mean that he endorses the views of the Islamists. Undoubtedly a social conservative who is religious in outlook and rhetoric, he does not lapse into simplistic binary analyses of the west (secular or "Crusader Christian" against Islam) like many of his countrymen. He denies being anti-western at all. "How can I be anti-western? How can you be anti-western when [the west] is so varied, so different? It doesn't make sense."
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Finger on the pulse: speaking at a rally in Lahore last month. 'We only have one chance and we have to be completely prepared,' he says. Photograph: Warrick Page/Getty Images
It is not religion driving Khan's anger but something else. Take, for example, his analysis of the violent insurgency in the western borders of his country. For most scholars, this is the result of a complex mix of factors: the breakdown of traditional society, war in Afghanistan in the 1980s and the 2000s, the generalised radicalisation of the Islamic world since 2001, al-Qaeda's presence, the Pakistani army's operations in the area and the civilian casualties caused by drone strikes. The militants themselves, who behead supposed spies and drive out development workers or teachers, are increasingly unpopular. Yet Khan calls the violence a "fight for Pashtun solidarity against a foreign invader". He insists "there is not a threat to Pakistan from Taliban ideology".
For Khan this foreign invasion takes various forms. There is dress (he speaks admiringly of how the Pashtuns still shun western clothes) and there is TV (he mentions how his former mother-in-law thought one channel beamed in from India was in fact American, because of all its adverts for consumer goods). His charge against the "liberal elite" is implicitly a charge against the most westernised elements in the country. It is a defence of a vision of the local, the authentic, the familiar, against globalisation.
However, with his cultured public-school vowels, his half-British children, his British ex-wife, his success at a game the English invented, it becomes a very personal argument, too. Khan says he first became aware of the effects of colonialism as a teenager. "My first shock was going from Aitchison to play for Lahore. The boys from the Urdu [local language] schools laughed at me… Then in England we had been trained to be English public schoolboys, which we were not. Hence the inferiority complex. Because we were not and could never be the thing we were trying to be."
Even the memory agitates him. "I saw the elite [in Pakistan] who were superior because they were more westernised. I used to hear that colonialism was about building roads, railways etc… but that's all bullshit. It kills your self-esteem. The elite become a cheap imitation of the coloniser." He says that he recently read that after 200 years of Arab rule in Sicily, the court continued to speak Arabic and wear Arab clothes for 50 years after their former overlords had left.
His recent book is full of such references. P34: "Colonialism, for my mother and father, was the ultimate humiliation." P43: "The more a Pakistani aped the British the higher up the social ladder he was considered to be." P64: "In today's Lahore and Karachi rich women go to glitzy parties in western clothes chauffeured by men with entirely different customs and values" – and so on through the 350 pages.
This lays him open to charges of hypocrisy, inconsistency, of being a self-hating "brown sahib" himself, accusations frequently made by the "liberal elite" Khan so detests. Yet Khan's patriotism, faith and honesty are attractive to many in a chronically unstable country seen as an exporter of extremism and violence, as irremediably corrupt, as "the most dangerous place in the world".
So, what would Khan do in power? At the moment he is thick on aspiration and thin on practical policy. He would, he says, cut government expenditure and raise tax collection. He would turn the mansions and villas of senior officials – "these colonial symbols" – into libraries or even museums "like after the Iranian revolution" to show the people how the elite lived. He would solve the "energy and education emergencies" and he would "totally pull out of the war on terror", withdrawing the army from the western border zone and letting "our people in [these areas] deal with the militants themselves". Whether he could make the country's powerful military obey such directives – his critics allege he is unhealthily close to the army – is unsure.
As for relations with Washington, his position is clear: "We need to be a friend of American, but not a hired gun," he says. "We will take no aid from them. We will stand on our own feet, with a fully sovereign foreign policy and no terrorism from our soil."
Which political leaders does he admire? Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the moderate Islamist Turkish prime minister, he says; Brazil's Lula da Silva, who forced a better redistribution of his country's newly generated wealth; Mahathir Mohamad and Lee Kuan Yew of Malaysia and Singapore, two authoritarians. But it doesn't really matter. If Khan does end up prime minister he will do things his way.
Khan is not "dim", as the elite who he detests contemptuously say, but is not an intellectual either. He is a politician riding a wave of public disaffection, and that wave might just carry him to power. What he does afterwards is not something he worries about. He will be 60 this autumn. This would only bother him, he says, if he "had nothing to look forward to". But he is convinced that he does. From his hilltop Khan looks down and says: "This country will go through its biggest change ever. A revolution is coming."
Munir Ahmed Baloch exposing Biased media against Imran Khan
At the height of his cricket glory days, Imran Khan would visualise winning – standing on the podium, cup held aloft – and propelling Pakistan to victory. Last weekend, standing before a sea of supporters in Lahore, he had a similar epiphany about his political career.
"As I stood there, watching them, I knew the moment had come," Khan, who is the leader of the Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insafr party, said. "Now nothing can stop us. This is a revolution, a tsunami. We will not just win the next elections – we will sweep them."
Whether the former cricket captain can translate rhetoric into reality is hotly debated. Yet few doubt that last weekend's rally sent shockwaves across Pakistan's moribund political system.
Over 100,000 people crammed into a historic Lahore park. Many were middle-class Pakistanis – young, urban, educated – drawn by Khan's rhetoric and their anger at conventional politics.
"This is the emergence of a new force. The cry for change is resonating across Pakistan," said Ayaz Amir, a parliamentarian from rival Nawaz Sharif's party, who was there. "Young, old, professionals, women – I've never seen such people at a public meeting in Pakistan before."
The sight, Amir added, had "scared the living daylights" out of his own party.
But others are sceptical that Khan represents real change. "We've heard this rhetoric many times before," said Badar Alam, editor of Herald magazine. "I'm cautious about it. I don't know what agenda he is really promoting."
Khan is visibly buoyant. For years he has campaigned on a platform of what some call "anti-politics" – virulent criticism of the graft and patronage that infect Pakistani politics. Now, he says, he has been proved right.
Sitting on the veranda of his hilltop farmhouse outside Islamabad, he pointed across the city at the presidential palace. "[President Asif Ali] Zardari is a crook, nothing more," he said. "We've broken all records in corruption."
His plan for the economy is to "inspire" Pakistanis to pay tax – currently only 2% do so. "We just need to have some austerity and collect taxes. If we do that, we can balance our budgets," he said.
In power, Khan said, he would cut off American aid. "I want to be a friend of the Americans, not their lackey. Aid is a curse for a poor country; it stops you making the required reforms and props up crooks."
But perhaps most alarmingly for Pakistan's western allies – and some Pakistanis – Khan says he would negotiate with instead of fighting the Taliban militants who have been bombing Pakistani cities.
"Anyone who thinks this country will be taken over by Taliban are fools. There's no concept of a theocracy anywhere in the Muslim world for the past 1,400 years. If I came to power, I could end this conflict in 90 days – guaranteed."
Khan's choice of allies, many of them veterans of previous political dispensations, has also been controversial. Khan's foreign policy adviser, Shireen Mazari, is famously hostile to India; when editing a national newspaper she ran stories that branded British, Australian and American journalists as "CIA agents".
"I don't agree with her on everything. We give her hell on certain views," he says.
Yet Khan is defiantly proud that his newfound success is vindication against what he calls the "liberal, westernised elite" – wealthy, English-speaking Pakistanis who, he claims, are out of touch with the realities of their own country. "I call them coconuts: brown on the outside, white on the inside, looking at Pakistan through a westernised lens," he says.
His political views are firmly rooted in a particular view of Islam. He does not favour changes to the notorious blasphemy law – a virulent debate that led to the assassination of his friend Salmaan Taseer last January. "The time is not right. There would be bloodshed. We need to worry about other things," he says.
And he is careful to direct his barbs away from the powerful military, which controls relations with India, the US and the fight against the Taliban. Although Khan enthusiastically criticises [former president Pervez] Musharraf, who is now in exile, he has little criticism of the army chief, General Ashfaq Kayani.
"I have been critical of the generals in the past. I told them they are selling our blood for dollars," he says. "But this is not martial rule. It's up to our corrupt government to take responsibility." If he was in power and the army interfered, he says, he would resign. "We would go back to the people."
Khan enjoys a reputation for probity, having set up a cancer hospital in honour of his mother, who died of the disease. He also has a flash of glamour. A famous Pakistani pop band, Strings, opened last week's rally; supporters include his former wife, Jemima Khan, who attended a recent press conference in Islamabad to protest at CIA-led drone strikes in the tribal belt.
For some Pakistanis, Khan simply represents a protest against a moribund political system. "He's a bit of an idiot," said an architect from Lahore. "But he's better than the rest. I would vote for him."
To achieve his dream of becoming prime minister, Khan needs to convert his newfound popularity into seats in parliament (he has none, having boycotted the 2008 poll). To do so, he may have to recruit the same "corrupt" politicians to achieve a majority. "This is his most deadly flaw," says Herald editor Alam.
And time is short. Pakistan's next election is set for February 2013 at the latest, although a snap election is a possibility.
His party remains weak, he has few candidates and, crucially, many of his supporters have never voted before. Whether they will now, says Alam, is "perhaps the biggest unknown in Pakistani politics today."
Background
Although a self-styled "revolutionary", Imran Khan's politics are far from the fevered streets of the Arab Spring. The difference is democracy: whereas across the Muslim world, dissidents are fighting for the right to vote, Pakistanis already have it. But many dislike the leaders those elections have thrown up, hence the current upheaval.
President Asif Ali Zardari is an accidental leader, propelled into the job after his wife, Benazir Bhutto, was assassinated in December 2007. (Police indicted seven people for her killing last month, including two policemen, but the details remain murky.) Zardari has struggled to shake off the "Mr 10%" moniker – a reference to alleged corruption – while deteriorating economic and security conditions have plunged his poll ratings into the low teens.
But the main opposition challenger, Nawaz Sharif, has failed to capitalize on this misfortune. His N-league party, which controls the Punjab government, has grown unpopular for failing to contain an outbreak of dengue fever in recent months. Sharif is also estranged from the powerful military, which launched him into politics in the 1980s, due to his long-standing rivalry with Pervez Musharraf , the general who ousted Sharif from power in 1999.
The turmoil has emboldened challengers. One is Musharraf, who currently lives in exile in London, and has vowed to return to Pakistan next March. But the general faces numerous obstacles, including court prosecutions, security threats and opposition from the army leadership. The other is Khan, until recently viewed as a fringe player in national politics, seen most often on chatshows and protests against drone strikes.
All eyes are now fixed on senate elections next March, which should see Zardari's Pakistan Peoples Party take control of the upper house – and, possibly, pave the way for a second term as president for Zardari.
Imran Khan: the man who would be Pakistan's next prime minister
As he reaches 60, the Pashtun aristocrat who married into the height of British society says he is becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the legacy of colonialism. The cricketer turned politician talks in Islamaba
o Jason Burke
o The Observer, Sunday 4 March 2012
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'We need to be a friend of America, but not a hired gun. We will take no aid from them': Imran Khan at his home outside Islamabad. Photograph: Sam Phelps for the Observer
Imran Ahmad Khan Niazi, 59 years old, currently of Bani Gala village on the outskirts of the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, is certain of many things. He is certain that "a huge change" is coming to his country. He is certain, too, that a "revolution" is on its way. And even if he does not state it explicitly, he is certain that he will, within eight months to a year, win a landslide victory in elections to become Pakistan's prime minister. "When we are in power", he says these days, not "if we were in power".
When I arrive, Khan is sitting alone at a table in the garden of the house where he has lived since 2005. It is mid-afternoon, but the sun is low and the light is already fading. The house, built as a family home when he was still married to Jemima Goldsmith, sits on the crest of a ridge and commands a view of the foothills of the Himalayas, a large shimmering lake and the city of Islamabad. He is dressed entirely in black, working his BlackBerry.
The house has become part of Khan's political persona. There is the short journey through the increasingly scruffy villages and then up to the beautiful hacienda-style house with the dogs, the lawns, the swimming pool and the view. There is the image of the politician who currently leads all polls in the country, looking down from his hilltop on the city and the power that he seems set to seize. The vision of the uncorrupt outsider eyeing the distant den of iniquity that he is set to purge is simply too neat to ignore.
Consciously or otherwise, Khan does nothing to undermine the impression. He leads me briskly down to the edge of his land, steps up on to a large boulder overhanging the steep slope and points out the park which he saved from illegal development, and the new houses scattered across the shores of the lakes that are getting closer and closer to where we are standing. "Look at it," he says angrily. "There is no planning, no planning at all." He flings an arm out towards the serrated ridge of hills along the horizon. For, along with the certainty, there is righteous anger. This is directed at a number of different targets: a "corrupt political elite" who "plunder" Pakistan; strikes by American missile-armed unmanned drones against suspected Islamic militants near the Afghan frontier; the local "liberals" who condone the strikes; the lack of electricity crippling the country's economy; imperialists of old and neo-imperialists of today; the war on terror and its attendant human-rights abuses; multinational lending organisations; Washington; rich Pakistanis who avoid tax while their countrymen live in "multi-dimensional deprivation".
In Pakistan today, certainty and anger make a potent mix. The country, chronically unstable if astonishingly resilient, is not only suffering ongoing extremist violence but also terrible economic problems which are steadily wiping out any gains in prosperity made in previous decades. Over recent months Khan has held a series of huge political rallies, with crowds numbering more than 100,000. In terms of popularity at least, Khan and the party he founded 15 years ago, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (Pakistan Union for Justice), have made a major breakthrough.
In the brutal world of south Asian politics – where dynasties, patronage and frequently sheer muscle count more than policies or public support – this is a genuine achievement. In 1999 I spent several days with Khan and his partyworkers on the campaign trail in eastern Pakistan. The headline on my pessimistic piece was: "No Khan Do". These days few would risk such glib assessments of Khan's electoral chances.
The late 1990s, when Khan was making his political debut, were a raw time. The political scene in Pakistan was dominated by Benazir Bhutto, one of the most celebrated female politicians in the world, and her local rival, Nawaz Sharif. In 1999 the army stepped in through a bloodless and broadly popular coup. I saw Khan on and off occasionally over the subsequent years, but there was little to indicate that my earlier analysis was wrong. He was a legend in sporting terms – one of the best all-rounders in cricketing history – and increasingly well-thought of as a philanthropist, without doubt, but not a serious politician. A column in a local English-language political magazine relentlessly satirised the ambitions of "Im the Dim", and few disagreed.
Now Bhutto is dead, assassinated on 27 December 2007 by Islamic militants, and the old guard of politicians who have survived her, including her husband Asif Ali Zardari, president since 2008, are detested. Khan says he could take over – democratically, of course – at any moment, but he is biding his time. "We have the power to go out and block the government on any issue. But we will only have one chance and we have to be completely prepared." Back in the late 1990s, he tells me, politics was "like facing a fast bowler without pads, gloves or a helmet". Not any longer, he says.
Khan was born on 25 November 1952 into a wealthy and well-connected family in Lahore, Pakistan's eastern city. Ethnically he is a Pashtun, or Pathan, as British imperialists called the peoples concentrated along what once was known as the North-West Frontier. Educated at Lahore's Aitchison College, one of the most exclusive schools in Pakistan, the Royal Grammar School in Worcester and Oxford University, his early years were typical of Pakistan's anglicised upper classes. Khan reminisces about how his family home, Zaman Park, was surrounded by fields and woodland where he used to hunt partridge. "Now everything is built up; it's like living next to a motorway," he says. "The air pollution, noise pollution… It is terrible."
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Special delivery: playing at Lord’s in 1987. Khan made his Test debut against England in 1971 aged 18. Photograph: Bob Thomas/Getty Images
The shy teenager's precocious sporting talent took him rapidly into the national side: he made his Test debut against England in 1971, aged just 18. Eleven years later, after performances combining tenacity and flair, he was made captain of Pakistan. Khan's two autobiographies, All Round View (1992) and Pakistan: A Personal History (2010), both tell the story of his years as an international cricketer: the victories against the odds in front of the home crowd, the career-threatening injury overcome, the return from retirement at the age of 37, winning the World Cup – for the first and only time in Pakistan's sporting history – despite a ruined cartilage in his shoulder. It is only when in Pakistan, where the sport is a national passion, that the enormity of his sporting achievement is clear.
Neither book is forthcoming about his activities off the pitch, however. A string of rich, well-connected, beautiful women earned him a reputation as a playboy. Then in 1995 he married Jemima Goldsmith, daughter of the late billionaire Sir James Goldsmith. Aged only 21, she converted to Islam and moved to Pakistan. The couple soon had two sons.
"I had always wanted to marry a Pakistani, but I realised while I was playing cricket that sport at that level and marriage were not compatible," he says. "So I decided I'd only get married when I gave up sport." Khan twice announced his retirement: the first time, General Zia ul-Haq, then military dictator of Pakistan, persuaded him to reconsider, and the second time he returned to the team to help raise funds for Pakistan's first cancer hospital. His mother, to whom he wad been very close, had died of cancer in 1984 and in her memory he had decided to build a hospital which would offer free treatment to the poor. "The whole board [of the hospital] said I needed to keep playing so they could raise money. So I carried on until I was 39, and by then I was too old for an arranged marriage. I just could no longer trust someone else to find someone for me.
"So I found it very difficult," Khan continues. "The irony was I thought all the 25-year-olds were too young, and I was still looking when I met Jemima – and she was 21." The couple married in 1995 and divorced nine years later. "It would have had a greater chance of working if I hadn't been involved in politics or she had been Pakistani. Or if she could have got involved in the politics with me."
As one of his wife's grandfathers was Jewish, a noxious storm of abuse and conspiracy theories was unleashed. Pakistan is a country where antisemitism is so deep-rooted as to be remarkable only when absent. Local politicians targeted this "weak spot": spurious court cases, rabble-rousing editorials, underhand smears all contributed to make Pakistan a hostile environment for the young socialite heiress.
The construction of the cancer hospital and the leadership of his party consumed most of Khan's funds and time. "Because they attacked me and her, calling me part of the Jewish lobby, she couldn't get involved in politics and that was the beginning of it becoming more and more difficult. And she really gave it her best shot. I look back and think: could my marriage have worked? I think of the words of the prophet [Mohammed]: 'Don't fight destiny because destiny is God.' I believe the past is to learn from, not live in."
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'She really gave it her best shot': with his ex-wife Jemima on their wedding day in 1995. Photograph: Nils Jorgenson/Rex Features
He still gets on well with her family – when in London he stays with his former mother-in-law Lady Annabel Goldsmith – and has a "fabulous relationship" with his sons. A day or so after we meet, he is flying to London for three days for half term. "It's very important to spend time together. Children really need a mother and a father. They have different roles, but both are very important. This idea of having two men as parents. It's a nonsense."
Religion became important to Khan relatively late. He grew up, he says, surrounded by faith. His mother read him stories from the life of the Prophet Mohammed and at seven he was taught to read the Koran in Arabic by a visiting scholar. But as a young man, he was not devout. The return to faith came following his mother's illness and a profound personal interrogation, he says, prompted by the furore after the publication of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses. Wanting to defend Islam from what he saw as ignorant attacks, Khan began to read more widely about the religion.
These days his identity as a conservative, but not fundamentalist, Muslim has become part of his political programme and, in a way not often understood in the west, his political persona in Pakistan. Liberals in the country dismiss him as a mullah, literally a low-level cleric but figuratively an ignorant extremist, just, they say, without the beard that is the mark of the pious Muslim man. This, predictably, irritates Khan. His faith, he says, has been influenced primarily by the Sufi strand of Islamic practice, which emphasises a believer's direct engagement with God without the intercession of a cleric or scholar. Another major influence is Allama Iqbal, a poet, political activist and philosopher who died in 1938 and is considered one of the spiritual fathers of Pakistan. "Iqbal, who is my great inspiration, clashes with the mullahs," says Khan. "The message of all religions is to be just and humane but it is often distorted by the clergy."
For all the talk of tolerance, Khan's party has been keeping some strange company recently, sharing a platform, for example, with the Difa-e-Pakistan or Pakistan Defence Council. This is a coalition of extremist groups which wants to end any Pakistani alliance with the USA and includes people who not only explicitly support the Afghan Taliban but who are associated with terrorist and sectarian violence. At one recent rally of the council in Islamabad, I met members of Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan, a Sunni group which has murdered thousands of Shias, while around me hundreds chanted: "Death to America." Lashkar-e-Toiba, the organisation responsible for the 2008 attacks in Mumbai in India in which 166 died, is also part of the coalition. Mian Mohammed Aslam, the head of the Jamaat-e-Islami, a mass Islamist party similar to the Muslim Brotherhood in the Islamic world and dedicated to a similarly hardline, conservative programme, spoke warmly of "close relations" with Khan, even going as far as raising the prospect of an electoral pact with Khan's Tehreek-e-Insaf in the coming elections, when I interviewed him.
Khan says that as a politician he and his party need to reach out to everybody, but that does not mean that he endorses the views of the Islamists. Undoubtedly a social conservative who is religious in outlook and rhetoric, he does not lapse into simplistic binary analyses of the west (secular or "Crusader Christian" against Islam) like many of his countrymen. He denies being anti-western at all. "How can I be anti-western? How can you be anti-western when [the west] is so varied, so different? It doesn't make sense."
Finger on the pulse: speaking at a rally in Lahore last month. 'We only have one chance and we have to be completely prepared,' he says. Photograph: Warrick Page/Getty Images
It is not religion driving Khan's anger but something else. Take, for example, his analysis of the violent insurgency in the western borders of his country. For most scholars, this is the result of a complex mix of factors: the breakdown of traditional society, war in Afghanistan in the 1980s and the 2000s, the generalised radicalisation of the Islamic world since 2001, al-Qaeda's presence, the Pakistani army's operations in the area and the civilian casualties caused by drone strikes. The militants themselves, who behead supposed spies and drive out development workers or teachers, are increasingly unpopular. Yet Khan calls the violence a "fight for Pashtun solidarity against a foreign invader". He insists "there is not a threat to Pakistan from Taliban ideology".
For Khan this foreign invasion takes various forms. There is dress (he speaks admiringly of how the Pashtuns still shun western clothes) and there is TV (he mentions how his former mother-in-law thought one channel beamed in from India was in fact American, because of all its adverts for consumer goods). His charge against the "liberal elite" is implicitly a charge against the most westernised elements in the country. It is a defence of a vision of the local, the authentic, the familiar, against globalisation.
However, with his cultured public-school vowels, his half-British children, his British ex-wife, his success at a game the English invented, it becomes a very personal argument, too. Khan says he first became aware of the effects of colonialism as a teenager. "My first shock was going from Aitchison to play for Lahore. The boys from the Urdu [local language] schools laughed at me… Then in England we had been trained to be English public schoolboys, which we were not. Hence the inferiority complex. Because we were not and could never be the thing we were trying to be."
Even the memory agitates him. "I saw the elite [in Pakistan] who were superior because they were more westernised. I used to hear that colonialism was about building roads, railways etc… but that's all bullshit. It kills your self-esteem. The elite become a cheap imitation of the coloniser." He says that he recently read that after 200 years of Arab rule in Sicily, the court continued to speak Arabic and wear Arab clothes for 50 years after their former overlords had left.
His recent book is full of such references. P34: "Colonialism, for my mother and father, was the ultimate humiliation." P43: "The more a Pakistani aped the British the higher up the social ladder he was considered to be." P64: "In today's Lahore and Karachi rich women go to glitzy parties in western clothes chauffeured by men with entirely different customs and values" – and so on through the 350 pages.
This lays him open to charges of hypocrisy, inconsistency, of being a self-hating "brown sahib" himself, accusations frequently made by the "liberal elite" Khan so detests. Yet Khan's patriotism, faith and honesty are attractive to many in a chronically unstable country seen as an exporter of extremism and violence, as irremediably corrupt, as "the most dangerous place in the world".
So, what would Khan do in power? At the moment he is thick on aspiration and thin on practical policy. He would, he says, cut government expenditure and raise tax collection. He would turn the mansions and villas of senior officials – "these colonial symbols" – into libraries or even museums "like after the Iranian revolution" to show the people how the elite lived. He would solve the "energy and education emergencies" and he would "totally pull out of the war on terror", withdrawing the army from the western border zone and letting "our people in [these areas] deal with the militants themselves". Whether he could make the country's powerful military obey such directives – his critics allege he is unhealthily close to the army – is unsure.
As for relations with Washington, his position is clear: "We need to be a friend of American, but not a hired gun," he says. "We will take no aid from them. We will stand on our own feet, with a fully sovereign foreign policy and no terrorism from our soil."
Which political leaders does he admire? Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the moderate Islamist Turkish prime minister, he says; Brazil's Lula da Silva, who forced a better redistribution of his country's newly generated wealth; Mahathir Mohamad and Lee Kuan Yew of Malaysia and Singapore, two authoritarians. But it doesn't really matter. If Khan does end up prime minister he will do things his way.
Khan is not "dim", as the elite who he detests contemptuously say, but is not an intellectual either. He is a politician riding a wave of public disaffection, and that wave might just carry him to power. What he does afterwards is not something he worries about. He will be 60 this autumn. This would only bother him, he says, if he "had nothing to look forward to". But he is convinced that he does. From his hilltop Khan looks down and says: "This country will go through its biggest change ever. A revolution is coming."
Munir Ahmed Baloch exposing Biased media against Imran Khan
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