Against the Partition of Joy قفس

I don’t usually write about this. The argument feels antique: the anxious fixation on who may sit where, whose hands may dance in the light, which bodies may be seen together in a room tuned to song. But the hour insists. So here I am—reluctant, yes, and also unwilling to stay silent—because what happened around a concert in Karachi is not a small quarrel about taste. It is a story about who gets to breathe in public.

A homegrown band, Qashqarian, took the stage. Their sound isn’t what I queue on a quiet morning, but I hear it everywhere—Khowar syllables stitched to a beat, a river of vernacular rising through the noise of our time. For young Chitrali audiences, that music is more than entertainment. It is a language refusing erasure, a poem standing up in a crowded bus and saying, I am alive. In a season like ours—mean, precarious, frequently unkind—such music does what art has always done: builds a small ark; ferries whoever will step inside from despair to breath.

The venue was in Karachi—our sprawling, salt-bitten city by the Arabian Sea, a place that has always been porous enough to let a thousand worlds pass through. The crowd was mixed: Chitralis, yes, but also people from Gilgit and other corners. For a few hours, the ordinary miracle of a concert: strangers becoming a temporary “we.”

And then, the backlash. Online, in the low corridors where rumour kneads itself bold. Some voices—chiefly men, loudly pious—announced that the mixing of genders, the sight of women dancing, was un-Islamic, an embarrassment to Chitral, a tear in some imagined veil. The old script returned like a bureaucrat with a stamped file: shame, honor, control. A theatre where women’s presence becomes the problem to be solved.

I know this play. We all do. It is the choreography by which a society performs its insecurities on women’s bodies. Call it tradition, decency, modesty; the words are polished often, but the grip beneath them never seems to loosen. Meanwhile the other fires rage—floods you can map with your own feet, addiction that threads into kitchens, obscene gulfs between rich and poor—and yet the umbrage gathers here, at the edge of a dance floor, before the unthreatening fact of young people holding joy together for an evening.

I want to say: choose a worthier enemy. Choose drought, choose hunger, choose the cynical trade of lies for votes. Choose the slow violence of apathy. Let music go. Let young people have a night to test the breadth of their lungs.

But to say only that would be to miss the longer lineage. The present outrage is not isolated weather; it is climate. It is the slow death of tolerance in too many precincts of the country, and the rise of a punitive religiosity that confiscates ordinary pleasures and calls the loss piety. It is the old partitioning impulse—cut the room, cut the street, cut the syllabus—until nothing remains of the public square except suspicion. 

When I looked for language equal to the moment, I found myself reaching, as I often do, for Begum Rokeya. Over a century ago, in British India, she wrote a slim, radical book, Sultana’s Dream, in which she imagines “Ladyland”—a city where women, educated and unafraid, steer science, order civic life, and, crucially, are free to move. “You need not be afraid of coming across a man here,” she writes. “This is Ladyland free from sin and harm. Virtue itself reigns here.” Ladyland is satire, yes, but also scripture for what is possible when fear loosens its fist.

Rokeya did more than dream. She built: India’s first school for Muslim girls, and a movement that argued—logically, relentlessly—that women’s education is not a luxury or an afterthought but oxygen. She understood that the project of gender segregation is never merely about “protection”; it is about power. Keep women removed from the page, and you keep them removed from the payroll, the ballot, the archive. Keep them behind a screen, and you dim the horizon for everyone. Rokeya called the bluff. She saw that emancipation is not a gentleman’s gift; it is a curriculum, a ledger, a key.

Ask her what she thinks of a small storm gathering because a few young women swayed to a Khowar chorus on a Saturday night. I suspect she would smile the way a teacher smiles when a child mistakes the shadow for the tiger. Then she would ask the practical questions: Who benefits when joy is rationed? Who is served by a model of piety that trembles before a song and sleeps easy through injustice?

This is not a denunciation of faith. It is a plea for proportion—and for an ethic that remembers the Prophet’s gentleness, not only the fear of error sworn by his most severe interpreters. It is possible—indeed necessary—to be devout and capacious at once; to hold reverence in one hand and the rights of our daughters in the other; to prefer argument to policing; to trust that if a tradition is genuinely alive, it can withstand the sight of women and men learning, working, listening, laughing in the same air.

What is at stake is larger than one band, one set, one night. The obsession with segregation has cost us—culturally, socially, politically, economically. When the public sphere is divided like a school lunchbox, creativity starves. Commerce shrinks. Conversation degrades into parallel monologues. A community that cannot bear the mingling of genders will, in time, find it cannot bear the mingling of ideas either. And that is how extremism wins—by teaching us to fear the basic fact of each other.

Meanwhile in Chitral, a valley I love, winter is sharpening its knives; roads will close; young people will dream bigger than the mountains will allow. They will look to cities—to Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad—for a window. Must we slam it shut because someone read a sermon as if it were a barricade? Must we tell a young woman that the alphabet of her joy cannot be conjugated in public? Must we teach our sons that the sight of their classmates’ laughter is a threat?

Love is not license to keep quiet. If anything, it binds us to tell the truth plainly: to police women’s presence at a concert is a smallness we cannot afford. There are too many real devastations asking for our hands.

Rokeya would call us back to first principles. She would say: educate your girls, give them the rooms and salaries and microphones to stand without apology. She would say: do not confuse the architecture of control with the architecture of faith. She would build another school, then another. She would pull a young woman aside after the show and ask what she heard in her own bones when the bass came in, then ask how to make more rooms where that feeling is permitted to grow into a life.

So perhaps that is our task now, beyond statements and posts. Build the rooms. Fund the stages. Teach the histories. Publish the poets who write in Khowar and the designers who stitch that language into cloth. Make it increasingly ridiculous—logistically, economically—for anyone to argue that a woman’s presence in public is a breach. Normalise her everywhere, until the scandal dissolves in the daylight.

A final word to those men who believe they are protecting something sacred by guarding the threshold to a concert: what you are guarding is not sanctity; it is your fear of change. Let it go. Stand in the same queue. Tap your foot. If the song isn’t to your taste, fine—no one is asking you to sing along. But do not mistake your preference for a law. Do not make your anxiety a border around someone else’s evening.

Because this is the quiet thesis of the night in Karachi: that a people rise not by partition but by proximity; that the public square grows taller when it is wide; that a language survives not only on the page but also in the chorus shared between strangers; that we honor our elders not by repeating their errors but by enlarging their hopes.

Ladyland was a dream, yes. But every just city begins as a sentence someone dared to write. Let ours begin like this: the doors are open; the music is for everyone; no one’s dignity is diminished by joy.