My grandmother had a saying about food being cooked in the house. She would tell my mother that the aroma and fragrance of the food must not waft beyond the boundary walls of the house. It would be wrong, you see, for anyone passing by who may be hungry and unable to feed themselves to smell the food and feel less than, or poorer than us.
The saying, of course, is about the immorality of showing off your wealth, or dikhawa.
Whatever fortune bestowed upon you by Allah is not to be flaunted. While many religious-minded gentlemen in Pakistan will disagree, this is the basis of the short shalwar/short robe concept in Islam. In Arabia, during the time of the Prophet (PBUH), it was customary to display one’s wealth by the length of one’s robe. The longer the robe’s train trailing across the floor, the wealthier the person wearing it. To put a stop to this show of wealth, Muslims were ordered to wear short robes above their ankles.
This practice has continued to this day, though in my experience, most people, when asked why they do it, can’t tell you.
This practice is not relevant in today’s world. If we were practicing Ijtehad, as is mandatory in Islam, we would have realised that the symbols of wealth today are not long robes or sweeping trains. Today’s symbols of wealth are the brand of phone we carry, the car we drive, the size of the house we live in. Today’s symbols of wealth are the brand of clothes we wear, or where we ‘vacation’.
If the many bearded and modest men and women in this country want to practise the essence of Islam, adhering to an obsolete representation of this tenet is not the way to do it. To truly fulfil the spirit of avoiding dikhawa, one must decry showing off one’s Rolex watches, Hermes handbags, and Fortunas. The goal, after all, is to bring simplicity to your life. The acquisition of things in a modern capitalist world is the very antithesis of Islam’s simplicity.
Of course, in the world we live in today, simplicity is glaringly missing from all aspects of life, in both religious and secular spheres. This is because, as Whitey disseminates his new wave of colonialism, we have bought into the hype of capitalism, hook, line, and sinker.
Buy, Buy, Buy
Capitalism has one goal: to convince consumers to buy products. All capitalism needs to succeed is for us to believe we must buy something, even if we don’t need it.
A couple friend of mine in the US is neck deep in the disease of consumerism. Not quite hoarders, they nevertheless have an inordinate number of things in their life. When I stayed with them last, they apologetically put me in a room full of boxes and piles of magazines and papers. The papers, as I saw when I was making room for my own things, were mostly junk mail—coupons and promotions and fliers from every store they frequented. Most of us may think of junk mail as just that—junk to be thrown away. However, my friends were sure that the coupons may be useful the next time they wanted a new set of towels or car freshener, so they stacked the coupons (neatly, by the way. They weren’t messy, just overcrowded) in the unused guest room for some imaginary future use.
I never opened the boxes, but my friend did tell me that there were winter clothes in them. The cupboard in the guest room was similarly filled with different coats of varying weights—coats for summer, for winter, for autumn, for spring, for the rain, for the snow, or just for warmth.
I have one coat that I wear in all weather whenever I visit the US (or when I lived in Islamabad), so the plethora of coats was mind-boggling to me. I am from the generation that uses something until it wears out completely, and only then do I replace it. My friends had a slightly different mindset. When my friend’s husband decided he wanted smoothies for breakfast, they went out and bought a blender specifically for smoothies. It was irrelevant that they had a complete Cuisinart at home, including a blender, that would have blended his morning fruit just as efficiently.
Whenever they couldn’t find something in the house (which was often, because my friend’s organisational system wasn’t very, well, organised), they would simply go out and buy it. As a result, they had several different kinds of Tupperware, much of it unused, cluttering up the house. The clutter spilled into their cars, which were often loaded with gadgets and more papers, sometimes cartons of drinks (soda cans, mostly), and they never parked in the garage, because it too was filled to the brim with things. (Yet neither of my friends would be considered hoarders by US standards because there was room to move around their house.)
A lot of this is a result of a culture of ‘keeping up with the Joneses’, which permeates the fabric of Western society like a plague. It comes on the fag end of the concept of buy now, pay later.
What has this done to American society?
A large number of people, in an effort to emulate and have the lifestyles of their neighbours, will buy things they don’t need with money they don’t yet have. Almost everyone in the country is in debt. It’s extremely unlikely that anyone is NOT in debt (except, of course, the billionaire and corporate class).
What they don’t realise is that, having bought everything you could not afford today, you now have to work for the rest of your life to pay it off. There are people who can’t afford to get sick, to take time off, or to be fired, God forbid, because that would bring down their carefully constructed house of cards. People who lose their jobs tend to lose almost everything because they can’t keep up payments on their houses, cars, their fancy gadgets, and home appliances (if you haven’t already, check out the movie Fun with Dick and Jane, both the original and reboot—they’re equally good—for an idea of how someone can lose everything).
To take from that film, corporate slavery isn’t a common concept, rarely discussed or mentioned, but it exists. It’s a result of a credit economy, where living within your means is lost to the wayside. Whatever life you aspire to, you can have today, even if you can’t afford it. Buying a house in Pakistan, for example, is well beyond the means of the majority of the population. It can be achieved by taking out a loan, the markup on which is so exorbitant that you’ll be spending the rest of your life working to pay off the loan. If at any time you are unable to keep up the payments, the bank has every right to take your home away. And if you cannot pay it off, it will fall to your children or grandchildren to pay off the loan. In all cases, any delay or break in your ability to repay the loan will mean a total loss of the money you’ve paid so far, and the home itself.
To keep up with the pressure of paying off your debts, you become a slave to corporations and all of their unreasonable demands on you. 25 years ago, this was a theoretical conversation with my CEO and he laughed off the idea of corporate slavery. You get paid, after all, in a corporate job, and in some cases, paid very well. But your time and your dreams are not your own, especially in a Pakistani sethia organisation.
Capitalism in the US is structured to entice people to buy. As the market has grown, companies no longer create products that fulfil a need in the market—it’s now the other way around. Products are created and the desire for that product is artificially generated, using some of the most sophisticated psychological marketing techniques known to man. People are compelled to buy things, to fill up all conceivable empty spaces with stuff that is often useless, unneeded, and irrelevant except for the profit it generates for the seller.
Pakistani Aspirations
When we were kids, my mother taught us that all good things come to those that wait. She instilled the idea of saving up to buy what you wanted, making it all the more sweet when you eventually had what you wanted. The common saying she reiterated was chador dekh kay pair phailao (spread your legs based on the size of the sheet you’re on). That’s not something Americans do. They have no patience. The concept of waiting is alien to their DNA because capitalism doesn’t like it when consumers wait. Capitalism prefers it if you get everything you ever dreamed of today—how magnanimous of capitalism!—and paid later.
We have now acquired American Consumerism in Pakistan.
It’s important to us what brands we wear, what brand phone we carry, what car we drive, and where we live. In Karachi, of course, it’s all about what side of the bridge you live on (Clifton Bridge, Kala Pull, the Southern Bypass). In Islamabad, acceptable sectors are E and F. Twenty years ago, I was part of a project with four other artists and writers, all of whom lived in DHA. I was the only one who had NOT grown up in Pakistan. I’d been there for less than ten years at that point, yet I was the only one who knew the way from DHA to Federal B Area or Lalukhet because my colleagues rarely felt the need to cross the bridge. Their image was built on it.
Our consumerism is equally discriminatory. We routinely eschew Pakistani products, making it an uphill climb for local producers to sell to our middle class markets. It’s irrelevant to the vast majority of our countrymen that we make better fabric than India—they prefer Indian saris to our own Banaras colony. We don’t seem to care that local fruit and vegetables are far superior to most imported items (which are often the result of GMO agriculture), yet high-end stores stock and sell imported fruit and vegetables at a premium. When I go to do my monthly shopping, I am often stymied by the sheer volume of groceries that most people buy, even if it is for the whole month. One or two carts loaded to the brim is normal and the price is probably equally loaded to the brim.
This rampant consumerism, the results of which we can see so clearly in the US, has meant that, when the Palestinians need us the most, we have been unable to do such basic boycotts as Coke or Pepsi. It’s a small ask and isn’t of great impact to the global structure of these companies, but anyone who understands the power of boycotts knows that every individual action counts.
Religion Cannot Save Us
We don’t yet see how consumerism is changing us, but its effects are deep and insidious. We already know that consumerism has a direct impact on the planet and the climate, as the production of these things we demand drain the earth’s resources and damage what’s left of the atmosphere. But its effects stretch further than that, and we aren’t asking the questions we should be.
What does it mean to own more things? In Pakistan, as in the rest of the world, the perception is always that the ability to buy things translates to being better than others. In a certain unnamed, extensive, and very popular school chain in Pakistan, this has translated into the promotion and placement of managers who are both incompetent and unsuitable for leadership positions. However, as wives of men with money, most of the women promoted up the ladder have shown expensive tastes in clothes and accessories, and have fit right in with the money-conscious owners of the school chain. The education these managers impart is necessarily, therefore, subpar.
We should also ask ourselves, what happens when two incomes are insufficient to keep up with the Joneses? Like Dick and Jane, is the inevitable next step a life of crime? It has been for many among us. The wealthiest among us are almost all crooks of some magnitude. Our judiciary and bureaucracy are already built to favour the rich, so a population of crooks is not inconceivable. Bribery is already deep-rooted into the fabric of our society.
Consumerism affects our planet, our education, our governance, our justice. It is the root cause of almost all the wars in the world. Consumerism provides us no path save one: down.
It’s a myth that our religiosity will save us from this descent. As I pointed out in the beginning, our understanding of the tenets of Islam are skewed. We are not thinking Muslims. We are blind followers of a one-eyed King.
This is why our religious leaders only raise concerns regarding Hudood crimes or blasphemy or apostasy. Financial crimes, the judicial and equitable management of public money, the small corruptions of our institutions, are all overlooked. Most of the religious leaders are deeply entrenched in financial corruption themselves, because the brand of cars they are able to buy is so important to them that they can and will bury any discussion of ethics and money.
It all falls, as I have come to hope, on the educated middle class to recognise the dangers of consumerism, and to, hopefully, take steps to reverse the course we’re on. I am relying on like-minded and thinking individuals in the country, whether religious or secular, to recognise how badly we need a new ideology, a new set of values, or an existing set of values brought back to life.
Is there anyone like that out there?
This article was originally published in T-Magazine on October 27, 2024. It’s also up on my Substack.
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