Radicals vs. Buddha

By Adnan R. Khan - Thursday, June 25, 2009 at 9:40 AM - 1 Comment

The irony is as thick as the dust clouds sweeping over the ramshackle Pakistani market town of Takht-i-Bahi. At the hilltop ruins of a first-century Buddhist monastery, Ikram Ali, a local university student, is in the middle of explaining what it is that attracts him to the UNESCO-designated World Heritage Site’s grassy knolls and quiet quadrangles when automatic gunfire rips through the serene vales and gullies. “It’s peaceful up here,” he’d been saying just a few seconds earlier, scanning the horizon in the direction of the Swat Valley. “You can escape all of the noise and stress that goes on down there.” The volley of bullets erupts just as he points down toward the town. A group of villagers can be seen scrambling for cover under a grove of trees. The exchange is brief, lasting five minutes or so, after which the villagers resume their routines. Ali watches the scene with mild amusement. “That kind of thing happens every day around here,” he says with a Buddha-like calm.

Across a wide, fertile plain to the north, the black mountains of Malakand Division, including Swat, stretch across the horizon. There, ruins of another sort are a dominant feature—the products of weeks of war that have gripped the Swat Valley and its environs. But up in the hilltop monastery in Takht-i-Bahi, none of that seems particularly relevant. Here, young couples, otherwise forbidden from even speaking to one another, huddle conspiratorially in the shadows of meditation halls, or walk casually through what were once monks’ residences. None of them can tell you much about the prolific history of Buddhism in Pakistan and the role Buddhism once played in bringing peace to a region perennially beset by violence. They can tell you little about Ashoka, the third-century BCE emperor of the Mauryan dynasty of India, who, after witnessing first hand the killing fields of his army’s expansionist campaigns, converted to Buddhism, banned war, and spent the rest of his life actively promoting a Buddhist-inspired program of peace and brotherhood. His story reads like a life lesson in pacifism. The prosperity his empire enjoyed after his conversion is legendary. Some of that legacy remains in Takht-i-Bahi, in the quiet, contemplative moods of people like Ali who come there to clear their minds.

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Week in Pictures: May 21st – May 27th, 2009

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, May 27, 2009 at 4:50 PM - 0 Comments

Pakistan's Eden goes to hell

By Michael Petrou - Monday, January 26, 2009 at 11:36 AM - 0 Comments

In October 2000, I crossed the soaring and snow-swept Khunjerab Pass connecting China and Pakistan at a height of some 4,600 metres and descended, through numerous stomach-churning switchbacks and around the odd road-blocking rockfall, into the apricot groves of Pakistan’s Hunza Valley and some of the most beautiful landscape in the world.

What followed was a glorious month in Pakistan, mostly in the north and west of the country. The Taliban were entrenched in next-door Afghanistan, and Pakistan’s Tribal Areas were full of sympathizers, as well as some three million Afghans who had fled the Taliban’s cruelty and attendant chaos. But even so, my memories of that trip are almost uniformly pleasant.

One of my favourite places was Swat, a lush valley I first glimpsed from the roof of an overcrowded minivan on which my traveling companion and I had caught a lift. We spent several days there in a guesthouse beside a trout-filled stream and surrounded by trees that grew fruit of a kind I haven’t encountered since – bright orange, spongy and sweet. The owner hadn’t had customers in ages and treated us well. Now, when I read stories from Swat like this one, it breaks my goddamned heart.