Picture: Mushahid with With Alys and Faiz Sahib: Prof Khwaja Masud, Farhat Zaidi and Salim Bokhari are also present
The Friday Times: August 11-17, 2006 - Vol. XVIII, No. 25
At The Muslim
Mushahid Hussain
The former journalist turned politician and current secretary general of the PML (Q) recalls his stint as editor
Mr Poya, accompanied by Syed Nusrat Ali Shah, came over to my house in Lahore and asked, “Why don’t you give The Muslim a try as Editor?” I initially declined because I then lacked the confidence to fill the shoes of the likes of AT Chaudhri. I was 29 with no prior journalistic experience and I felt that the job would be too big for me. But his persistence paid off and I decided to take the plunge. After Mr Chaudhri’s exit, I had worked as Assistant Editor with an experienced and interesting journalist, Zafar Iqbal Mirza, aka ZIM. Some of the best editorials in The Muslim were written by him.
My first challenge was to gather a good team, often a key ingredient of success. A major talent hunt resulted in one of the finest teams in Pakistani journalism, with a blend of experience and youth plus rank outsiders. This included full time journalists with The Muslim and columnists and writers. The journalists included Nusrat Javeed, Mariana Babar, Rahimullah Yousafzai, Kamran Khan, Ishrat Hyatt, Abbas Rashid, while Salim Bokhari provided continuity by handling the news desk and ensuring that the paper was put to bed on time. I invited Khawaja Asaf, former Chief Editor of the Pakistan Times to join The Muslim as Editorial Consultant, basically the role of a “goalkeeper”, editing reporters’ stories and ensuring good, clean copy. Younger brother of the music maestro Khurshid Anwar, he was decency personified and a professional to his fingertips.
I also reached out to a number of good writers who were out of favour with officialdom, for instance Khalid Hasan, then living in Austria, started a weekly column which was quite popular combining incisive comments with good humour. Shahid Mahmood Nadeem, in exile in London and working for Amnesty International, began a regular newsletter, while Farhatullah Babar, living in Saudi Arabia, started a similar column. Asma Barlas, a bright member of the Foreign Service who had recently lost her job on political grounds, became our Assistant Editor while Tariq Ahsan, who had served a prison term for publishing a pamphlet against the military regime, was hired as the Magazine Editor. He had been an academic at the Quaid-i-Azam University before his arrest. A major success was to persuade my old colleague and friend Professor Khalid Mahmood to join The Muslim because I knew he had a talent for writing, which had been wasted, for the most part, in the futile, factional world of Left politics.
Two other friends, then living abroad, were inducted as The Muslim’s foreign correspondents. Dr Maleeha Lodhi became our London correspondent and Dr Shirin Mazari, the New York correspondent. Since both were well off, I told them that we would not be able to pay them, but I promised them a prominent by-line. Among academics, friends like Dr Waseem and Dr Riffat Hussain were among those who became our contributors, while former ZAB confidante HK Burki, who was officially persona non grata, wrote under a pseudonym.
The Muslim’s cosmopolitan character was reinforced by the presence of two American women, both married to Pakistani men. Karen Pasha handled the news side while Stephanie Bunker Khan (SBK) assisted me on the editorial page. During this period, the government only objected to three of my choices. The Information Secretary, Lt Gen Mujib, called to protest the appointment of Khalid Hasan, Farhatullah Babar and Minhaj Barna, which was disregarded on the ground that the government could not be allowed to determine our writers.
I remembered visiting Disney World in Florida, where there was a unique exhibit simply called ‘Imagination’. The key to taking The Muslim ahead of the competition would be via ideas, issues and initiatives and what we lacked in resources was to be made up by an out-of-the-box approach. A top notch cartoonist, Feica (who now works for the Dawn ) introduced some outstanding political cartoons for the editorial page. I also endeavoured to change the notion of the traditional editor, who, like the judges of past, was supposed to be low-key and not to be seen except through the editorial. An editor essentially defines a newspaper’s profile and apart from doing [writing] regular news analyses on the front page on current issues, I also personally went to cover events in the field. For instance, during the “autumn of fury” in 1983, accompanied by photographer BK Bangash, I went to cover the MRD agitation in Sindh, meeting a range of dissenters from GM Syed to Rasul Bux Palejo’s Awami Tehreek activists. I did a series of articles called the Sindh Diary, then another on the Frontier Province, followed by one on Balochistan.
One person who always encouraged me was the great poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz. Whenever he visited Islamabad, he would drop in at my office, accompanied by Professor Khwaja Masud, to give a pat on the back. He was soft spoken, a man of substance with a lot of humility.
The Muslim soon became a voice for drawing room liberals given its left of centre, Islamic populism. For instance, The Muslim was the only newspaper in Pakistan giving out front page ads for free to the Women’s Action Forum (WAF) or presenting an alternative view on Afghan policy.
In trying to explain the Zia regime to our readers, I often found recourse to the English language to coin new kinds of phrases to describe a particular even or a situation. The military regime was invariably described with a generic term as ‘the establishment’, while I referred to General Zia’s style as ‘double handshake, triple embrace’. Government propaganda was referred to as the ‘official certified truth’, while General Zia’s own political future was dubbed as a ‘Catholic marriage with power’. The American ambassador was labelled ‘the Viceroy’ while I also coined the term ‘Culture of Kalashnikovs’ to describe the fallout of the Afghan war on Pakistani society. When Benazir Bhutto returned to Pakistan in April 1986 to a tumultuous welcome ( The Muslim had covered her in exile in London), she seemed convinced that the Americans would soon oust General Zia and help in bringing her in; The Muslim coined a critique of those who felt that ‘the road to Islamabad lies through Washington’!
By then, The Muslim had become Pakistan’s most quoted newspaper. I felt that The Muslim had ‘arrived’ when two different figures from the power structure approached us. AQ Khan sent a note saying that he was the victim of an international media campaign to malign him for the nuclear programme, while Mr ZA Sulehri, the doyen of establishment journalism, after he was fired from The Pakistan Times , offered his services as a columnist, which I had to decline, because as I told him “politically, we are poles apart.”
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August 11-17, 2006 - Vol. XVIII, No. 25: w w w . t h e f r i d a y t i m e s . c o m
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