Why Muzamil chose the center: the world runs in grey

The end of a three-part journey

This is the final part of a three-episode series. In the first two, Muzamil described how his politics shifted over his life. Here he wraps it up, explains where he landed, and says what he learned on the way.

He recaps the path. He grew up, like most Pakistanis, in a conservative household with “an inherent anti-West bias.” As he got older and consumed Western media, he came to admire the West: developed, successful, a place where people go to bed with full stomachs. He began to think Pakistanis praised themselves for nothing and blamed the West for problems they should fix themselves.

Then he kept reading. History, geopolitics, the region, and philosophy from both the West and the East. That reading changed his view again. The West was ahead, he concluded, partly because it had drained the subcontinent and China for two to three hundred years. He says that about 400 years ago the region was around half of global GDP, and he sees no reason it could not lead again once it solves its basics.

How empires sustain themselves

Muzamil’s argument is that an imperial power does not hold its position through wars alone. It also holds it through economics, culture and soft power, and through what he calls propaganda tools.

In his reading, the major conflicts in the Muslim world over the past 50 years were about power and money. Oil had to be traded in dollars, and the dollar had to stay the world’s reserve currency. He also points to Iraq, where he says the war was fought in the name of weapons of mass destruction that did not exist, and to the war in Gaza since October, which he calls a genocide enabled by Western support.

He began to question the tools as well as the wars. He agrees Pakistan has serious gender issues. But he asked why the conversation about them was being driven from the West, whether it was sensitive to local culture, and whether it was actually helping Pakistani women or creating more division.

When he raised these questions, he says, he started to get cancelled. That was the moment his idea of liberalism broke. “Liberalism by definition is the name of freedom,” he says. The loudest values he grew up with were freedom of speech and freedom of thought. Yet the people who claimed those values turned on him for a counter-opinion. He concluded that many of them had become “propaganda tools in a war of narratives” without realizing it.

Pakistan without a single point of truth

The same rethinking applied at home. Over the past two years, he says, many Pakistanis have come to understand how the country works and what elite capture looks like.

That led him to reject any single point of truth. Can PTI solve every problem if it comes to power? “Not at all,” he says. In his view, its narrative might be a step in the right direction, but it can be criticized on a thousand counts. Are the other parties the worst there is? No. They operated inside a system that was corrupt to begin with, and they adapted to it.

He draws a personal conclusion from this. If you sympathize with what happened to one party, logic says you should also empathize with the older parties, who faced their own injustices. He says he owes an apology in his heart to the people he once judged harshly.

Lessons from the journey

The first lesson is that nothing is black and white. “The world operates in a lot of grey,” he says. If he was wrong about so much before, there is no reason his current beliefs are guaranteed to be right.

So he second-checks everything, whether he agrees or disagrees. A mainstream outlet repeating a claim does not count as a check. After watching the coverage of Israel and Palestine, he reads across a range of media and forms a view of what lies between them.

The second lesson is humility. He knows people who now see that they were wrong about local or global politics but cannot admit it. He understands the defensiveness. Growth, he says, means admitting the mistake, apologizing and moving on. “You will not become small. Your honour will not be lost.” What does cost you, he argues, is defending a bad narrative for the rest of your life.

The third lesson is to slow down. Do not react to a single clip, tweet or headline. Find out what the person meant and on what basis.

What the center means for him

After the previous episode, some viewers on the right asked why he had criticized them at all, since the right stands with Islam. His answer: “Islam is on the side of truth. A Muslim can be damaged.” A human being is fallible, and so are commentators who speak for religion.

His center is about how he listens. He names commentators across the spectrum: Sahil Adeem, Qaiser Ahmed Raja, Youth Club, Syed Muzammil Shah and Shahzad Ghias. He listens to all of them and tries to extract their knowledge. His disagreement with some is about tone. He says they make many good points but argue with anger, as if everyone else were a fool. “That is a very, very dangerous place to be in,” he says of anyone who believes he has all the answers.

He also objects to how each side mocks the other. Left-leaning commentators laugh at ideas they have not explored. Right-leaning commentators dismiss opponents as liberals with an agenda. He thinks both sides are speaking from trauma and that both are shaped by a global narrative set in the West.

The responsibilities of the left and the right

In the previous episode, he argued that the educated left had a duty to be humble and to improve people’s lives. Here he sets out what he believes the religious right owes.

If you claim to speak for spirituality, he says, humility should come built in. He points to the life of the Prophet, peace be upon him, as a story of humility and forgiveness, in which “arrogance is the death of man.”

In his view, the right’s job goes beyond fighting obscenity and Western culture. Its job is to bring peace to society, to make women safe and secure, and to protect children. He addresses child sexual abuse directly. It happens across society, he says, and madrassas are part of society. His expectation is that the right will make sure it stops, instead of staying silent and leaving the left to raise it.

He compares Pakistan with other Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Turkey. There, he says, religion is driven by basic human values such as cleanliness and protecting children, values he believes were always part of Islam. Pakistan’s task is to put its own house in order so outsiders have no opening to lecture it.

Faith, submission and the big picture

Muzamil closes the lessons with faith, and he is clear he is speaking personally. In his experience, growth has almost always come after adversity. When he became too certain about how the world worked, he says, God stopped him in a painful way and showed him an uncomfortable truth.

Faith tells him not to lose hope. Submission tells him to make the best decision he can and leave the outcome to God. Humility follows from both. When people say he must always take the right side in a fight between right and wrong, he answers that the Quran and Sunnah give a basic framework everyone agrees on. Beyond that lie sects, schools of reasoning and politics. Anyone who sells hate, in the name of Islam or in the name of development and capitalism, is wrong in his view.

His last method is to look at the macro picture. He studies economic cycles and how civilizations rise and fall, instead of reacting to one price or one prime minister. He gives an example: when governments hold the petrol price down for political reasons, the current account deficit worsens and the rupee eventually collapses.

Where the channel goes next

He ends on the channel itself. He wants episodes to fall to 30 minutes and then 20. He asks people to stop calling him Pakistan’s Dhruv Rathee, saying Rathee is doing a phenomenal job and that he lacks that bravery. He has no fixed vision for the channel and wants it to grow with the audience. He asks viewers not to make him larger than life. “I am a human being,” he says, “and I will disappoint you at some point.” He asks them to correct him when that happens, and to send in the topics they want covered next.