How getting cancelled pushed Muzamil back to the center

Picking up the story in 2010

This is the second part of a personal series. In part one, Muzamil described growing up in a simple Pakistani home with eastern values, then moving through private school, the internet and American pop culture during the war on terror. By 2010 he had a westernized mindset and lived in what he calls a filter bubble of A-level friends. “I thought I knew a lot about Pakistan,” he says. “Unfortunately I did not know anything.”

He explains how that bubble carries on into university. Most A-level students aim for the same business, art and medical schools. In those places, he argues, thinking converges on one elite view. Dissent is called uncool or ignorant and pushed aside. He does not blame the students. Everyone goes where they feel comfortable. But original thinking, in his view, starts with studying diversity, and a room where everyone agrees teaches you very little.

Karachi, FAST and the real middle class

His first plan was to go abroad and chase the American dream, as his brothers and an uncle had. That was too expensive, and his grades did not win a scholarship. LUMS offered him economics but not computer science, so he went to FAST Karachi. The campus had been burned in a local dispute and still had no proper projectors. He was thrown off moving buses more than once, chased by dogs in Clifton, and looked at with suspicion by the Rangers. After two and a half months he flew home to Islamabad, feeling like a loser.

That gap year is when he started his photography page and his digital media work. The next year he passed the test for FAST Islamabad. There, he says, about 97% of students came from FSc backgrounds, many on need-based scholarships from across Pakistan, from Bahawalpur, Dera Ismail Khan, Sindh and Balochistan. His family had little cash, but it had proximity and connections. “I got a very clear sense of my privilege,” he says. Because these classmates were his friends, he listened when they said things he would once have called ignorant, and he asked where they were coming from.

2013 and the internet’s new crowd

Muzamil believes the internet explains much of Pakistan’s polarization. Before 2013, he says, roughly 6 to 7 million Pakistanis used broadband, about 2 to 3% of the population. It was a small, privileged and polite space. Then the 3G and 4G licences were sold. A 10,000-rupee QMobile replaced an expensive laptop as the way online, and over the next five years he estimates 30 to 40 million Pakistanis came onto the internet for the first time.

For the first time, mainstream Pakistanis could say online what power and fear had kept them from saying to an officer’s face. Many of Muzamil’s school friends were shocked. He offers a test for readers: how did you react when TikTok arrived? If you called it cringe, he says, you are making the judgment he made in 2010. Those people did not change. You can see them now. He argues the answer is to ask why someone thinks what they think. “When you begin to understand the why,” he says, “you can backtrack to what happened to that person that did not happen to you.”

Walking away from the World Bank

A viral video led to a job as a World Bank consultant on water and sanitation. He travelled to districts and villages, saw people longing for 5,000-rupee pipes, and saw a city like Faisalabad where water reached homes on donkey carts. He stayed in the most expensive hotels with a security detail and was paid well in dollars.

His conscience did not accept the gap. In his telling, he was spending around a million rupees of the Bank’s money to write a report on a problem that cost a few thousand to fix, and in a loan-funded project the country itself carried the debt. After about two years he quit. His boss was angry and told him how much money he was walking away from. Muzamil did not try to argue philosophy. He just said it was not working for him. The experience broke his belief that western institutions ran on logic. “There are vibes there too,” he says. “Their vibe is just flashier.”

A panel, a question and a shouting match

Around this time he was invited to a UNDP youth panel at the Lahore Literary Festival. Another panelist argued that democracy and secularism would solve Pakistan’s problems. During the Q&A, an audience member suggested Islam itself was the country’s problem. Muzamil asked the hall, which he estimates at 1,200 to 1,300 people, to raise their hands if they had read the Quran with a translation. In his account, no one did. “I don’t personally think that religion is the problem,” he told them. “I think the way that religion has been interpreted is the problem.”

He then put a question to the other panelist. If democracy is supreme, run a referendum and ask whether the majority wants an Islamic Republic or a secular state. If the majority chooses the first, how can you impose the second? In his account, she replied that some things have to be done for the greater good because people are ignorant. To Muzamil, that broke the logic: you cannot want democracy only when you control it. Backstage, a man in his sixties shouted that people like him were the reason children were dying. It was, he says, his first experience of extremism on the liberal side.

The Aurat March post

By 2018 he was working a job and posting on Instagram. He supported the Aurat March and encouraged his wife to attend. But the media focus fell on a few provocative posters, while women from Balochistan and middle-class backgrounds were asking for education and inheritance rights. He wrote a post aimed at conservatives, asking them not to dismiss the whole movement: “Just like Al-Qaeda does not represent all Muslims, similarly a fringe does not represent the entire movement.”

The first comments were from people who said it changed their view. Within the hour, a tweet claimed he had compared women to Al-Qaeda. Articles and attacks followed, and his wife received messages telling her to divorce him. He was cancelled by the people he thought were his allies. His lesson is about method. Outrage only makes people defensive. “You cannot build support on aggression,” he says. A movement needs leadership, compromise and solutions. And the onus, in his view, is heavier on the educated and privileged, who had every advantage the people they mock did not.

A podcast clip and a label

Muzamil says he started Thought Behind Things because he wanted a space for context-driven conversation. He reached out across the spectrum and recorded long conversations with commentators on the left. Then Shehzad Ghias invited him onto his podcast. Muzamil says he went to build a bridge, but the conversation opened with his old Aurat March post. He explained some points and apologised for others. In his account, a clip was later posted asking whether he was middle class. He says he had described himself as upper middle class and has never claimed to be middle class, and that the clip changed the context of what he said. The label has followed him since.

Why he stays in the middle

Muzamil says the easy move after being attacked by one fringe is to run to the other. He chose not to. “I have consumed every kind of thing,” he says. He read the right and moved right, then read the left and moved left. “A rational person will eventually find the middle path.” He says he disagrees strongly with commentators on both fringes, yet respects them and their right to speak, because people need to hear every voice to form their own view.

He ends without blaming anyone. People react from their own experiences and traumas, and he accepts that his words may have sounded tone-deaf to some. His position is simple: “There is nothing wrong with having wrong opinions as long as the discourse continues, as long as you are not promoting hate.”