that Khan, five years after 9/11, was in the throes of a religious
and political transformation. I was researching my first book,
Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands, and
had only just returned from an eight-month trip through Syria,
Yemen, Iran, and Pakistan. Khan’s views, though alarming in
their intensity, struck me as juvenile. He said he believed that
suicide bombers, according to “the rules of the Geneva Con-
vention,” had the right to blow themselves up. Here, I remem-
ber feeling, was a man who had dealt so little in ideas that every
idea he had now struck him as a good one.
The next time I met Khan was under dramatically altered
circumstances. In December 2007, I was staying with my uncle
Yousaf in his house in the old city of Lahore, when televisions
across the country began to flash the news that Benazir Bhutto,
the former prime minister, had been assassinated. It was deep-
ly affecting, even for those who disliked Bhutto, to see this tar-
nished but enduring symbol of hope and democracy cut down
so violently. Upon her death, Pakistan, battered by terror and
military dictatorship, descended into paroxysms of grief. Into
this atmosphere Khan arrived a few days later with a French
girlfriend. He had been in Mumbai, staying at the house of a
prominent socialite, where he had been photographed pool-
side in swimming trunks as his country was engulfed in trauma.
Khan has a commanding presence. He fills a room and has
a tendency to speak at people, rather than to them; never was
there a greater mansplainer. What he lacks in intelligence,
however, he makes up for in intensity, vigor, and what feels
almost like a kind of nobility. As Wasim Akram—Khan’s pro-
tégé and his successor as captain of the Pakistan team—said
to me in Karachi, “There are two types of people, the followers
and the leaders. And he is definitely a leader. Not just in crick-
et—in general.” To describe Khan as Im the Dim, as he has long
been known in London circles, fails to capture what it feels like
to be around him. “You might say he’s a duffer; you might say
he’s a buffoon,” his second wife, Reham, told me over lunch in
London. “He doesn’t have intelligence of economic principles.
He doesn’t have academic intelligence. But he’s very street, so
he figures you out.” Like his coeval in the White House, Khan
has been reading people all his life—on and off the field. This
knowing quality, combined with the raw glamour of vintage
fame, creates a palpable tension in his presence. The air bris-
tles; oxygen levels crash. The line is taut, if no longer with sex
appeal, then its closest substitute: massive celebrity.
I had been less aware of this when I first met Khan in Lon-
don. But to see him two years later in the old city of Lahore,
doing more dips in the gym at 55 than I could do at 27, watch-
ing him fawned over by young and old men alike, was to feel
myself in the company of a demigod. Alone with him, I was
struck by that mixture of narcissism bordering on sociopa-
thy that afflicts those who have been famous too long. His
utter lack of emotion when it came to Bhutto—whom he had
been at Oxford with, and had known most of his life—was
startling. “Look at Benazir,” he told me as we drove through
Lahore one morning, past knots of mourners and protesters.
“I mean, God really saved her.” Then he began fulminating
against Bhutto for having agreed to legitimize General Pervez
Musharraf, Pakistan’s military dictator, in return for the gov-
ernment dropping corruption charges against her.
“Imagine that,” Khan said. “It’s the most immoral thing you
could have done. So this thing has come as a blessing for her.”
“This thing?” I asked.
“Death,” he said matter-of-factly. Then, with what sounded
almost like envy, he added, “Benazir has become a martyr. She
has become immortal.”
Khan’s inability to enter the grief of his country—even if he
felt none for Bhutto—is an extension of his messianism, whichprevents him from being in sympathy with any national drama
in which he is not the key protagonist. But when the conver-
sation turned to the elite whom Bhutto represented, another
aspect of his character emerged. Khan, who had just returned
from partying with Bollywood stars in Mumbai, began to
speak without a shred of irony of the virtues of Victorian-
ism. “Societies are strong,” he told me, “when their elites are
strong. If you look at Victorian England, you’ll see that their
elite was strong and moral. Our problem, both in India and
Pakistan, is that our elites have decayed.” He pointed to my
father, who had recently joined Musharraf ’s government as
a minister. Khan told me he feared that my father lacked “a
moral anchor. He just sits there drinking his whiskeys, laugh-
ing at everything, putting everything down. He’s cynical. Not
at all like me: I am an optimist.”
It is easy to view the contradiction between Khan’s words
and actions as hypocrisy. But to my mind, hypocrisy implies
willful cynicism. This was different. It was as if Khan was unable
to make a whole of the many people he had been—unable to
find a moral system that could support the varied lives he had
led. For his new self to live, it seemed, the old one had to be
renounced. “This man has a Jekyll and Hyde problem,” Hina
Rabbani Khar, Pakistan’s former foreign minister, explained
to me in Lahore. “He is actually two people at the same time.”Unlike other populists, Khan
belongs to an elite even more
rarefied than the one he attacks.
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