The distance between the “day-time Khan” and the “night-
time Khan,” his biographer suggests, was something that
people had noticed about him even in the 1980s, when he was
playing county cricket in Britain. But what one can dismiss in
a sportsman is harder to ignore in a politician—especially one
who is as stern a moralist as Khan. “To the Weekly Standard,”
writes Sandford, “he was the ‘Khan artist’ who continued to
‘inveigh against the West by day and enjoy its pleasures by
night.’ ” In treating the West as nothing but a source of permis-
siveness and turning the East into a romantic symbol of purity,
Khan provides a fascinating mirror of the cultural confusions
and anxieties of our time. As Imaan Hazir, a human rights law-
yer whose mother serves as a minister in Khan’s government,
put it to me: “It’s quite common among Pakistanis that we dis-
like in others what we most dislike about ourselves.”‘P
olitics in Pakistan,” my father always said, “is a
game of the appointed and the disappointed.”
He was referring to the fluctuating interplay of
forces—now the all-powerful military, now the feudal chief-
tains who control large portions of the rural electorate—that
make up the establishment in Pakistan. In 2008, it was my
father who had been appointed, first as a minister under
Musharraf, then as governor of Punjab. Before Khan became
prime minister, he felt free to denounce any compromise
that civilian leaders like my father might man-
age to broker with Musharraf. “Even if I’m alone,
I would stand away,” he told me during our drive
into Lahore. “See, what faith does is liberate you.
La illa il Allah”—the Islamic testament of faith—“is
a charter of freedom. What makes a human bigger
than others is when he stands up against lies. And
what destroys a human being are compromises.”
Today, 10 years on, my father is dead, assassi-
nated by his own bodyguard in 2011 for his uncom-
promising defense of a Christian woman accused of
blasphemy. Now it is Khan who has been appointed,
presiding over a government in which there are no
fewer than 10 Musharraf-era ministers.
The moral landscape of Pakistan is not always
easy for outsiders to navigate. “All morality origi-
nates from religion,” Khan once asserted, but some-
times it can feel that religion in Pakistan is the source
of dystopia, a world turned upside down. Last April, on the way
to my uncle’s house in the old city, we passed walls plastered
with posters of my father’s killer, Malik Mumtaz Qadri, under
whose image are the words, “I am Mumtaz Qadri.” Through
the distorting eye of faith, Qadri is a hero in Pakistan, with a
shrine in his name, near the capital Islamabad.
Khan—or “Taliban Khan,” as he is sometimes referred to
by his critics—has often seemed sympathetic to the religious
extremism sweeping his country. The man who once invited
the Taliban to open a political office in Pakistan days after a
church bombing in Peshawar killed 81 people, and whose
government has funded seminaries that have produced
jihadis—including Mullah Omar, the founder of the Afghan
Taliban—seems never to express the same violence of opinion
for Islamic extremism as comes so easily to him when attack-
ing the West. “Here he is, trying to play a very difficult game,”Salman Rushdie said of Khan at a panel I chaired in Delhi in- (Khan, the chief guest, had withdrawn in protest upon
hearing that the author of The Satanic Verses would be present.)
Khan, Rushdie said, was “placating the mullahs on one hand,
cozying up to the army on the other, while trying to present
himself to the West as the modernizing face of Pakistan.” He
added acidly, “I’d concentrate on that, Imran. Try and keep
those balls in the air. It’s not going to be easy.”
On social issues, Khan has certainly played to both sides.
He fired one minister for speaking in bigoted ways about Hin-
dus—a tiny minority in Pakistan—but dropped a leading mem-
ber of his economic advisory council for belonging to a sect
considered heretical. Khan’s supporters argue that he is mere-
ly being strategic in dealing with Islamic extremism. Once, on
a flight to China, Ali Zafar asked Khan about his right-wing tilt.
“It’s a very sensitive society toward certain issues,” the crick-
eter told the pop star. “You just can’t talk about those issues
so openly, because you’re going to be penalized for it.” Khan
assured Zafar that he knew what he was doing. “You know
me,” he said. “I’m a liberal; I’ve got friends in India; I’ve got
friends who are atheists. But you’ve got to be careful here.”
Earlier this year, when massive protests erupted in Pakistan
after the acquittal of Asia Bibi, the Christian woman my father
had died defending, Khan’s response was indeed calculated.
His government initially gave the extremists plenty of rope with
which to hang themselves, then cracked down hard
on their leaders. “Look at the way he’s dealt with
these bastard maulvis,” my uncle Yousaf told me.
“What did Imran do?” I asked.
“He threw them all in jail and beat some sense
into them.”
My uncle—the grandson of Muhammad Iqbal,
Khan’s political hero—was convalescing at home
after a leg injury. We sat in a beautiful room with
green silk upholstery and stained glass windows.
One of Pakistan’s most famous actresses, Mehwish
Hayat, leaned against a bolster, languidly smoking a
cigarette. A vigorous man in his late 60s, Yousaf has
known Khan since they were at Aitchison College
together—Pakistan’s equivalent of Exeter. His faith
in his friend is boundless. “I always knew he was a
blessed child,” Yousaf said. “Whatever he sets out
to achieve, he will achieve.” He initially tried to dis-
suade Khan from going into politics. “This just isn’t a decent
man’s game,” he told him. Khan responded by quoting Iqbal,
Yousaf ’s own grandfather. “If no one is prepared to do it,” he
added, “then who will do it?” But when I asked Yousaf about
how strange it is that a man who started a family with someone
as mondaine as Jemima Goldsmith is now married to a small-
town spiritual guru, he became defensive. “What?” he said, as
if surprised by my surprise. “What of it?”
If Khan’s personal life fascinates, it’s because it so closely
reflects the moral and cultural schizophrenia of the society
in which he operates. Like evangelicals in the United States,
in whom a politicized faith conceals an uneasy relationship
with modernity and temptation, Khan’s contradictions are not
incidental; they are the key to who he is, and perhaps to what
Pakistan is. Like other populists, Khan knows far better what
he is against than what he is for. His
STICKY WICKET
Khan has played
to both sides
of what he calls
the “competing
cultural forces
in my life.” 1. As
a young man in
Pakistan, 1971.- During a cricket
match in England,
1981. 3. With
Pashtun
tribesmen, 1995. - With his son
Sulaiman and
wife Jemima after
Princess Diana
toured his hospital
in Lahore, 1997.
CONTINUED ON PAGE 113OCTOBER 2019 91PHOTOGRAPHS BY ADRIAN MURRELL/
ALLSPORT
(2), S
TEFAN ROUSSEAU/PA IMA
GES (4), FROM
S&G/PA IMAGES (1),ALL FROM GETTY IMAGES; BY PAUL MASSEY/CAMERA PRESS/REDUX (3)