OCTOBER 2019 VANITY FAIR 113
hatred of the
“ruling elite,” to which he belongs, is the
animating force behind his politics. He faults
reformers, such as Turkey’s Kemal Ataturk
and Iran’s Reza Shah Pahlavi, for falsely
believing that “by imposing the outward
manifestations of Westernization they could
catapult their countries forward by decades.”
Khan may be right to critique a modernity
so thin that it has come to be synonymous
with the outward trappings of Western cul-
ture. But he is himself guilty of reducing the
West to little more than permissiveness and
materialism. When it comes to its indisput-
able achievements, such as democracy and
the welfare state, Khan conveniently grafts
them on to the history of Islam. “Democratic
principles,” he writes, “were an inherent part
of Islamic society during the golden age of
Islam, from the passing of the Holy Prophet
(PBUH) and under the first four caliphs.”
Khan is not the first Islamic leader to
insist that all good things flow from Islam
and that all error is the fault of the West.
But to do so is to end up with a political pro-
gram that is by necessity negative, deriv-
ing its energy not from what it has to offer
but from its virulent critique of late-stage
capitalism. “The life that had come to
Islam,” V.S. Naipaul wrote almost 40 years
ago in Among the Believers, for which he
traveled extensively in Pakistan, “had not
come from within. It had come from out-
side events and circumstances, the spread
of the universal civilization.” Khan’s repur-
posing of Iqbal serves in part as an inocula-
tion against the West, and in part as a cudgel
with which to beat Pakistan’s elite. But it
does not amount to a serious reckoning with
the power of the West, or with the limita-
tions of one’s own society. As such, it cannot
bring about the “cultural, intellectual, and
moral renaissance” that Khan yearns for.
Under his version of khudi, people genu-
flect toward Islam but quietly continue to
lead secret Western lives.
“Six grams?” I asked Reham Khan in dis-
belief. “He couldn’t have been doing six
grams a day. He would be dead, right?”
It was a bright blue day at the Ivy bras-
serie on Kensington High Street in London,
and Khan’s ex-wife was wearing a black
polo-neck blouse and gold necklace. Their
brief and calamitous marriage ended after
only 10 months, with Reham writing an
explosive tell-all book in which she accused
Khan of everything from bisexuality and
infidelity to a daily intake of cocaine large
enough to kill a baby elephant.
“There would be three sachets in the
drawer on a regular basis,” Reham insist-
ed. “Within each sachet would be like three
candy—you know, like in old times we
used to have those twisted type candies.”
She then went on to describe her ex-
husband’s ecstasy consumption. “Half
an ecstasy every night with the coke,” she
said. “And before speeches, he would take
a full ecstasy tablet.”
Reham’s book is too much an act of
revenge to be taken at face value. But even as
an exaggerated version of reality, it reflects
Khan’s years in the political wilderness—
a bleak, solitary time, confirmed by mul-
tiple sources, in which the aging celebrity
turned to drugs out of loneliness and des-
peration. “That’s the dark side of his life,”
one of Pakistan’s senior-most columnists
told me. “He wanted to get rid of all these
shady friends. Now I’m told that they’re
not allowed to enter his house.” The col-
umnist, who had grown up with Khan,
recalls him as a troubled young man. On
one occasion, Khan was riding pillion on a
bike with the columnist’s younger brother,
when he saw his father in a car with anoth-
er woman. “Follow the car,” Khan said. “I
want to kill the bastard.”
Khan is often compared to Trump, but
the politician he most resembles is Bill Clin-
ton. According to Reham’s book, Khan’s
father, a civil engineer, was a womanizing
drunk who beat his mother. And as a celeb-
rity and politician, Khan was never averse
to using his position to add to his sexual
conquests. “He’s a nymphomaniac,” some-
one who has known Khan for years told me
in a Lahore coffee shop. “At fund-raisers
in America, one of his stooges used to walk
behind him. Khan would take a picture
with some woman, and if she was hot, he’d
tell this guy, and that guy would come and
say, ‘Madam, is it possible to meet after-
ward? What’s your number?’ He would just
collect phone numbers.”
The conflation of virility with political
power is as old as Islam itself; Khan likes
to compare his pleasure seeking with that
of Muhammad bin Qasim, the eighth-
century conqueror of Sindh. But if the
prophet himself, who displayed a healthy
sexual appetite, made his example one that
all men could follow, Khan is very much a
law unto himself. In a society as repressed
as Pakistan’s, where normal urges can turn
corrosive, Khan makes no allowances for
others to enjoy the pleasures in which he
has indulged so conspicuously. As such, hecannot escape the charge his former associ-
ate leveled against him: “He encapsulates
all the double standards that Pakistan has.”
Indeed, Khan’s faith appears to be rooted
more in superstition than in what we nor-
mally think of as religious faith. What he
describes in his autobiography as “spiritual”
experiences would be familiar to any parlor-
room psychic—a pir telling his mother that
he will go on to be a household name, a
holy man who somehow knows how many
sisters Khan has and what their names are.
In practicing a form of Islam that flirts with
shirq, or idolatry, Khan recently found him-
self the subject of a viral video, in which he
is seen prostrating himself at the shrine of a
Sufi mystic. (It is forbidden in Islam to pros-
trate oneself before anyone but Allah.) “His
knowledge of Islam is extremely limited,”
Reham told me. “With the magic thing,
people will think less of him.”
A veteran journalist recently reported
that Khan’s marriage to Maneka is in trou-
ble, and a message making the rounds on
WhatsApp alleges that she stormed out
after she caught him exchanging sexts with
a junior minister. In response, Khan issued
a statement that he will stay with Maneka
“until my last breath.” (As the saying goes,
“Never believe a rumor until you hear it offi-
cially denied.”) The clairvoyant, wearing a
white veil, issued a message of her own,
one couched in the prophetic imperative
employed by strongmen everywhere. “Only
Imran Khan can bring change in Pakistan,”
she said, “but change requires time.”During our drive together in 2008, Khan
spoke of how faith protected him from
selling out his principles. Today, former
supporters accuse him of the ultimate
compromise. “He’s a stooge of the army,”
a journalist in Islamabad told me. The jour-
nalist, who has known Khan for years, once
counted himself among the cricketer’s
greatest fans. “I consider myself to be that
unlucky person who built a dream about
an individual and saw it shattered before
my eyes,” he said.
In 2013, after years of military rule, Paki-
stan finally achieved what it never had
before: a peaceful transfer of power. These
signs of a maturing democracy, however,
posed a direct threat to the power of the
military, which began, in the words of
Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s former ambas-
sador to the United States, to develop the
art of the “non-coup coup.” That, the jour-
nalist said, is “where the unholy alliance
between Imran Khan and the establishment
began.” The following year, Khan led what
are called the dharna days—months of pro-
test calling for the overthrow of Pakistan’s
democratically elected government.
Farhan Virk, a young medical student,
was there for the dharna days. One night,Imran Khan
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