Discontent and Its Civilizations By Mohsin Hamid Recently I was strolling along Amsterdam’s canals with a pair of Pakistani immigrant friends. They were worried. The leader of the third biggest party in the Dutch Parliament had called for a ban on the Koran. Attitudes toward Muslims were becoming toxic. A strange thought hung over me as we wandered by marijuana-selling coffee shops and display windows for legal prostitutes: the thought that Anne Frank, as a permanent reminder of intolerance gone mad, could be a guardian angel for Muslims in Amsterdam. How sad that in this city, with its history, a religious minority could once again feel the need for such a guardian. Suspicion of Muslims is, of course, not confined to Europe. Earlier this year, on a trip from Pakistan to New York with my wife and baby daughter, I had my usual lengthy encounter at J.F.K. Airport with an American version of the same theme. Sent to secondary inspection, I waited my turn to be investigated. Eventually it came, the officer questioning me about such things as whether I had ever been to Mexico or received combat training. As a result, we were the last passengers on our flight to claim our luggage, a lonely set of suitcases and a foldable playpen on a now-stationary baggage carousel. And until we stepped out of the terminal, my heart kept pounding in a way incongruent with my status as a visitor with papers in order. When we returned to Pakistan, a shock wave from a suicide bombing, the latest deadly attack by militants intent on destabilizing the country, passed through my sister’s office in Lahore. The blast killed several people, but was far enough from the university where my sister teaches not to harm anyone on campus or shatter her windows. It did open her office door, though, pushing it firmly ajar, like a ghost exiting into the hallway outside. Some might argue episodes such as these are signs of a clash of civilizations. But I think not. Individuals have commonalities that cut across different countries, religions and languages — and differences that divide those who share a common country, religion and language. The idea that we fall into civilizations, plural, is merely a politically convenient myth. Take two notional civilizations, namely those of “Muslims” and “Westerners.” To which do my Pakistani friends in Amsterdam or I belong? They are secular and believe in equal rights irrespective of gender or sexual orientation. And I, a citizen and resident of Pakistan, have spent 17 years in America, longer than the lifetimes of over 70 million Americans born since 1983. Westernized Muslims, Islamized Westerners: Surely people like us can be disregarded as recent, tiny and unrepresentative minorities? Actually no. Fly from Lahore to Madrid and you will find that the words for shirt and soap are virtually the same in both places, linguistic testament to the fact that people have always intermingled. Yes, Pakistani murderers set off bombs that annually kill thou.

1. Discontent and Its Civilizations
By Mohsin Hamid
Recently I was strolling along Amsterdam’s canals with a pair
of Pakistani immigrant friends. They were worried. The leader
of the third biggest party in the Dutch Parliament had called for
a ban on the Koran. Attitudes toward Muslims were becoming
toxic. A strange thought hung over me as we wandered by
marijuana-selling coffee shops and display windows for legal
prostitutes: the thought that Anne Frank, as a permanent
reminder of intolerance gone mad, could be a guardian angel for
Muslims in Amsterdam. How sad that in this city, with its
history, a religious minority could once again feel the need for
such a guardian.
Suspicion of Muslims is, of course, not confined to Europe.
Earlier this year, on a trip from Pakistan to New York with my
wife and baby daughter, I had my usual lengthy encounter at
J.F.K. Airport with an American version of the same theme.
Sent to secondary inspection, I waited my turn to be
investigated. Eventually it came, the officer questioning me
about such things as whether I had ever been to Mexico or
received combat training.
As a result, we were the last passengers on our flight to claim
our luggage, a lonely set of suitcases and a foldable playpen on
a now-stationary baggage carousel. And until we stepped out of
the terminal, my heart kept pounding in a way incongruent with
my status as a visitor with papers in order.
When we returned to Pakistan, a shock wave from a suicide
bombing, the latest deadly attack by militants intent on
destabilizing the country, passed through my sister’s office in
Lahore. The blast killed several people, but was far enough
from the university where my sister teaches not to harm anyone

2. on campus or shatter her windows. It did open her office door,
though, pushing it firmly ajar, like a ghost exiting into the
hallway outside.
Some might argue episodes such as these are signs of a clash of
civilizations. But I think not. Individuals have commonalities
that cut across different countries, religions and languages —
and differences that divide those who share a common country,
religion and language. The idea that we fall into civilizations,
plural, is merely a politically convenient myth.
Take two notional civilizations, namely those of “Muslims” and
“Westerners.” To which do my Pakistani friends in Amsterdam
or I belong? They are secular and believe in equal rights
irrespective of gender or sexual orientation. And I, a citizen and
resident of Pakistan, have spent 17 years in America, longer
than the lifetimes of over 70 million Americans born since
1983.
Westernized Muslims, Islamized Westerners: Surely people like
us can be disregarded as recent, tiny and unrepresentative
minorities? Actually no. Fly from Lahore to Madrid and you
will find that the words for shirt and soap are virtually the same
in both places, linguistic testament to the fact that people have
always intermingled.
Yes, Pakistani murderers set off bombs that annually kill
thousands. And yes, some Pakistanis fit the stereotype of poor,
radicalized, seminary-educated militants. But they live in a
nation where under 10 percent vote for parties of the religious
right, where a rapidly growing majority watches television.
Pakistani television programming is incredibly diverse for good
reason: So is the country. The blast wave that passed through
my sister’s office doubtless passed through devout Muslims,
atheist Muslims, gay Muslims, funny Muslims and lovestruck
Muslims — not to mention Pakistani Christians, Chinese
engineers, American security contractors and Indian Sikhs.
What civilization, then, did the bomb target? And from what
civilization did it originate?
Civilizations are illusory. But they are useful illusions. They

3. allow us to deny our common humanity, to allocate power,
resources and rights in ways repugnantly discriminatory.
To maintain the effectiveness of these illusions, they must be
associated with something undeniably real. That something is
violence. Our civilizations do not cause us to clash. No, our
clashing allows us to pretend we belong to civilizations.
In Pakistan, I live as part of an extended family. My parents
built their house adjoining that of my grandparents. My wife
and I built our apartment above the house of my parents. Our
daughter needed a room. So we converted our balcony, adding a
corrugated-metal, foam-insulated roof, and some well-shaded,
double-glazed windows.
The room was bright, inexpensive, energy efficient and quick to
build. All we wanted, in other words. But then it occurred to us
that our daughter’s windows faced in the direction of a main
road. A hundred yards away were offices, shops, banks. The
kinds of places sometimes attacked in our city.
I decided to ask an architect friend whether I ought to consider
blast-resistant film for my daughter’s windows. Despite four
generations of my family having lived in the same place, this
was a question none of us had ever posed before. I had no idea
whether such films were effective, or how much they might
cost.
I did not wonder if they were made by factories in the West, by
workers who were Muslim, by both, or by neither. No, I
wondered instead if such films were truly transparent. For
outside my daughter’s windows is a yellow-blooming amaltas
tree, beautiful and mighty, and much older than us all.
I hoped not to dim my daughter’s view of it.
(From: the International Herald Tribune)
2
Ebbets Field

4. Nobody we knew owned a car, so we went there on foot from
where I lived, walking across the hills and meadows of Prospect
Park. By the time we reached Flatbush Avenue, there was a
convergence of all the tribes of Brooklyn: the Jews and the Irish
and the Italians, immigrants and their American children;
oldtimers who had moved from the waterfront neighborhoods to
the higher slopes to be near the great ballpark; tough lean men
who had survived Iwo Jima and Anzio and the Hurtgen Forest,
places where they had lost the hyphenated prefixes of origin and
had become Americans; and of course, all those black
Americans, including men with gray hair who had waited for
too many decades to see Jack Roosevelt Robinson walk on big
league grass.
All of us were going to Ebbets Field.
In memory, encoded in all those unreliable images printed upon
me as a boy, the place was huge. It was, in fact, the largest
structure I had ever entered, larger than any church, larger than
any movie house. I know now that it was sneered at as a
bandbox: TK feet down the right field line, TK feet to
center, TK to left. But if you were eleven, and you were sitting
in those centerfield stands, and Terry Moore of the Cardinals
was directly below you, and home plate seemed a mile away, it
was huge.
It was also beautiful. As kids, we used free tickets from the
Police Athletic League to get in, or brought one of our friends
who had been crippled by polio and played on the sympathies of
the special cops, who always let us in, with a growl and a wink.
Then we climbed dark ramps, higher and higher, climbing to the
distant reaches and the cheapest seats in the ball park.
Finally we were at the top level, and walked through a gate, out
of the darkness, and there before us was the field. No grass has

5. ever been greener. Each time I went back to Ebbets Field, and
made that climb, and saw that field, my skin
pebbled once more, at the sight of all that beauty.
There was no television then, and so we knew the Dodgers and
Ebbets Field from stories and photographs in the Daily News
and from the voice of Red Barber on the radio. Most of us
imagined the Dodgers before we ever saw them. Nothing in
newspapers or radio ever matched the experience of being there:
the smell of hot dogs, the signs along the walls (“Hit Sign, Win
Suit”), the barking of beer hawkers in thick Brooklynese
(“Getcha cold one now, heah day are, cold as da Nawt’ Pole”)
the music of the Brooklyn Sym-Phony, the shouting and
argument, dismay and joy in the stands. Everyone was joined in
the rough democracy of the upper deck.
The great accomplishment of Robinson in 1947 was not so much
that he integrated baseball, but that he integrated those stands.
Which is to say he started integrating his country, our country.
And so when Robinson jittered off second base, upsetting the
enemy pitcher, the number 42 sending signals of possible
amazements, we all roared. Whites and blacks: roaring
for Robinson. And when he broke for third, the roar exploded to
another level, and birds rose from the roofs of the ballpark and
the stands shook so hard you thought they might fall. They
would eventually fall, but not from the roar.
There was much to roar about. Kids my age were granted an
amazing gift that went beyond the crowded intimacy of the park
itself. Branch Rickey had built for us an extraordinary team:
Snider, Furillo, Reese and the others. Robinson was their
engine. Driven by his passion (the way 40 years later
the Chicago Bulls would be driven by Michael Jordan) , they
fought for every victory; they did not shrug away a loss and call
their agents. Most of them had no agents. Most of them even
lived in Brooklyn; Gil Hodges had a small house on a good

6. street about eight blocks from the tenement where I lived. The
great ones stayed with the team year after year; we knew them,
we celebrated their great victories, and plunged into gloom at
their defeats. We thought we would have them forever, and that
when they got old they would come back to Ebbets Field on Old
Timers Day and we’d see the Dook slash one off the concave
wall in right field or Robinson walk to bat in his pigeon-toed
way and dare the pitcher to throw at his head. We would
have our children with us. We would tell them the tale of that
great team, those boys of summer.
None of that ever happened and we should have known it, even
as boys. The last game was played in 1957, and then they were
gone. For some people, the departure was an immense wound, a
betrayal, a rejection. Walter O’Malley, the Dodger owner, had
played with our emotions, made fools of us, and some people
never forgave him. I didn’t go to another major league baseball
game for twelve years; my father, an Irish immigrant made into
an American by baseball, lived another 28 years and never
entered a single ballpark.
Within a year after the Dodgers lammed to Los Angeles, Ebbets
Field was smashed into rubble. From the rubble would rise a
project called Ebbets Field Houses. Years later, I went out there
for a look, and there was a sign on the wall beside the front
door.
NO BALLPLAYING ALLOWED, it said.
I started walking home, the way I did as a boy, through Prospect
Park, and all around me I could hear a roar, and there in my
mind, as it will be forever, was the image of Robinson, dancing
off second, about to break for third.
Copyright 2004 Pete Hamill

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