As imperialism destroys one country after the other, the phenomenon of primitive accumulation and accumulation through dispossession by destruction is swiftly taking over the countries of global South hence migration to the West has become a regular feature.

Labour is trying to follow capital but on latter’s draconian terms. Let’s examine how the Pakistani migrants are adjusting to the new realities.

In Australia and Europe Pakistani expatriates can be divided into two groups. People escaping from Zia’s wrath were mostly progressives and they sought asylum only because life in their country was made impossible for them.

Being progressive, they assimilated in the system without much ado. The post-Zia wave brought a variety of people which can be divided into two groups.

After the fall of the Soviet Union and later after 9/11, the wave of expatriates was either religiously conservative and suspicious of western culture or outright liberal. Their prime focus was to accumulate money by working in inclement conditions or by involving themselves in businesses.

The conservatives stuck together to build ideologically fictive religious and cultural identities.

Mosque or places of worship provided them a sense of identity and satisfied the nostalgia of homelessness. In the alienated culture the process of ghettoization promoted the sense of religious superiority and helped them introduce Sharia in their private lives, and if possible, in the system as well. Saudi influence was apparent not only through their dress code but also through their anti-Palestinian ideology.

Lack of economic opportunities, deterioration in cultural norms and stifling obscurantism in their native countries with pronounced insecurity, pushed the other segment abroad—the young, educated migrants who sought refuge in atheism or anti-Islamism.

Impressed by western Orwellian democracy and so-called liberty without economic freedom they found their catharsis in Orientalism.

Their Islamophobia is not the consequence of any socio-economic analysis of the objective conditions but is based on stereotyping Islamic icons and personalisation. For Adorno these are the symptoms of an authoritarian personality, “a first step to psychotic thinking, a crucial characteristic of the fascist character”. Incidentally, this fascist trend remains common to both groups.

Akin to neo-cons in the US, the newly born expatriate ex-Muslims, teeming and blaming Islam are finding all defects in its ideology forgetting that political Islam was the creation of US-Saudi nexus, admitted by Muhammad bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. “Even the tribes”, Eqbal Ahmed........

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