Khan was a living god during his cricket years, a once-in-a-generation “symbol of emancipatory virility” who found the doors of the British aristocracy thrown open to him and left a long line of “Khan-quests” in his wake
One night the future first lady of Pakistan had a dream. Visions and prophecies were Bushra Maneka’s stock and trade, for she was a femaleor living saint. Known as Pinky Peerni to her admirers, Maneka’s gift of clairvoyance had earned her a following well beyond her hometown of Pakpattan, a celebrated spiritual center 115 miles southwest of Lahore.
The short answer is politics. In 1996, after years of turning down pleas from established politicians and military dictators eager to align themselves with his celebrity, Khan launched his own political party. In its first election, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party, or PTI—which translates as the Movement for Justice—won zero seats in parliament. Five years later, Khan won one seat, his own. Even by 2013, with his personal popularity at an all-time high, the PTI won only 35 seats.
During the weeks I spent reporting this piece in Pakistan, I made repeated attempts to reach out to the prime minister, but his political handlers seemed alarmed at the prospect of resurrecting his past in the pages of a glossy magazine. In 2000, Khan, then married to Jemima, had been the subject of a profile inthat focused on his youthful escapades.
STICKY WICKET. Khan has played to both sides of what he calls the “competing cultural forces in my life.” As a young man in Pakistan, 1971 and with Pashtun tribesmen, 1995.Khan’s inability to enter the grief of his country—even if he felt none for Bhutto—is an extension of his messianism, which prevents him from being in sympathy with any national drama in which he is not the key protagonist.
Khan—or “Taliban Khan,” as he is sometimes referred to by his critics—has often seemed sympathetic to the religious extremism sweeping his country.
Khan may be right to critique a modernity so thin that it has come to be synonymous with the outward trappings of Western culture. But he is himself guilty of reducing the West to little more than permissiveness and materialism. When it comes to its indisputable achievements, such as democracy and the welfare state, Khan conveniently grafts them on to the history of Islam.
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.
Whatever else can be said about Khan, he inspires hope the likes of which Pakistan has not known for a long time. Attiya Noon, an interior designer, was seven months pregnant when she went to see Khan speak at the Minar-e-Pakistan monument in 2011—widely regarded as the moment when Khan became a credible political choice. “Up until that point,” Noon said, “we had no hope in the system. We all felt that this guy means well, but he’s not going to get anywhere.
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