“I know it’s not right to have your palm read…” Hina says. But there is something about her brother that’s important to know in order to understand him—in order to understand all that had happened between her brother and Qandeel Baloch—better. When he was younger, Hina’s elder brother Abdul Qavi was taken to a skin doctor for some ailment. The doctor also dabbled in palmistry and liked to look at his patients’ hands and tell them whatever he could see. He uncurled Abdul’s fist and ran his fingers over the faint spidery lines on the boy’s palm. He is unusual, the doctor told Abdul’s parents. He might have even said extraordinary. Abdul is intelligent. But there will be many who are jealous of this. There will be many who are against him, who will not like how intelligent and extraordinary he is. Just as the sun rises to its peak, so too will Abdul. And just as the sun reaches in its flaming ascent the point known as zawal—a time when some Muslims believe it is forbidden to pray and others say it is the moment when the everlasting fire in hell is kindled afresh—so too will Abdul’s life have a moment of zawal. A time of misfortune.
Abdul’s sisters saw that he was careless with his tongue, that he was too trusting, too naive. “My father would tell us, ‘Explain this to your brother. He says things in jest and he does not realise that every person is not his friend,’ ” Hina says. She teaches women how to read and understand the Quran, and in Multan she is known as Apa (elder sister) among those who flock to her classes. “This is one of the first things the Quran teaches us: how to hold your tongue. But my brother lacks this ability. When people know that about you, they will try to exploit this weakness. Even now, even after everything that has happened, he will not change. Whatever happened to him was a trial from Allah.”
But Allah looks out for His beloved ones, she says. “It is Allah’s grace that has saved my brother.” After all, it is at times such as a trial, when your heart is hurting and you feel forsaken, that you are drawn closer to Allah. That is what happened to her brother after he decided to meet Qandeel, Hina believes. That woman was a test of Abdul’s faith. She ushered in a time of great uncertainty and bad luck for Abdul—the zawal the doctor had foreseen all those years ago.
Abdul Qavi and his three sisters were born and raised in Multan, as was his father and his father before him, and so on for decades. His family can trace its lineage in the city back 300 years, he says. The fifty-nine-year-old cleric still lives there with his wife, his three daughters and their children, in a small house located at the back of the Darul Uloom Ubaidia, the madrassa that he runs in Multan’s Qadirabad neighbourhood. “Look for the street that is crowded with the halva and milk sellers,” he said when giving me directions to his home. “You’ll know you’re near me when you smell sweet wafts of halva. Let that be your guide.” And if you get lost, he instructed, just ask any man on the street where you can find Mufti Abdul Qavi. Everyone here knows him.
I do get lost. I cannot find the halva sellers. And no one—not shopkeepers, guards, traffic policemen, rickshaw drivers, men idling on the side of the road, men squatting on donkey carts—knows Mufti Abdul Qavi’s name or where his madrassa is. When I finally find it, the place smells of nothing. The madrassa is located in a lane off a small square. A man leans against a cart laden with fish. They have been gutted and laid open to the sun as the blood congeals on their gleaming scales. A milk seller places a plastic dummy milk bottle as tall as a man outside his shop and paints its creamy white surface with a menu—cardamom milk, milk with crushed almonds, cold milk soda. A billboard for “Gorgeous Beauty Saloon & Institute,” sun-bleached black and white with tinges of green, has been fixed above the milk shop.
The swinging glass doors to a shop selling “Multan’s famous sohan halva here since 1970” are closed. There is no one inside and a barber has set up shop on the kerb. An old man sits on a high chair before a table with a mirror propped against an electricity pole. He stares at his reflection as the barber tilts his head, clutches his tufts of greying hair to hold him steady and strokes a razor down the side of his jaw.
The madrassa, flanked by a shop where a boy is slapping pats of dough inside a hot tandoor, has a faded date painted at the entrance: 1862. Inside, visitors are welcomed with a sign that reads, “This is a school for those who seek knowledge; the streams of knowledge that flow from here shall never run dry.”
“All of this,” Mufti Qavi says, drawing an arc with his arm from the milk seller to the boy with the naan to the madrassa established 155 years ago and the two mosques—one set up by his uncle—further down the lane, “this whole street is ours.” When Qandeel was murdered, there was talk about Mufti Qavi’s connections with the village where her family still lives. There was speculation that his photographs with Qandeel had tarnished his reputation in Shah Sadar Din and that he was furious about that. But Mufti Qavi rubbishes these claims. “I have nothing to do with that place,” he wants people to know. “But my great-grandfather was married to a girl whose family was from there.” The girl’s father had been the prayer leader at the village mosque. That connection meant that people from the village had gone to Mufti Qavi’s ancestors to study the Quran and receive religious guidance. “Everyone who is running a madrassa or mosque there, or anyone who prays there, has likely been taught to do so by my family,” he says. He only returns to the village now on “happy or sad occasions.”
Mufti Qavi spends his days in the offices abutting the madrassa. The two-storey building is centred around a courtyard used as a parking space. The first floor has rooms to accommodate any guests of the madrassa. Mufti Qavi’s office itself is small and carpeted, with a few dark green shelves stacked with books. The walls have been painted a sickly pale green with a glittery sheen as if glass has been crushed into the paint. The colour is streaked in some places and chipped in others, revealing slate-grey concrete beneath. The room doesn’t get any sun, and the bright white phosphorescent lights stay on until Mufti Qavi leaves for the day. There is no privacy. The windows do not have curtains, and the door stays open all day. He points out that there is no guard at the gate or the entrance to the office. Mufti Qavi wants his visitors to know that he has nothing to hide. Anyone can look into his office. Anyone can walk in to give Mufti Qavi a box of mithai as thanks for solving a particular issue or to fold a wad of notes—rent for the properties he owns in Multan, he explains—into his hand, and he will pause briefly in the middle of whatever he is doing to say “salaam” before continuing a conversation or helping someone who has come to him for advice.
When he speaks, his visitors know not to interrupt. He sways gently back and forth and projects his voice as though addressing a gathering or standing at a lectern rather than sitting in a room that can accommodate six or seven people at best. When he becomes impassioned, his voice rises like he is trying to drown out someone else’s words. If his phone rings while he is speaking, he will answer the call but keep the caller on hold until his sentence is complete. Only then will he turn his attention to the call. Once he has had his say, he will hang up with a quick “Peace be with you.” Callers rarely get to question or argue with anything he has said.
Most of the space in the office is taken up by a low, hefty slab of wood topped with a sheet of glass. Mufti Qavi sits at this “desk” cross-legged on a small raised wooden platform with a bolster at his back. When meeting journalists, attending an event or taking part in a television show, Mufti Qavi likes to wear a waistcoat and his karakul cap. Today he wears a grey waistcoat and a cap threaded with embroidery. His beard is clipped to a precise point under his chin, and when he smiles his cheeks lift in two cheery, plump points, and his small eyes, often difficult to see behind the light that glints off the glasses he always wears, narrow into slits. His hair and his beard are an even black. There is no grey, no salt and pepper. His nails are neatly trimmed and his hands smooth and pale. There are no creases in his cream-coloured shalwar kameez. But when he sits at his desk on that wooden platform you see his feet. The soles are ash-grey, the skin is calloused around the toes and his nails broken and jagged.
He is particular about the placement of books, stationery and papers on the desk, sliding them across the glass until the corners of all the books are aligned with the edge of the table and the papers lined up next to the books before he speaks or acknowledges visitors. And they in turn must be seated in a particular way in this room. Visitors accompanying someone, or those who want to sit in on a particular meeting to glean some religious knowledge, must sit on the floor directly opposite Mufti Qavi. Men who come to Mufti Qavi for guidance or religious instruction must sit to his left, while women go to the right.
“Come closer.” He beckons to me, pointing to the carpeted floor on his right side.
He clicks his tongue. “Closer.”
He pats a spot that is within arm’s reach of him. “Come on,” he cajoles. “More closer.”
There’s a reason for this seating arrangement, he explains, and the story tumbles out. Akbar, the Mughal king who was married four times, had yet to have a son. Two of Akbar’s wives were Hindu and two were Muslim. Now, to cut a long story short, one of the Hindu wives gave birth to a son. Of course, many Muslim clerics today—not Mufti Qavi but many others—say that Hindus and Muslims cannot get married, and so you can just imagine what they would call a baby born from a union between a Muslim and a Hindu, a word that Mufti Qavi would not like to say in front of me, a woman whom he has just met but whom he looks upon as his daughter, but of course we all know what that word is, but anyway back to the story. Whenever Akbar’s Hindu or Muslim subjects came to visit him, Akbar would have the Hindus sit to his left, and the Muslims to the right. When one Hindu objected that the king was treating the two groups differently, a wise vizier helped Akbar out of a potentially sticky argument by explaining, “The king has seated his Hindu subjects to his left, so that his heart faces you.”
Mufti Qavi loves this story. When women visit him with their fathers, brothers or husbands and appeal to him for help with domestic issues—and he is often on their side, you see, and scolds the husband who beats his wife or the father who wishes to forcibly marry off his daughter the moment she hits puberty—no one can claim that Mufti Qavi is biased towards them. For his heart, he says, quoting the vizier, looks upon the men.
“Now, come closer,” he says. “You see, I don’t like to speak loudly. Everyone in my home knows this—from the children to the wife. If I must call someone, I just—” he claps his hands together like a magician “—do this. I don’t like loud voices at all. Now, say in the name of Allah, and…” He folds his hands and rests them on his stomach. He bows his head and closes his eyes. It’s hard to tell if he is praying or if he would like you to know that you have his utmost attention. “Ask me anything,” he encourages, his eyes shut.
Mufti Qavi is clearly used to having an audience. His appearance on Raja Matloob’s show with Qandeel was not his first or last on national television. In January 2011 he had been on TV with Pakistani actress Veena Malik, who had been voted off the Indian reality TV show Bigg Boss.
Malik had spent eighty-four days in the Bigg Boss house before she was evicted. As an article in the English daily the News noted, “When the show started off, hardly anybody in India knew of [Veena Malik]. But by the end of the first week, she had the audience agog.”1 Malik struck up a friendship with an actor named Ashmit Patel, and was not afraid to be seen “openly fondling him on screen and sitting in secluded corners…having long, intimate discussions,” the article stated. They kissed and hugged often and there were rumours that they had had sex while in the house together. Malik dressed in skirts, shorts and high heels on the show, and in one episode wore a bathing suit as she joined the other residents of the house in the pool. This did not go do down well with the audience in Pakistan.
In January 2011, fresh from her sojourn in India, Malik was invited on to a talk show on Express News to defend her actions in the Bigg Boss house to Pakistani viewers. “There is an allegation against you, made by a segment of Pakistani society, that you brought dishonour upon Pakistani culture in India,” the host Kamran Shahid said to Malik. “Your dresses and your actions, as well as your interactions with people there, did not represent the ideological foundations of Pakistan, its culture or its people. As a cultural ambassador of Pakistan, do you regret your actions—if these allegations are true—or do you think the allegations are baseless?”
Malik said she did not set out to represent Pakistan, nor could she have acted as a cultural ambassador on the show. “I was there to represent the Veena Malik of Pakistan’s entertainment industry,” she argued.
“So what you’re saying is that the entertainment industry is vulgar and encourages nudity?” Shahid countered.
Before Malik could explain herself further, Shahid cut to the night’s second guest, Mufti Qavi. “Mufti sahib, I’m going to stay neutral,” Shahid said, “but you on the other hand have an opinion about all this.” Mufti Qavi told Malik that her actions had saddened his heart and the hearts of millions in the country who liked and respected her. Allah had blessed her with beauty and grace, he said, and showing off that beauty and grace was permissible, but within certain parameters. “After all, Allah loves beautiful things,” he lectured. “But if [Veena Malik’s] conscience is alive, she needs to look at her pictures and ask herself if what she has done is right or wrong.” He would give remarkably similar advice to Qandeel five years later during their interview on Ajeeb Sa.
Malik said her conscience told her she had done nothing wrong. The argument swiftly escalated. Mufti Qavi told Malik he was hurt by what she had just said. “No Pakistani can sit with his daughter and look at those images of you,” he said, his voice rising. The host tried to get Mufti Qavi to be quiet, so that Malik could respond, but the cleric shouted over him, “Whenever she has a son, he will not be able to look at these images of her. Her father and her brother could never look at them.”
“If you want to come and talk to me about Islam, then you should know that you are not permitted to even look at me right now,” Malik responded. She ran her fingers through her wavy chestnut-brown hair. She was wearing a low-cut sleeveless black top and she leaned forward as she addressed Mufti Qavi. She wanted to know how he could praise her beauty and grace when, according to Islam, he could not gaze at a woman who was not related to him. “You should be punished for that,” she said. Instead of lecturing her on Islam, Mufti Qavi should turn his attention to other problems in the country, she suggested. “Go and look at what the politicians are doing. What about bribes and robbery? What about murders in the name of Islam? Why are you picking on Veena Malik? Because I’m a woman? Why me? Because I’m a soft target.”
Mufti Qavi tried to reply, but Malik would not let him. She told him to “focus on the clerics who rape the children who come to study in their madrassas.” Mufti Qavi asked her to refrain from attacking him, but Malik would not be stopped. “If you follow the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), then you would know that he was a man who stood up in respect for women,” she scolded him. “He would not call them dishonourable…Just because you’re a mufti, you think that you can accuse a woman of anything and pass a fatwa on her whenever you feel like it?”
Shahid did not intervene as his guests continued to shout at each other for nearly twenty minutes.
“I speak on behalf of all those who say that your behaviour was so horrifying that to call you a Pakistani or to call you a Muslim would be an insult to Pakistan and an insult to Islam,” Qavi told Malik. However, a few minutes later, when she asked him which actions in particular had angered him, Qavi admitted that he had never watched Bigg Boss. “I did not watch your programme, but millions of Pakistanis who did say that your behaviour was an insult to Pakistan and Islam,” he hastily added.
Malik won. Qavi looked like a fool—a man who had passed judgement on a woman’s character when he did not know very much about her at all, and who did not hesitate to call her behaviour blasphemous or insulting to Islam in a country where such an accusation can be punished by death.
Their exchange was widely reported locally and internationally, with many praising Malik for taking on the clergy. Audio of Malik’s retorts during the show was even remixed into a viral song featuring the line, “Mufti sahib, ye kya baat hui? [Mufti sahib, what is this?]”2 The line entered pop culture as a meme. An opinion piece in the English–language daily Dawn maintained that Malik’s “articulate, protofeminist defence on television garnered unexpected support from the liberal intelligentsia,” while Mufti Qavi was derided as a “hapless cleric (who claimed not to have seen what he was happy to comment on).” A blog for the same newspaper argued that the episode had been “brilliant because in an hour it summarized everything that is wrong with this country and our mindset.”
For many Malik was the star of that show. What they didn’t realise, however, was that producers at television channels across the country realised that in Mufti Qavi they had a potential ingredient for a hit show—one that might not be critically praised but would be watched and talked about. The Malik–Qavi spat had been a ratings success. “When did Mufti Qavi the cleric who just ran a madrassa become Mufti Qavi the media darling?” asked a local journalist in Multan. “It was on that show. Before that, people didn’t know his name. He was just one of dozens of clerics here and he would only be invited on talk shows sometimes to talk about the sighting of the moon or some other religious matter.”
The words that Veena Malik taunted him with—when he spoke of her beauty and grace—drew many, especially journalists in Multan, to Mufti Qavi. They believed that he was only being honest in praising a beautiful woman; he was not pretending to be a religious scholar immune to the pleasures of the material world. And even though those journalists do not want to be associated with him today, then they praised him as a “liberal maulvi [cleric].” Initially, he was embraced by the media fraternity in Multan as someone who was approachable. He was available at a moment’s notice for a press conference, a live call or a show. “Everyone in the media knew which maulvi was always ready to be on TV,” explained one reporter. “And he could talk about everything from politics to transgender rights, and he didn’t just drone on with a lecture like some of the others.”
Mufti Qavi gave good TV: he got into arguments, he could be charming, he was witty and cracked jokes with his fellow guests. He was entertaining. In 2015 he made an appearance on a talk show with a glamorous, mouthy transgender rights activist named Almas Bobby.3 He flirted with Bobby, who was wearing a bright red and gold sari, and joked that they would get married. “I have a very open mind and an open heart,” he said as she playfully swatted his arm. He only wanted 35 rupees dowry, but he needed to go home and ask his wife for permission to get married to her, he said. The audience, mainly women, giggled and clapped, and Bobby swooned and clutched Mufti Qavi’s shoulder.
Some said his behaviour was not appropriate; others liked seeing a cleric let loose. “Why should we expect our maulvis to always be sitting in the mosque, stroking their big beards and holding prayer beads in their hands?” asked one of Mufti Qavi’s friends. “Why can’t a cleric have fun?”
Many journalists and producers who booked him for prime-time shows said that Mufti Qavi was knowledgeable—he knew how to make an argument and he was well read. “Whatever you wanted him to give a fatwa or an opinion on, he could do it,” said a reporter. “Other religious scholars didn’t want to sit with women on live TV or talk about women’s issues. But we knew that if you made Mufti Qavi do it, you’d have a hell of a show.”
Mufti Qavi would stay in touch with reporters and send them his itinerary any time he travelled. That way, they knew exactly where he was if they needed him at a studio or to be available for a call. Soon he was the first name that came to mind when a cleric was needed to chip in on any topic. Journalists in Multan like to tell how every second or third day you could see a television van parked outside Mufti Qavi’s home. His knowledge of Islam and his frequent appearances on TV as the representative of the majority of Pakistanis served as a short cut to influence. There is a rumour that that he was a member of a secret WhatsApp group of senators, who would turn to him for advice or suggestions on political matters. He was invited to officiate at marriages between some of Multan’s richest families, including those of high-ranking officers in the army.
Many journalists and reporters in Multan say that their professional relationship with Mufti Qavi gradually turned into a friendship—or at least a relationship where they felt comfortable confiding in him and asking him for counsel. One reporter explained that many men would go to Mufti Qavi to talk about things that they felt too ashamed to approach anyone else with. He encourages “frankness”—it’s a word he uses often—and when he has an intimate discussion with someone, he likes to brag about their “frankness ka level.” When those journalists who had befriended Mufti Qavi heard what Qandeel said about their meeting, when she accused him of being too “frank” or inappropriate, they believed her. “Maybe the things he was saying were new for Qandeel,” one of his friends said, “but for us, it was not surprising at all. We knew he was like this.” However, Mufti Qavi has since learned to take certain precautions—at one point in our meeting he asks me to turn off the tape recorder so that he may ask me something “while being frank.”
“Mufti sahib is able to make you feel comfortable and draw you out,” the reporter explains. “He is the kind of cleric who is also human. He doesn’t hide under a cloak of morality. He tries to see where he can create paths for you—and your desires—within the ambit of religion. We could talk to him about boyfriends, girlfriends, or relationships outside of marriage.” And besides, this reporter said, Mufti Qavi seemed to be that rare thing: a cleric “who loves to talk about sex.” He didn’t make religion feel removed from modern life.
“We would spend evenings with him and ask him all sorts of vulgar questions,” one reporter said, giggling. “No, I don’t want to say what the questions were. I’m feeling shy. But when we asked him these things, he didn’t judge us. Any other cleric would have cursed us.” This reporter once played a prank on Mufti Qavi. He visited him to record a short interview for a piece on relationships between students and teachers after there had been a highly publicized case of harassment at a local school. When Mufti Qavi’s opinion had been recorded, the reporter pretended to turn off the camera but actually kept recording and asked him a question about the religious angle when it came to girls dating their teachers. He wanted to catch the cleric saying something scandalous. “He gave me an excellent answer,” the reporter said. “He opened up his books and showed me examples and used logic to talk about the issue. If you want a modern version of Islam, he’s the guy to go to. He is the true preacher of liberal Islam, and in Pakistan there are very few clerics you can say that about.”
Mufti Qavi’s interviews appealed to religiously moderate Pakistanis, and he discussed women’s rights when few clerics were doing so publicly. “Religious scholars need to be in line with the needs of the world and the time they’re living in,” he tells me. “We need to learn to speak in English. We cannot just rely on Arabic. We should speak well in Urdu. Perhaps we should even know how to speak Chinese. Because we don’t just need the education we get in madrassas. We need maths, science, geography and so on. There must be religious education and regular education. Our children—and especially our girls—need this.”
He is irritated by those who try to make Islam seem unyielding. During our meeting he receives a call. A man has just lost his wife and wants to know whether it is permissible for him to touch his wife’s shrouded body at her last rites. “This is just against intellect,” Mufti Qavi clucks when he ends the call. “If my wife, who has been with me for fifty years, leaves this world, can I not hug her? Can I not kiss her? She’s a piece of my heart. Some maulvi has told this man that to even look at your wife’s body is haram.”
This, he exclaims, is the difference between Mufti Abdul Qavi and everyone else. This is why, he insists, other clerics criticize him. It has nothing to do with his TV appearances or his behaviour. “They are angry that Mufti Qavi has made them redundant,” he says. “I have wiped out the work they did for a hundred or two hundred years. I have eroded the influence they enjoyed here when they gave people opinions like this.” He tells me that if he hadn’t been a religious scholar, he would have carried over this tendency to question popular opinion and rules in another profession. “I am revolutionary,” he explains. “If I was a professor, a politician or a businessman, I would still be revolutionary. Because what you have to understand is that ‘Mufti Qavi’ is the name of a revolution.”
By 2016, Mufti Qavi had perfected the persona of the affable, fun-loving cleric. It’s easy to see why the producers of Ajeeb Sa liked having him on. A month before the episode with Qandeel, Mufti Qavi had been on the show with an actress named Sheen.4 When Sheen told him she was a fan of Imran Khan, he said he could introduce her to the politician. In 2013 he had been made president of the religious-affairs wing of Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party and often arranged meetings between religious scholars and the party’s leaders. It was the same offer he would make to Qandeel.
It’s hard to conceive of another cleric answering the kind of questions put to him that night. “Do you like to go on long drives?” Sheen asked him. “Are you able to?” Later, “When is the first time you lost your heart to someone?” It was easy to make light of Islamic injunctions with Mufti Qavi and make jokes that other clerics might find offensive. During the same episode the host asked Mufti Qavi if it was permissible to contract a nikkah [marriage] with a woman over the phone. What about through a group chat on WhatsApp so that you could have the requisite two witnesses?
Mufti Qavi had earned himself a reputation as a misogynist from the Veena Malik interview but then began to portray himself as a champion of women’s rights. Five years later, as he sat with Sheen, Mufti Qavi had learned to temper his responses when asked a question about women or women’s issues. “What if your parents want you to marry someone and you want to marry another person? Is it disobedience to refuse?” he was asked on that episode of Ajeeb Sa.
“Not at all!” Mufti Qavi replied. “According to Islam, women are utterly independent when it comes to their choice of who to marry.” He was no longer afraid to be ridiculed for his love of beautiful women. He described himself as “zinda dil”—one whose heart is passionate. “Whenever I travel, I look around to see who is the most beautiful woman on the aeroplane or in the airport,” he said on Ajeeb Sa. “You see, the Holy Prophet (PBUH) said that when you see someone who is beautiful, you ask them to pray for you. Because if Allah has blessed them with beauty, then he will also listen to their prayers. Allah is beautiful, and he loves beauty. So, if I see a beautiful woman in an airport, I make it a point to go stand in the same line as her. And in the aeroplane I look for the most beautiful air hostesses. I like to ask them to pray for me.”
“Have you ever been involved in a scandal?” the host asked.
“I have done things in the past that could have resulted in me getting stuck in a scandal, but Allah is Sattar, and that means ‘one who veils sin,’ ” Mufti Qavi replied with a grin.
The Multan bureau chief of a television station who has known Mufti Qavi for around two decades explains, “If you had met him earlier, before all of this, you would have wanted to meet him again and again. You just have to remember that he’s an ordinary man who knows more about religion than you or me. He’s no angel. But one thing’s for sure: just like any ordinary man, Mufti Qavi has the devil inside of him too.”
I told Mufti Qavi I wanted to know what had happened in that hotel room when Qandeel Baloch met him in Karachi in June 2016. In interviews since then his version of events has changed with each retelling.
He knew the photos didn’t look good. He should have never let her wear his cap. That’s what ruined it all, he confided in a friend. The cap. As for his waistcoat—he had merely taken it off because he needed to do his ablutions for prayer. When he came out of the bathroom in his hotel room, Qandeel was already wearing his cap and wanted to take a photo.
The story changed. She was not wearing a dupatta to cover her head and she felt bad about it, so he offered her his cap. No, she asked him if she could borrow his cap. Well, actually there had been a few people in the hotel room with them—his followers in Karachi—and when he saw these guests to the door and returned to where Qandeel was sitting, she was wearing his cap. Either way, it didn’t look good.
She had perched on the arm of the sofa he was sitting on. He counselled her to remain respectful, and she chided him, “Mufti sahib, your heart must be veiled.” It was important that their hearts were filled with modesty, she felt. The rest did not matter. She needed to take some pictures with him. Just as he had fans and followers, so did she—and hers were online and they would want to see proof that she had met Mufti Qavi.
“This was all part of the plan,” Mufti Qavi now says with a sigh. “I should have stopped her but I didn’t want to seem rude.” The plan, he says, was for Qandeel to sell the photographs to the highest bidder among Mufti Qavi’s “enemies.”
The day after the photos went viral, Qandeel and Mufti Qavi were invited on to Mubasher Lucman’s talk show, Khara Such. “Mufti Qavi and Qandeel’s photographs are all over social media,” Lucman said at the start of the interview on 21 June 2016. “And both of them, for various reasons, have been in the news many times. It seems Mufti Qavi likes to be in the news, and since Qandeel is in showbiz, she enjoys it as well.”5
Mufti Qavi seemed to be wearing the same waistcoat and cap from the day he had met Qandeel at the hotel, while she wore a black shirt that left her shoulders bare, and held a wrap around herself, fidgeting with it often as she tried to cover her shoulders or her chest.
For the previous twenty-four hours Mufti Qavi had been ridiculed in the media. He had been referred to as “the Qandeel Baloch of maulvis.” “When Qandeel Baloch met Mufti Qavi: a guideline on how NOT to learn Islam,” mocked a story in the English-language daily Express Tribune. “Qandeel Baloch claims Mufti Qavi ‘hopelessly in love’ with her!” announced Pakistan Today. Almost every channel ran a story on the meeting between “scandal queen Qandeel Baloch” and the cleric.6 The video Qandeel had shot in which Mufti Qavi promised to introduce her to Imran Khan was played over and over again.
Even after everything that has happened, Mufti Qavi wants people to know that the thing that saddens him the most is that he was only trying to help Qandeel. “I’ve never told anyone this, but I spoke with Imran Khan’s secretary,” he says. “I spoke with a close friend of his. This friend picked up my call immediately, you know. We talked in great detail. This person who is so close to Imran Khan said that he would meet Qandeel a few days after Eid.”
Mufti Qavi also has friends in India and tells me he promised Qandeel that he would speak to them about getting her on to Bigg Boss. And that he had called the owner of one of Pakistan’s most-watched television channels and pleaded with him to give Qandeel a chance to perform a naat on any show. After she was killed, the police questioned him about phone records that showed he had called her three times right after they met. He was only calling her to let her know about Imran Khan, Bigg Boss and the naat, you see. “Now you tell me,” he says with a sigh. “If I call someone my beti [daughter] and help her like this, why would I do whatever she said I did?”
On Lucman’s show neither Qandeel nor Mufti Qavi mentioned these phone calls. Qandeel insinuated that Mufti Qavi had tried to proposition her—he “made me an offer,” she said demurely. Lucman wanted to know why Mufti Qavi met Qandeel alone and what they did in the room together. “Let me explain one thing to you very clearly,” he said to the cleric. “Until I get answers to my questions, this programme will keep running.” The show overshot its time by an hour and a half as Lucman’s guests squabbled about what had happened in that hotel.
Qavi said that Qandeel had confided in him about her family life and told him about her father, who was unwell or injured. This was a detail about Qandeel’s personal life that had until then never been revealed. Lucman did not ask Qandeel if it was true or how Mufti Qavi could have known something like that if Qandeel had not told him.
Lucman invited the deputy secretary general of Imran Khan’s political party, Imran Ismail, to weigh in via a phone interview. “Mufti Qavi does not hold any office in the PTI; he never has and, God willing, he never will,” Ismail said. “I will ask Imran Khan to never let people like Mufti Qavi in the party. What he has done is a stain on the name of Islam. It’s very clear what his intentions were when he called an unmarried young woman into his hotel room alone.”
Mufti Qavi grinned widely.
“Mufti sahib sits on TV shows and satiates his lust with the things he says,” Ismail continued. He mentioned the interviews about beautiful women. “How would Mufti sahib feel if some man spoke to his wife or daughters this way? There is no better way to disrespect a religion than what he has done.” Ismail’s next few words were unprecedented. “Mufti Qavi needs to apologize,” he said. “Whatever Qandeel Baloch is doing, at least she is doing it in front of the whole world. There’s no hypocrisy, whether it’s right or wrong…but Mufti Qavi is a scholar of Islam and he has a nation following him and he did all of this.”
Few Pakistanis would ever have seen a cleric shamed on national television in this way, and even fewer would have seen a woman like Qandeel praised over a cleric.
“Even now,” Ismail continued, addressing Mufti Qavi, whose face remained fixed with that grin, “you have a smile on your face and there is no trace of shame for what you have done.”
Today, to me, Mufti Qavi explains why he did not appear worried, angry or ashamed during that interview. He did not raise his voice or attempt to silence his critics. He was serene and for the most part smiled pleasantly as if he could not hear the things that were being said about him. He says he knew Qandeel had been paid to appear on Lucman’s show and how the host wanted him to behave. He was supposed to shout and argue and lose his temper. He had expected the things that were said about him. He was prepared. “I wanted to show that none of it affected me,” he explains, chuckling. “Those people on the show just wanted to create hatred for men of religion. They wanted to show, and may Allah forgive me for saying this, that I am some kind of—” he lowers his voice “—sexy man of God.”
The day after the Lucman interview aired, Mufti Qavi was removed from the Ruet-e-Hilal committee. The PTI issued a notice saying he had been stripped of his membership of the party. Once more he was just another maulvi who ran a madrassa in Multan.
Qandeel tweeted the news and mocked people with “fake faces.”
Mufti Qavi headed back home from Karachi and wondered what he would say to his wife and sisters when he saw them. He felt embarrassed. He had lost everything that he valued. Everything he had achieved in the last six years had been erased by two or three minutes of video and a few questionable photographs. He felt forsaken.
His car pulled up to his house. As he got out, he recounts to me, he felt his phone vibrate in his pocket. Once, twice, three times. In the space of three minutes, a string of five text messages arrived. They were from Qandeel. Even today he can recite the messages he says she sent him.
“I am sorry Mufti sahib, what happened was bad it should not have happened.”
“It’s all my fault.”
“Please forgive me if you can.”
“Whatever happened to you was not right I’m really sorry.”
“The one who forgives has a big heart.”
He walked into his home with a great big grin on his face. This was Allah’s grace. Just when his faith had been tested and he had wondered why such misfortune had come his way, Allah had sent him a small sign as if to say, You will be victorious.
After all, if he had really kissed and hugged Qandeel and said he wanted to marry her, if he had really done something wrong, then why was she the one apologizing? Even today Mufti Qavi keeps photocopies of those text messages—blurry pictures taken of the phone—to show to journalists, friends and family. He says he has lost the phone he originally received the messages on.
In the days after the Lucman interview aired, Mufti Qavi received dozens of phone calls from admirers and well-wishers all over the world. They told him not to worry; they would always support him. They said terrible things about Qandeel. The names they called her are too terrible to repeat. They made his heart tremble. Mufti Qavi will utter those names if you ask him to, but only if you also accept the sin of saying such words. “Gushti,” he says, spitting out the word. Whore. They knew the names of the men she visited at night, his followers said. We’ll have her picked up, they promised Mufti Qavi, and then just see what we do to her. Some of them told him exactly what they planned to do to her.
The police later told him that thousands—yes, thousands; he has many followers, you see—of phone numbers that showed up on his call records matched the ones on Qandeel’s records.
“Now what can you say to these followers, these passionate men?” Mufti Qavi asks. “If Imran Khan can have followers—” he thumps his desk in indignation at the suggestion that clerics might not have thousands of zealous followers who promise murder “—then why can’t Mufti Qavi?” Thump. “After all,” he asks, “aren’t you my follower now that you have come here to meet me? Now that I’ve told you everything about myself and how I care deeply for women?”
The day Mufti Qavi is lowered into the ground, thousands of those followers—especially women—will come to his home, he promises. They will tell his wife and sisters, Your brother was our brother and our father. He knows it. And to those who say he should not behave inappropriately with female followers, “There are two kinds of people in this world. One will dig a well in the middle of the road so that any traveller who drinks from it will send him their blessings. But another man would close up that well because he fears someone could fall into it in the dead of night. Now, both those men will get Allah’s blessings.” So, if Mufti Qavi calls a woman his daughter and she kisses his hand and feels some relief or if she whispers her problems in his ear, what is wrong with that? It may not be what another cleric would do, but that doesn’t make it wrong, does it? “It’s just a form of worship for me,” he explains.
Mufti Qavi walks at a quick trot to his home. He crosses the courtyard outside his office and enters a dark, narrow lane with pools of water from leaking pipes. The lane opens on to another courtyard, and Mufti Qavi strides to the far right corner and calls out for his wife. He wants a quick bite to eat. Inside his home, his sisters sit in a room where charpoys heaped with bedding are wedged in close to each other. His wife is in the kitchen heating naan bought from the shop next door. She is small and squat and her eyes are limpid and bulbous, one darting to the side while the other fixes you with its gaze. “Did you know that one channel ran a piece of news saying that my wife was going to have a press conference to speak out against me?” Mufti Qavi says, chortling. “I told them, ‘Go to my home and find my wife. She will either be cleaning my home, cooking my food or washing my clothes.’ ”
His sisters received text messages in the days after the photos with Qandeel went viral. “We are going to reveal the truth about you,” one said. “You pretend to be so good. Go and look at what your brother is doing.”
Ordinarily, Ramzaan is a happy month in this household. The family gathers for the night prayers, breaks their fast together and then meets before dawn for the start of the fast the next day. That year the women of the house wept and prayed together and asked God to help the careless Mufti Qavi out of his bind. Did Qandeel have another video? they wondered. Did she have more to show? Now they hear that a documentary is being made on Qandeel, and they worry that Mufti Qavi will be given a “lifelong negative role.” God forbid someone suggests that he had a hand in her murder. There were stories in the newspapers about Mufti Qavi’s connections with a man named Abdul Basit who drove Qandeel’s murderer away from her house in Multan that night. While some allege that Basit is Mufti Qavi’s nephew, others report that they are cousins.7 But Mufti Qavi’s sisters say this is a case of mistaken identity. They marvel at the sheer coincidence of the fact that one of their nephews is also named Abdul Basit.
They wonder about what happened between Qandeel and their brother. “When Allah will call us to his court on the Day of Judgement, then all will become clear,” his sister Hina says. But Mufti Qavi is impatient to end the conversation. He has another court to attend to—what he calls the “Islamic court” he rules over in his office.
He hurries back to his office. Several men and a woman sit inside. The men to the left, the woman on the right. She holds a squirming infant in her arms. Her husband uttered the words “I divorce thee” three times during a fight, and under Islam a marriage can be annulled by doing just that. He wants to take it back. The baby whimpers and wriggles as the woman answers Mufti Qavi’s questions about her marriage: Does her husband beat her? Has he ever told her to get out of their home and never come back? The matter is dealt with swiftly. The divorce is annulled and the couple reunited with Mufti Qavi’s blessing. It’s time for the next petitioner.
A man comes into the office with a little boy bundled up in a shawl. A stray dog, likely rabid, bit the child. The man carries something in a paper bag. He spreads a newspaper before Mufti Qavi and the contents of the bag spill out in a dusty heap. It looks like white sand but is gritty rice flour. Mufti Qavi mutters a prayer. He then takes the child’s hands, places them gently on the surface of the flour and covers them with his own hands. We sit in silence as he whispers prayers. He lifts the child’s hands and brushes the flour off his palms. The man scoops the flour back into the paper bag. He will take it home and ask his wife to make dough with this flour. Then he will pinch some dough between his fingers and pull it apart. He will see hair in the dough the colour of the rabid dog’s fur. He will know then that Mufti Qavi’s prayers have worked and the dog’s poison has been drawn from his child and transferred into that flour. Sometimes there are two or three short hairs in the dough; other times people have reportedly found a dozen or more bristly sand-coloured hairs. The man is instructed to bury the dough in the ground. His child will be cured. If there is no hair in the dough, the child was never at risk.
The child’s father presses a box of mithai into Mufti Qavi’s hands. The cleric is pleased. He pries open the box. “Have something sweet,” he offers as he plucks out a yolk-coloured laddu (sweet).
For now at least this “court” brings him joy while he waits for the world to forgive him and forget whatever happened with Qandeel Baloch. He wants to write a book about the practice of honour killing. He wants the world to know that he believes a woman like Qandeel, killed for honour by her brother, is a shaheed, a martyr. His sisters tell him he should stop talking about this book.
There are no more TV appearances these days. The invitations dried up shortly after the Lucman interview. A reporter who came to interview him claimed that Mufti Qavi was furious with Lucman. “You never know where a bullet can come from any day,” the mufti said. He did not realise he was being recorded. The reporter says he sent the tape to Lucman in order to warn him. Mufti Qavi’s journalist friends don’t suggest his name to producers any more.
Sometimes his friends say that his name has been ruined and his reputation irretrievably lost; other times they tell him to have faith. They assure him that the entire episode with Qandeel was in fact a struggle between two powerful media companies. Mufti Qavi was a regular guest on a popular religious show on one channel, and the other channel wanted to bring that show down. Qandeel was planted. She had been told exactly what to say and do.
When news broke of Qandeel’s murder, Mufti Qavi had been invited to talk about her on the same channel where he had first been introduced to Qandeel on the talk show Ajeeb Sa. “We belong to Allah and to him we shall return,” he said in the interview. “But I also have a message for those who are watching and listening right now. In the future, before you falsely accuse a man of doing something, for God’s sake think about the consequences. And when a man has been accused, it is a blow to the hearts of all his followers, and their every sigh is an appeal to Allah. He may grant their wish.”