Fourteen years old—“a bit of a dunce,” one of his ex-wives would later claim, interested only in cricket—Imran Khan confronted his first spiritual experience: Pir-ji, his mother’s religious advisor, had arrived to offer prayers and guidance. “The woman was sitting on the floor with three or four of her disciples. her head covered by a chador,” Imran later recalled. “She never looked up at me, I never saw her face.” Though Pir-ji miraculously divined that Imran had been evading Quran classes, she proclaimed the boy “would turn out all right.”

Though he did not know it then, the veil he stared into was the beginning of Imran’s ideological journey—and his destiny.

For months now, the city of God that the cricketer-turned-Prime Minister promised to build has been disintegrating, torn by storms he himself unleashed. The Pakistan government is struggling to salvage an International Monetary Fund bailout Imran blew up during his last months in office. The jihadists he patronised are bringing the state to its knees.

Even though Imran ought to have been discredited by this downfall, he remains Pakistan’s most charismatic politician—and confident he can capitalise on the economic chaos in the early elections he hopes to force.

To understand where Pakistan is headed, it is critical to understand the complex inner world of Imran Khan. The misogyny and jihadism illustrated in a sharp interview with journalist Isaac Chotiner last week speaks for the religious anxieties and sexual neurosis of a generation of young men. The world offers them nothing but hardship. Imran Khan is living proof that paradise is possible.

Englishness and Islam

England, where Imran went to finish his school education, proved culturally traumatic: “I found it almost impossible to make friends with the British,” he recalled. “The English culture we knew through our English schoolmasters, books, stories and anecdotes of my parents’ generation had disappeared under a blitz of sex, drugs and rock and roll,” he wrote in his 2011 book, Pakistan: A Personal History. Even though Imran admitted he was not particularly observant, he “clung to my Muslim identity.”

Read more: https://theprint.in/opinion/security-code/misogyny-jihadism-imran-khans-complex-inner-world-points-to-where-pakistan-is-headed/1367434/