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ABSTRACT: The year 1969 saw the release of the Pakistani political fantasy film Zerqa, directed by socialist filmmaker Riaz Shahid. At once a leftist critique of the Ayub Khan regime and an endorsement of Palestinian armed struggle, Zerqa refracted Pakistan's political crisis through the question of Palestine. This paper historicizes Zerqa against Pakistani and third-worldist creative responses to Palestine in the 1950s and 1960s. Through textual analysis of the film and its ephemera, I argue that Zerqa's approach to solidarity, gender, and the figure of the Arab-Jew both captures the nuances of the identities imbricated in the Palestinian struggle and universalizes Palestine toward its own political ends.
KEYWORDS: Pakistani cinema, Palestine solidarity films, Urdu poetry, Riaz Shahid, Zerqa (film)
Humein yaqm hai dhalai gi ek din sitam ki ye sham ay Falast m Har ek mat: lūm sun chukka hai hamar a pegham ay Falast In
We believe this evening of oppression will set, oh Palestine Every oppressed one has heard our message, oh Palestine
"Ay Falastīn" (Oh, Palestine), Zerqa (1969)
INTRODUCTION
In the early hours of Thursday morning, August 21, 1969, news broke that a fire had engulfed Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. The blaze persisted for three hours, damaging the southeastern portion of the mosque and the famed Minbar of Saladin, an elaborate eight-hundred-year-old pulpit made of interlocking pieces of ivory and ebony.1 The attempted destruction of the third holiest site for a majority of Muslims and the decimation of a historic masterpiece of Islamic art sparked instant condemnation from Muslims around the world-already reeling from the devastating losses of the watershed Six-Day War of 1967.2 Although the arsonist was later identified as an Australian evangelical extremist, rumors of Israeli complicity in indoctrinating the culprit and deliberately prolonging the fire with the intention to build the third Jewish temple abounded. Stoked by such fears and by mounting anti-Zionist sentiment, large-scale protests were organized from Jordan to Kashmir to Indonesia. In the following months, a deluge of diplomatic activity between Muslim-majority countries would coalesce into an (initially) state-led international Islamic unity movement whose gathering force would shape national and global politics toward Palestinian solidarity for years to come.3
In the midst of these critical events, the Pakistani political film Zerqa (1969) was released.4 An...