Conflicting Moralities in Pakistan as Represented by Shoaib Mansoor’s Feature Film Bol: A Nietzschean Critique

Abstract

Ideologically, Pakistan is an Islamic country with sound moral and spiritual values serving as its guiding principles, but ironically, it is passing through a very difficult time of its history mainly because of the conflicting and predominantly distorted versions of morality underlying a number of its serious political, religious, and social issues. The great German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, however, identified morality as of two major types, that is, master morality and slave morality. Accordingly, this article was written with the aim of exploring as to how these moralities shaped highly conflicting mindsets over even very serious issues. However, in view of a proliferation of issues addressed by Bol, the analysis was delimited only to the major and the most controversial issue of producing more and more children vs. contraception as taken up and treated so elaborately by Shoaib Mansoor’s feature film Bol. For this purpose, the relevant discourses of different characters from Bol, i.e., Hakeem Shafahatullah, Hakeem Shafahatullah’s Wife, Zainab, and Police Officer, from their respective dialogues with one another from different parts of the film, were selected and analysed in light of Nietzschean concept of morality as well as the Qur’anic view of the worth and sanctity of human life. It is finally concluded that there is a frequent interplay of the master and slave moralities in Bol, represented by Hakeem Shafahatullah and Zainab respectively: The former being a conformist, fatalist, pessimist, dissembler, mentally-sick, having a retrogressive and Islamically distorted view of life, while the latter performs a dual role, that is, the one of being a Nietzschean critic of the slave morality and the other of an aspiring practitioner of master morality, having a rationalist, progressive, optimistic, healthy, and joyful view of life, more in accordance with the life-asserting teachings of Islam.