“It is hard for me to distinguish Saudi Arab and Pakistan from each other. I feel like being a national and a citizen of both”, said Mr. Ali S. Awadh Asseri, the departing ambassador of Saudi Arabia during the farewell dinner he gave to the journalists on Tuesday night.
Let me confess, I have been a fan of this exuberant and dynamic fellow ever since he landed in Pakistan on his first major diplomatic assignment.
Trained in various police academies for a career in law-enforcement, he was picked for foreign service because of his ‘winning’ ways, trained in the U.S, and then sent to Pakistan on a mission of further cementing the brotherly relations between the two countries.
“How do you feel going away from a country you had begun to treat as your home.” I asked him.
“Your question incorporates my answer,” he replied. “I feel the way one feels when has to say farewell to his home. But let me hasten to add. This is no farewell. Pakistan will live in my heart wherever I am. The beach sights in Beirut where I am going, will not erase the sweet memories of Islamabad, where I have shared so much commonness of faith and culture with my brothers.”
I had a feeling he was speaking his heart out.
“I am not the only Saudi to feel that way about Pakistan”, said he. “The ache of a thorn pinching Pakistan is felt in the entire Saudi Arab. We will never leave Pakistan friendless and brotherless. We have a common faith and a common destiny.”
“Let me ask you a hypothetical question.” I said, “How do you visualize the Saudi Arab of two decades form now?”
“It is hard to predict furture, replied Asseri. “But of one thing I am absolutely certain. The permissive values of the western democracy will never be able to find roots in the soil where faith is valued above everything else”.
Saying farewell to Asseri reminds me of the famous Shakespearean lines in which the world was compared with a stage, and its dwellers with actors, appearing briefly only to disappear………..
Asseri of course will not disappear from our hearts………
(This Column was first published on 18-06-2009)
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