Containing Ambiguity: Reading A Survival Guide for Ahmadi Muslims of Pakistan

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Containing Ambiguity: Reading A Survival Guide for Ahmadi Muslims of Pakistan

From the Series The Photo Book Written From Here : Amit Madheshiya

A woman wearing a black burqa stands in the middle of a street. Her face is covered, revealing only a fragment of her nose and forehead. Through this opening her eyes meet the camera. Shards of black painted glass lie scattered at her feet. Her fists are clenched. The street is narrow and converges behind her. There is no one else there. This constructed tableau spans a double spread in A Survival Guide for Ahmadi Muslims of Pakistan by Nida Mehboob.

The photograph is decisively arranged. Its symbols — the burqa, the shards of glass, the narrow street — are precisely aligned. The staging suggests violence and forecloses escape from such a scene. The shards block the woman’s forward movement, while the horizonless full-bleed image encloses the viewer within a controlled interpretation. The scene begins to resolve before the image has fully unfolded, and it is this sense of instruction that propels the reader forward.

“Avoid a Scene,” an authoritative directive, appears in large red type on the next page. Below the directive is the author’s note:

Ahmadi women are easily recognisable in public because of distinct kind of “burqa”

they wear. They can become targets of verbal and physical harassment in the streets…

The caption confirms the alignment between the symbols of the photograph and the text. The image, which could have sustained other interpretations by leaning on its incidental details, whether intentional or not, such as empty packets of cigarettes and chips strewn in the street, or even a sliver of sky reflected in one of the shards, is now reduced to a single reading by the text. There is a direct interpretive bridge between the image and the text, and if there still remains any residual doubt it is sealed by the testimony that follows:

Some girls figured out that I was an Ahmadi [Muslim] by the burqa I wore…

They said I was Kafir (an infidel) and I was wajib-ul-qattal (punishable by death).

Together, the staged photograph, the directive and the testimony form a closed system that works in compliance and reinforces itself. They enforce a singular reading of the image, removing the possibility of other interpretations and denying the image its ambiguity.

The question this closed system raises — how meaning is made through the coming together of image and text, and what is surrendered when that process is total — is the problem Another Way of Telling directly addresses.

In Another Way of Telling, John Berger argues that ambiguity is the fundamental condition of all photographs. Photographs are ambiguous by nature, and we impose meaning onto them through words. This ambiguity stems from the very act of excising them from some kind of temporal continuity — either historical or personal. As makers and viewers of photographs, this discontinuity unsettles us, and in an attempt to keep that continuity alive, we bring in context and narrative through language.

Mehboob’s photograph, however, is not allowed to be ambiguous. Its staging tightly controls its interpretation and complicates Berger’s account of photographic ambiguity. By pre-loading the image with fixed symbols and anchoring it to text twice over, through directive and testimony, Mehboob treats ambiguity as a grave risk. Unlike the documentary photograph, which is severed from a continuity it once inhabited, the staged photograph never belonged to one. Mehboob must therefore construct the continuity her image claims — and it is in that construction that the book’s central substitutions become legible.

The woman in the burqa is an actor, standing in an unnamed street. The testimony is attributed to Amina, a pseudonym. The body we see and the voice we read do not belong to the same person, and the name that anchors them is itself unreliable. Further, the testimony is not allowed even a shade of interiority. The speaking subject is reduced to an archetypal victim just as the photographed body stands in for one. The surrogate body and the displaced voice come together to simulate a personal continuity, replacing a lived experience with a constructed equivalence.

This constructed continuity does not arise from a specific temporal sequence, whether personal or historical. While historical continuity is legible to an informed reader, the photograph and testimony do not index a publicly recognizable moment within that history. Instead, they simulate it. Together, these substitutions produce not an event, but a repeatable type, standing in for a larger historical condition. Continuity is thus assembled, allowing the image to operate without anchoring itself to a specific time or person. In the absence of a specific event to index, meaning must be secured in advance. The image is literal because it cannot afford not to be.

Ambiguity requires duration — time for interpretations to emerge and meanings to rearrange. The political climate surrounding this book permits no such delay. The photograph is made immediately legible because it serves a specific function. Under blasphemy laws, an image that remains open invites hostile appropriation by a mob or a prosecutor who may read ambiguity as a provocation. By fixing meaning in advance, the book denies its opponents the interpretive latitude through which persecution is formally justified. The closed system here is an act of self-protection and a tool for survival that dissent is forced to inhabit.

Midway through the book, however, the structure shifts. If the earlier images were staged, fixing meaning in advance, the new images move toward documentation. The photograph now performs its conventional function. Printed on thin paper resembling newsprint are collages of newspaper photographs, headlines, and incendiary fragments, including calls to boycott and kill. The reproduction is in monochrome, and some of the images are enlarged to the point where their halftone dot structure becomes visible.

Because of the quality of reproduction, the images are not easily legible. Yet what unfolds remains legible at the level of an event. There are a handful of photographs of people gathered on the streets, often around fires. Is this a mob committing violence, or a crowd gathered in celebration? The caption provides that context:

Ahmadiya shops being set on fire.

Ahmadiya shops in flames while a custodian of the law looks on smiling.

While the testimony and the directive in the earlier pages confirmed the meaning embedded in the staged images, the caption now stabilizes an otherwise ambiguous photograph, converting uncertainty into a fixed historical claim. The power of the caption, as Berger notes, rests on a sense of history that cannot be taken for granted.

The turn to evidentiary photographs and contextual captions becomes a necessary way of anchoring the work to history. It situates Mehboob’s staged photographs and testimonies within a historical continuum. The assembled fragments ground the work in a history of violence, while the constructed continuity carries that condition into the present, where the threat persists.

Yet this shift in strategy, from producing a repeatable type to anchoring events, complicates the question of address: who, finally, is this book speaking to?

The triad of the staged image, the directive and the testimony does not create new meaning. The elements are not in friction with each other; they merely confirm one another, leaving no room for interpretive drift. The directives — Avoid a Scene, Cage Your Rage, Get Indoors When Mullah Roars, Don’t Act Like a Muslim — carry a rhetorical edge rather than an explanatory one. The testimonies do not deepen understanding so much as they reaffirm. With this rhetorical strategy, the book addresses the community, who live this reality and do not come to discover it, but to see it acknowledged.

By contrast, the evidentiary newspaper images, in tandem with their captions, make a claim to credibility. These collages are neither chronological nor structured as archival records. Yet they open the book outward, addressing a reader for whom this experience is not immediate. It is this reader who needs the caption’s historical grounding. The community has survived it.

A Survival Guide for Ahmadi Muslims of Pakistan operates across this split address. It speaks inward, confirming a shared condition, and outward, seeking recognition and belief. These two imperatives do not fully reconcile with each other but expose the difficulty of making images and circulating them under censorship and the threat of blasphemy laws. Under such pressures, the photograph is asked to both confirm and testify, to protect and to prove. The image becomes controlled and instructive, shaped by the demands of survival.

What remains is the harder question.

In certain traditions of political photography, an image that refuses a fixed meaning becomes a form of dissent precisely because it cannot be mobilized by any single authority. But this openness assumes a context in which misreading is survivable. For a community whose members may be prosecuted on the basis of how their images are read, an open photograph is not a site of resistance but of exposure. Here, closure is resistance. The survival guide that eliminates ambiguity and adopts literalness is one of the shapes political representation is forced to take when the cost of being misread is death.

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