If you were an '80s kid, then you’ve probably worked your hardest to block out those times when your parents dressed you up as a sailor and took you to a studio to have your picture taken.

It just so happens, that in a parallel world, known as Pakistan, parents used to do the very same thing at the very same time to their kids, except their choice of embarrassing costume was a bit different. Here, Bani Abidi shows us how popular it was back then to dress children in the Arabic keffiyeh (headscarf) and have them pose as once-conqueror of Pakistan – Mohammad bin Qasim. 

No amount of therapy has been able to figure out why parents perform such inhumane practices on their obliging and unsuspecting spawn, and since I’m no psych major, let’s just stick to the art historical aspects of this work. The work is a set of three photographs and one piece of fictional text, which I’ll come back to. The first two photographs clearly show us a young boy sporting a keffiyeh over his usual clothes, in different poses i.e. astride a plastic horse and wielding a toy sword. In the third frame, he seems to have abandoned the act altogether, leaving behind his headscarf in a heap, thus alluding to the title of the work. This getup was favorite in those days, because it was symbolic of bin Qasim, the young Umayyad general who captured the Pakistani province of Sindh in 711 and bought Islamic philosophy and practice to the region. In fact, there was quite a bit of pop culture centered on bin Qasim in the '80’s, including a popular TV show based on the general’s life.

So, why this entire racket about bin Qasim back then? It seems that Pakistanis were trying to summon up and popularize an alternative history for themselves that looked further past their Western colonization. You know, stuff like the search for roots and identity which all of us are constantly trying to do. Basically, people were like…colonization? Yeah, been there, done that, WAY before you Brits came over. There’s more to us than just those guys setting up camp here and acting like our colonial saviors.

The bit of text that sums up the whole work is a fictional piece based on the life of a convert to Islam, Yusof Masih, who fancies himself to be Mohammad bin Qasim – the harbinger of Islam in Pakistan. It appears, though, that the young boy in the pictures though, ultimately DGAF about history and who conquered who first. That, or the headscarf was just too damn itchy.