Pakistan’s cultural vocabulary of resilience, sabr (patience), and shukr (gratitude) has evolved from authentic spiritual practices into sophisticated mechanisms of psychological control that prevent critical consciousness about systemic suffering.
The Architecture of Linguistic Control
In the Pakistani context, words are imbued with moral significance and carry moral authority. When a person communicates a state of pain, the first reaction from our culture is not curiosity and support, but correction through vocabulary. The words ‘sabr karo’ (have patience) and ‘shukr karo’ (be grateful) act as stop signs that stop the emotion from continuing and turn it into a pathway for acceptance.
Dr Bushra Shahid, a clinical psychologist at Lahore General Hospital, notes that this happens every day: “Once someone starts verbalising that they are distressed, they are immediately reminded of being sabir.” What we are seeing is language being used to silence rather than heal. This phenomenon is not a cultural habit; it is the systematic use of sacred language for social control. The beauty of this system is that it is morally unimpeachable. Who can be against patience or gratitude without seeming spiritually impoverished? Yet that is precisely how cultural control works, by demonising resistance as immoral rather than rational.
Bourdieu’s Lens: Symbolic Violence in Sacred Clothing
Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of “symbolic violence” helps explain how the lexicon of resilience operates in Pakistan. Symbolic violence takes place when people from groups that oppressors dominate absorb the same categories of thought that justify their dominance, such that oppression seems natural rather than being created. Sabr and shukr are perfect examples of this phenomenon. When someone in Pakistani culture who is a victim of domestic violence is told to practice sabr, or when an unemployed man is told to practice shukr, these responses can operate the way Bourdieu described: to impose categories of thought that reframe suffering as spiritually meaningful rather than potentially actionable. Therefore, this verbal sorcery converts victims into willing subjects to their own subordination. The dominated not only accept their own suffering but also adopt the language through which this suffering is justified and thereby make resistance psychologically impossible.
The Corruption of Sacred Concepts
The earliest Quranic usage for sabr is in relation to situations of actual hardship: “And We will surely try you with something of fear and hunger and a loss of wealth and lives and fruits, but give good tidings to the patient [as-sabirin]” (2:155). One sabr is to have faith when you face a specific painful test from Allah but still ask Him for His guidance and His blessings. Modern Pakistani use has thoroughly debased this sense. Sabr has been redefined from “patient perseverance during divinely ordained trials” to “silent acceptance of the human-institute injustices.” This distinction is important: Sabr applies to earthquakes, sickness, and death, things beyond a person’s control. Cultural sabr applies to poverty, domestic violence, and mental illness, situations that could be changed by human action.
Dr Bushra Shahid explains this transformation: “Men in our society have been criticised for being a double whammy — successful, masculine, and pushing money — but also emotionally stoic.” When they are unsuccessful at either, sabr becomes the culturally prescribed reaction instead of taking action to reduce systemic issues like unemployment or mental health stigma. This type of transformation is a semantic shift, a technical term in linguistics, which means that a word loses its original meaning and begins to connote something completely different. Sabr has been rendered socially sedative from a state of spiritual virtue.
Shukr as Ideological Inoculation
Likewise, shukr has been “ideologically reworked” from its original meaning of genuine gratitude to what might be called “gratitude gaslighting”. True shukr acknowledges the blessings of Allah while still trusting the believer with the responsibility to pursue justice and reform. Cultural shukr is predicated on being grateful for objectively harmful situations and labelling any desire for change as spiritual ingratitude. This deceptive shukr serves as ideological inoculation, just enough acknowledgement of hardship (“yes, life is difficult, but …”) to prevent a critical examination of the whole picture, eventually diverting attention away from structural causes. So, the poor are told to be grateful for their food, while the causes of hunger are ignored.
Dr Bushra Shahid notes this clinically: “Patients often don’t have the words to express what’s going on inside, because the cultural vocabulary doesn’t contain words to describe legitimate mental suffering. All of this is filtered through sabr and shukr rather than being identified as treatable diseases.
The Gendered Dimensions of Linguistic Control
The lexicon of resilience operates through distinctly gendered processes, which reveal its oppressive function. For women, sabr is used in the context of sacrifice narratives — the good wife exercises sabr in domestic violence, the good daughter in forced marriage, and the good mother in exhaustion. These are not arbitrary cultural imperatives but ordered uses of linguistic discipline that direct women’s potential resistance toward spiritual performance.
For men, sabr is exercised through a set of stoic-oriented imperatives that are consistent with masculine expectations while precluding emotional expression or seeking help. The sabr man is also unemployed, depressed, and a social failure. This makes people literally die of what researchers call “lethal stoicism” — cultural norms that, when internalised, are literally deadly. The beauty of gendered linguistic control is its renunciation of the redundant: the exact words (sabr, shukr) generate different but equally effective modes of domination in gender-based contexts. Women are taught quiet endurance, men are taught quiet strength, and both are taught not to question the systems that produce their suffering.
Linguistic Liberation as Political Act
Reading Pakistan’s resilience lexicon not as a guide to spiritual discipline but as an apparatus of control creates space for what might be termed ‘linguistic emancipation’ — the deliberate recovery of true meanings from their cultural appropriations. Organisations like Umang, Pakistan’s first 24-hour mental health helpline, exemplify such reclamations in practice. Dr Kinza Naeem says, “Our vision is to give people a safe platform and professional support through our competent team of clinical psychologists. Their success lies not in abandoning Islamic concepts but in retrieving their authentic meanings while freeing them from their enslaving applications. True sabr involves actively persevering against injustice rather than passively accepting it. There is a difference between genuine shukr (thankfulness) for the ability to pursue beneficial change and thankfulness for destructive stagnation. When these ideas are used for their intended purpose, spiritual tools for addressing fundamental challenges while maintaining dignity and agency, they are empowering, rather than repressive, human flourishing.
Conclusion: Beyond the Vocabulary of Submission
The Pakistani vocabulary of resilience has become a form of what Bourdieu would call advanced symbolic violence, sacred language that has been used as a weapon to deter the development of critical consciousness regarding the suffering inherent in the system. The cultural incorporation of sabr and shukr designs, what might be called a vocabulary of submission, and the linguistic structures that render resistance as spiritually unsound rather than rationally required. The way forward is to recognise that genuine spirituality and social justice are not mutually exclusive elements of human dignity; instead, they are complementary components. As soon as sabr and shukr are freed of the applications that control them and returned to the applications that empower them, they can play their original role in instructing people on how to navigate authentic difficulties without depriving them of their inherent right to improve their conditions and experience emotional authenticity. Indeed, being resilient does not mean enduring without speaking out; it means having the strength to identify what is wrong, find a way to address it, and change the lives of individuals as well as the world around them without losing sight of spirituality and humanity.