Several years ago, the Pakistani journalist Taha Siddiqui believed his greatest risk was being killed by his country’s military. Things have changed. “Now the threat is just a drunk person,” he says lightly, “which is easier to manage.”
It’s a Friday evening in July in Paris, and Siddiqui’s bar, The Dissident Club, is about to open. Siddiqui cracks jokes as he cleans up dirty glasses from the previous night.
Siddiqui, 41, sports long sideburns and a goatee, a smirk, and a fedora. The hat has become something of a uniform for Siddiqui, who says he started wearing them when he opened the bar in 2020. “It’s sort of a personality thing for a bartender,” he says. “And they don’t say ‘Assalamu alaikum,’ ” he adds, referring to the Arabic greeting commonly exchanged between Muslims.
In 2006, Siddiqui started his career in domestic media, quickly moving on to report for international outlets, including France 24 and The New York Times. In 2014 he won France’s prestigious Albert Londres Prize, named for one of the pioneers of investigative journalism. Much of Siddiqui’s coverage focused on Pakistan’s powerful military. “And the military did not like that,” he explains simply.
In 2018, while Siddiqui was en route to the Islamabad airport, a group of men stopped his taxi, beat him, and tried to abduct him. He managed to escape the car, run into oncoming traffic, and jump into another taxi, then hid in ditches along the highway until he made it to a service road, where he took another taxi to a police station. Soon after, Siddiqui, his wife, and their son fled Pakistan for France, where they have lived as refugees ever since. “There is my life before exile and my life after exile,” Siddiqui says.
For Siddiqui, everything leads back to that attack, which he believes was orchestrated by the military. (The government has denied any involvement.) “In the back of my head, it’s always there,” he says. “The bar itself is a reminder.”
Siddiqui founded The Dissident Club as a hub for fellow journalists, activists, and others who have fled danger in their home countries for refuge in Paris. Exile can be a lonely experience. “You become very depressed,” Siddiqui says. The Dissident Club is a rare attempt to combat that isolation and foster community among exiles.
“Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience,” wrote the Palestinian American scholar Edward Said, who was displaced from Jerusalem as a child. “It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place.” Exile was once a common punishment in ancient times. Now, more and more journalists and other dissidents are going into self-imposed exile in order to avoid being imprisoned or otherwise targeted in their home countries, says Tomás Dodds, a University of Wisconsin–Madison assistant professor who has researched exiled journalists. “You live in a constant state of dissonance.”
Russian journalist Daria Timchenko, who fled Moscow in 2022, knows that feeling. So does Afghan journalist Mariam Mana, in Paris since 2015 due to death threats in Afghanistan. “I work and I cry,” she says. Journalist Mohamed Maher Akl fled Egypt after the government labeled him a terrorist. “I kept looking out the window at everything, because this was the last time for me to see it,” he says of the flight out.
The Dissident Club provides a much-needed gathering place. “When an exiled journalist feels alone, this club reminds them they are not,” Maher Akl says.
The Dissident Club, located in the 9th arrondissement, is playfully irreverent, with red and green walls and multicolored lights. One corner of the bar features a thoroughly punctured dartboard surrounded by photos of various authoritarian leaders, including Vladimir Putin and Muammar Gaddafi. A neon red sign that reads “Where Dissidents of the World Meet” bathes the bar in its glow. In this establishment, “Eat! Drink! Rebel!” is a way of life.
Behind the bar, where Siddiqui is making drinks for a growing number of guests, another sign is sandwiched between bottles of Jägermeister and mezcal: “No I Dont Wanna Hear Ur Life Story.” Most patrons drink beer or wine, Siddiqui says, but he also likes to serve a custom cocktail he calls the Red Mosque. Made of vodka, limoncello, and Pakistani rose syrup, the drink is a reference to the Red Mosque in Islamabad, where a 2007 battle between militants and the country’s military killed dozens. Siddiqui developed the recipe with a friend at an underground party in Pakistan several years ago. “We just wanted to be funny and blasphemous,” Siddiqui says. “I would probably get killed for it.”
But The Dissident Club brings people together. “My bar is a small one. It’s a cozy place where people come and usually end up making friends,” he says.
Siddiqui drew inspiration from the Parisian literary cafés that writers frequented in the early 20th century. Besides live music, the bar often hosts book talks and discussions about human rights issues; Airbnb has listed it as an experience in Paris. Siddiqui’s own book, a graphic novel called The Dissident Club: Chronicle of a Pakistani Journalist in Exile, is on display. Originally in French, it was published in English earlier this year.
The evening I visit, some of Siddiqui’s exiled friends stop by, including Rateb Noori, an exiled journalist from Afghanistan. Noori moved to Paris following Kabul’s fall to the Taliban in 2021. “Even now, when I have an hour free, the first place I think of is The Dissident Club,” says Noori, who works at Agence France-Presse. Noori doesn’t think anywhere other than Kabul will ever feel like home, but he keeps going back to the bar because of the people. “I can relate to them,” he says. “They have almost experienced the same things.” Other exiles point specifically to Siddiqui. “Taha has empathy. He’s very welcoming,” says Russian filmmaker Taisiya Krugovykh.
It’s hot this evening in the French capital, where air-conditioning is still not guaranteed. A few fans do their best to reduce the bar’s sauna-like temperature. Live jazz music, featuring guitars, a double bass, and eventually a trumpet, starts later in the evening as the bar fills with more customers. On other nights, one of the bartenders—an exiled Russian musician named Slava Ipatov—plays the saxophone.
Siddiqui stumbled upon jazz when he first moved to Paris, and he quickly fell in love with it. “Jazz is dissident music. It has its own dissident history,” he says. Standing on the sidewalk among a cluster of patrons, Siddiqui takes a long drag on his cigarette before squashing it into an overflowing ashtray. “Maybe it has to do with my trauma, but jazz really calms me down,” he says.
Shortly before two in the morning, most of the patrons have left for the night. Siddiqui brings in the glasses that guests left outside and sets them on the bar—to be cleaned sometime before the bar opens again the following evening. Taking a final swig of beer, Siddiqui quips that this was a relatively calm night. Others, he says, are more spirited. “I’m the dissident of the neighborhood,” Siddiqui says.
Handwritten in white script on the side of the bar’s red exterior is an excerpt of an Urdu poem by Habib Jalib, a Pakistani poet who was imprisoned under military dictatorships from the 1960s and ’80s. Two lingering drinkers—a neighbor who lives next door and an Iraqi college student—chain-smoke on the sidewalk. Siddiqui translates the poem into English, emphasizing one line: “I never learned to write with permission.” Then Siddiqui locks up the bar, says an efficient goodbye, hops on his bike, and rides into the night.
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