EXILES IN PARIS

SEVERAL YEARS AGO, the Pakistani journalist Taha Siddiqui believed his greatest risk was being killed by his country's military.

- BY LIAM SCOTT | PHOTOGRAPHS BY LOUIS CANADAS

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."