Pakistani cinema in its heyday from the mid 1950s to the late 1970s was largely a commercial enterprise. Commercial films were constructed with the elements of melodrama, comedy, romance, song and dance and action. While political themes were not overtly addressed in the films, there were few left-leaning directors and writers such as Khalil Qaiser and Riaz Shahid who dealt with politics in the few films that they directed. Two of their films Shaheed/Martyr (dir. Khalil Qaiser, 1962) and Zarqa (dir. Riaz Shahid, 1969) situated and showcased anti-colonial struggles in the Middle East. While Shaheed/Martyr set in the year 1922 was about fighting against British colonial forces looking for petroleum in the deserts of fictitious Middle East area called watan/country, Zarqa set in 1948 was about Palestinians fighting to save their watan/country against the settler colonial forces of Israel. While both films were commercially successful in Pakistan, Zarqa broke records of commercial success and finished a hundred weeks in cinemas, particularly attracting women in the audience. The films in Urdu language with Arabic sprinkled here and there were shot and produced in Pakistan with the local cast and crew. How was the Middle East discursively produced and constructed as a site of resistance for Arabs in these popular films? How were local codes of Pakistani cinema such as visual style, narrative, gender, and song-and-dance deployed to produce an anti-colonial narrative in the Middle East for a local audience in Pakistan? What other local, transnational, historical sources influenced the popular yet political codification of colonial oppression and anti-colonial resistance? This article investigates the discursive construction of these films and highlights both constraints and possibilities of the politics of the popular.