Books and Documents
It was a truth universally acknowledged that all young women traveling
from Britain to the Islamic State needed to go shopping first, and in that
strange winter when girls started to go missing, Westfield Stratford City, a
sprawling mall in east London, emerged as a favourite final destination before
the journey....
A fruit of such study across religious boundaries is that one is often
able to discover gems of goodness in other religions and communities. Such a
process can lead to a marked inner change for the good. And that’s perhaps what
happened with Jackson through his studying a fourteenth century Sufi from
Bihar....
Salam was the first Pakistani to win a Nobel, and his victory should
have been a historic moment for the country. But instead, 40 years on, his
story has largely been forgotten by the country in which he was born – in part
because of the religious identity he held so dear...
PM
ignored rumours about Bajwa’s Ahmadi link. Significantly, Nawaz cites a former
chief acknowledging that the screening of top promotions in the army was not
sufficient insurance against growing radicalisation within its ranks….
Pakistan
has been the victim of the covert war which was supposed to be directed at the
infidels. This should be instructive, given the aimless bloodshed, unless Pakistan
doesn’t care about it....
This is a human story written by a person who knows
how to listen and to observe. And because the subject is about a group of
ordinary Afghans and their mentor doing their best in the struggle to end one
of the longest wars in human history, it is a story that is well worth
reading….
A tendency towards revisionism and to make the past look good by not allowing
facts to come in the way of a good story, is not unique to Muslims the
temptation becomes the greater when a culture or community feels it is being
“targeted”....
His mother, a ‘very devout, very conservative, very Wahhabi’ woman, was
acting strangely—furtively taking phone calls when she thought he was out of
earshot....
Mentored in politics by moderate visionaries like Gopal Krishna Gokhale
and Dadabhai Naoroji, Jinnah in the formative days of his political career in
the early 1900s', enjoyed a unique position even as he was struggling to firm
up his Law practice in Bombay....
The most conspicuous of these is Wahhabi-Salafist Islamic
fundamentalism, with its medieval social, cultural and political agenda, which
has spawned organisations like the Taliban and the Islamic State and unleashed
savage violence in many parts of the world....
Serious discourse about
apportioning blame for present conditions upon liberalism is widely reported.
Nearer home, a particular version of liberalism we know as secularism has been
pushed into retreat by an aggressive version of nationalism....
To 'reappropriate' Muslim women's destinies, Lamrabet attempts to debunk
beliefs and myths surrounding what is considered the 'weaker sex' by discussing
and reinterpreting Quranic verses that either tell stories of female Quranic
figures, or that directly address believing women....
In the Sub-Continent, this
debate started with British imperialism (‘British Raj’, 1857-1947). Muslims
responded to the imperialism through different means, scholars like Chirag Ali
(d.1895), Sir Syed Ahmad Khan (d.1898), Allama Iqbal (d.1938), Abul Kalam Azad
(d.1958), Shibli Numani (d.1914), Mumtaz Ali (d. 1974), Syed Mawdudi (d.1979),
Amin Ihsan Islahi (d.1997), Abul Hassan Ali Nadwi (d.1999), and others gave
them critical response by their scholarly works….
Barren
sandy desert, extremely hot climate, and scarcity of water resources made the
heartland of the Arabian Peninsula an inhospitable abode for man
since ancient times. Its original people were pagans, except for some
Unitarians (ahnaf) who contemplated on the Oneness of God. In the post
Judeo-Christian era, pockets of wet fertile land attracted Jewish and Christian
settlers from the adjoining regions, and became isolated centres of trade and
commerce. However, the vast stretches of the desert heartland that only
sustained a nomadic life, remained in a primitive state until the advent of
Islam. The nomadic tribes had preserved their ancestral paganism, with each
tribe having its own idol; and the Ka‘ba, a cubical shrine at the heart of an
ancient sanctuary (Haram) in Mecca, was the centre of idol worship. The
nomadic Arabs were largely unlettered, had no notion of central state or
kingdom, and their social and moral norms were based on traditions (Sunnah) and
dictated by the struggle for survival. .....
“Understanding Salafi Movement in
the Context of Pakistan”, presents a nuanced analysis of the Salafi Movement
and its presence in Pakistan. It explains how the use of modern communication
technology helped the creation of a Salafi network across Pakistan....
When Radhakrishnan referred to some of the gods of the Hindu pantheon he
wrote, “The polytheism was organised in a monistic way. Only it was not a rigid
monotheism enjoining on its adherents the most complete intolerance for those
holding a different view.”...
Assange has been charged
on 18 counts, including 17 violations of the Espionage Act. James Goodale,
former general counsel of The New York Times, who urged the paper to publish
the Pentagon Papers during the Nixon administration noted…
Since the precise meaning of the word pluralism may not be clear to an
ordinary reader, I want to take a moment to talk about it. A pluralistic
society is one where multiple things, multiple viewpoints, multiple belief
systems, can exist at the same time....
Indian Muslims have fought and laid down their lives for the land and
the idea of India. Brigadier Mohammad Usman and Havildar Abdul Hamid are names
that stand out among a legion of martyrs....
Islamic history is usually taught to us as a kind of closed universe,
unlike Judaism or Christianity where world empires loom large and historical
personages such as Nebuchadnezzar, Cyrus and Alexander make appearances. But
even with Islam, we sometimes get hints of a subtext....
...
a thin, neatly dressed young man wearing a floral patterned shirt approached
him from the pavement. He put his hand through the open window (of the car),
and the nearly blind Mahfouz, thinking it was one of the many well-wishers who
still congratulated him for his Nobel, reached out his own hand to shake it.
But instead of grasping Mahfouz's hand, the youth thrust a long switchblade
knife (twice, according to one of the surgeons who treated Mahfouz), very hard,
into the eighty-two-year-old writer's throat....
True, we have a mind and a physical body, but we aren’t them (although most people think contrarily and so suffer). We are actually the Soul/Spirit/Atman or Life Energy that keeps a person alive. It arrives at birth and departs at death. It is invisible, intangible and beyond human comprehension and definition....
In the
patriarchal world of South Asia, women have to act tough or risk being toppled
by men. In a sense, this applies universally, as Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher was often said to be “the only man in the cabinet”. Sheikh Hasina is
authoritarian and harsh, bordering on cruel....
When you want
to put a lock on the collective mind, you embrace “ideology”. This is a recipe
for creating a uniform mind but you have to add a bit of punishment to make it
hold. Religion comes in handy because it allows you to punish deviation....
Reflecting Khan’s understanding that spirituality isn’t something cut
off from daily life, but, rather, deeply rooted in it, this book is framed
around anecdotes from the lives of people (famous as well as ‘ordinary’),
aspects of Nature, key events in the history of countries, reports in
newspapers and so on....