March 2005

The Archives

• homistan

  We Don’t Want to Return

  03.14.05 | Permalink | 9 Comments

  Outlook India has a rather breathless piece, When Veer Met Zaara, on the Pakistani cricket fans visiting India. The Pakistanis are discovering that “‘their hated neighbour’ is a more developed, easy-going, and less suffocating place” and now, “they don’t want to return”. To make matters worse, The General has been extended an invite to [...]

• optical character recognition

  Sunday Reading for The New Yorker

  03.13.05 | Permalink | 5 Comments

  I am starting to hate the New Yorker. I am weeks behind. They pile up, mercilessly mocking my inability to read them. Do I need this pressure in my life? And people ask me whether I read this or that. I will soon, I say. All Cretans Pakistanis are liars.

  All that to draw your [...]

• homistan

  Fatwa

  03.11.05 | Permalink | 1 Comment

  Spanish cleric Mansur Escudero, Secretary General of the Islamic Commission of Spain, issued a fatwa against UBL today [thanks, tsk]. I can’t find the text of the fatwa listed anywhere. Not that my Spanish is all that. Most reports say that it declares UBL outside of Islam based on his killing of innocent civilians on [...]

• homistan

  Charlatans for Islam

  03.10.05 | Permalink | 84 Comments

  Imagine a young, vibrant, clean-cut scholar of Islam who starts a tv show Aalim Online for GeoTV in Pakistan. On this program, he invites Shi’a and Sunni clerics and Christians and Hindus and Parsis and takes on controversial topics head-on. He even tackles suicide bombings and earns praise from The General himself. Imagine that being [...]

• optical character recognition

  Galabeya Woman

  03.09.05 | Permalink | 4 Comments

  Zein, Rakan, Aya and Jalila are Middle Eastern superheroes. Rob beat me to the punch on this but what is blogging if not shameless recycling? So none of these heroes is wearing a galabeya which makes them look “white” to Rob. I wouldn’t say “white” - but def. teutonic. The endeavor is headed by [...]

• univerCity

  Religions of al-Hind

  03.08.05 | Permalink | 2 Comments

  The Barmakid Yahya b. Khalid [d. 805] sent an envoy to India to draw up a report on religions of al-Hind.
  The Arabic geographer, Ibn Khurdadhbih [d. 912] used this report on al-Hind in his Kitab al-Masalik wa’l Mamalik. His longer work, in turn lost, exists in Persian historian al-Gardizi’s, Zayn al-Akhbar. Until al-Biruni, this was [...]

• univerCity

  The Silence

  03.07.05 | Permalink | 13 Comments

  A bit curious, historically, is the lack of interest the Muslims rulers of India took in Hinduism. If one compares the translation projects of Greek and Armaic sources into Arabic during the 9th-11th centuries in Damascus and Baghdad with the projects undertaken for Sanskrit, one realizes that there were no projects undertaken for Sanskrit. Not [...]

• homistan

  My Simhavadivu Technique is Unstoppable

  03.03.05 | Permalink | 38 Comments

  Thing about being a South Asian historian is that I am so clueless about South Asia. Like about Kalarippayattu. Did I even have an inkling about this mother of Kung Fu? How could I have not known about this bucket-of-oily-goodness South Indian Martial Art? I knew about pehlwani and silambam but nothing about this? How [...]

• univerCity

  Ten Habits for a Highly Successful Job Talk

  03.02.05 | Permalink | 10 Comments

  As you may or may not recall, I applied for some jobs this year. So yeah. Moving on from that subject, my glorious university has some openings in my department this year. For the past 6 weeks we have been hearing the job candidates. These are all good people who, I know, are on many [...]

• univerCity

  ReOrientations

  03.02.05 | Permalink | 1 Comment

  The idea of doing a conference on Orientalism wasn’t really appealing. The hoopla over HR3077 last year - especially on our campus - was too much even for me [HR 509, this year]. However, we did have some methodological questions. Literary critics have had their day in the sun with the text, and more power [...]