Four young men ran through the streets of Gujranwala, Pakistan, trying to escape the mob rioters chasing them and reach the house of their friends. Their friends, two brothers, had already arranged to move all the women of their house and others to a nearby neighbor’s home for safety. The four men reached the house [...]
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Díaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead Books, 2007. I. Comix For the record, that summer our girl caught a cuerpazo so berserk that only a pornographer or a comic-book artist could have designed it with a clear conscience. Every neighborhood has its tetúa, but Beli could have put them [...]
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Pakistan Penal Code 298, 298-A, 298-B, 298-C [pdf], updated by Anti-lslamic Activities of Quadiani Group, Lahori Group and Ahmadis (Prohibition and Punishment) Ordinance XX 1984. Paragraph 298-A: Use of derogatory remarks, etc., in respect of holy personages: Whoever by words, either spoken or written, or by visible representation, or by any imputation, innuendo or insinuation, [...]
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Below are further thoughts from Prof. CM Naim. A recent NYT story commented on conspiracy theories in PK and a number of people got really upset. Yeah. Here are the front-page “explanations” in Pakistan’s two foremost Urdu newspapers: Nawa-i-Waqt and Jang. Both are published in several cities, and also have web editions. According to one [...]
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There is a mosque near my house in Berlin. I bike past it every time. I often stop at the light, and enjoy the minarets against the grey skies. There is a mosque in Lahore, too. Every attack, every atrocity, every massacre diminishes us all. This, I choose to lay at the feet of Mawdudi [...]
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Religion gone global: an interview with Reza Aslan NS: How do you think scholars can learn to take part in broader conversations? RA: It’s often a total waste of time. You can’t be trained to speak to the media in a weekend seminar before going on Anderson Cooper. You have to be immersed in the [...]
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A.J. Arberry. British Orientalist. (London: William Collins Sons & Co, 1943): 7-11 What is Orientalism, and what constitutes an Orientalist? … The original connotation of the term orientalist was, in 1683, “a member of the Easter or Greek Church”: in 1691 Anthony Wood described Samuel Clark as “an eminent orientalian,” meaning that he knew some [...]
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The February 2002 issue of Seminar, Porous Borders/Divided Selves, on the Partition should be read immediately. I especially draw your attention to Santosh Kumar Ghose’s short story Hoina, the poems by Jibananda Das and Tasleema Nasreen, and the essay by Meghna Guha Thakurta, Uprooted and Divided. There is yet another phenomenon which distinguishes East Bengali [...]
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via Tom, more here: A B C, for baby patriots.
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I want to thank Sonam for allowing CM to publish this (it is scheduled to appear in print in “Another Chicago Magazine”). His translation and his text is haunting. The original Kashmiri verse, by the refrain “chaav myaney daeni posh”, appears in T. N. Kaul’s “Gems of Kashmiri Literature: Anthology of Kashmiri Verse”, (New Delhi: [...]
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“He usually walks around alone, looking lonely and kind of depressed usually,” said Nejilia Gayden, 18, of Bridgeport. “Sometimes he’ll mumble to himself.” Mr. Shahzad, Mr. Chomiak said, mentioned that he wanted to grow tomatoes. A Pakistani man said that an acquaintance of his who was a friend of the Shahzad family told him that [...]
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It is with great pleasure that I link to an interview of my advisor, Prof. Fred M. Donner, at Boston Ideas, Islam’s Beginnings, on his new book, Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam. IDEAS: Are your ideas particularly threatening to literalists because you question the Islamic narrative without attacking the faith? DONNER: [...]
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