CM friend, Neelika Jayawardane, reviewed Lapata’s The Little Book of Terror for Africa is a Country. Rather than fall into the sort of pop-psychology that claims to sort out why the children of the well-off (Osama bin-Laden included) may find “radicalism” attractive, Daisy Rockwell’s “cheeky little volume” of paintings and minimalist essays, The Little Book of Terror, offers a [...]
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I have a BEEF with the ridiculous voting thing that 3QD has – one can only vote for one post (wha?!?). But I want you all to go vote for one of Lapata’s amazing three post (I will be voting for the Stay at-Home Man). The blogzine 3QuarksDaily Arts & Literature Prize has declared its [...]
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Ki Muhammad se wafa tu nay to hum teray hain/ Yeh Jahan chiz hay kiya, Loh o Qalam teray hain Be faithful to Muhammad and I am yours/ This world is nothing, the Tablet and Pen are yours. I have a short piece in The Caravan India: Forfeiting the Future: Pakistan’s crisis can’t simply be [...]
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Ralph Luker, at Cliopatria, announces the Annual Cliopatria Awards in the History blogosphere. Guess who won a 2010! Best Writer: Lapata @ Chapati Mystery Lapata’s essays are not so much written as they are assembled, careful collages of visuals, text, and quotations always cunningly integrated into architectural unities. Her style always serves her subject: in [...]
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I have a review of Robert D. Kaplan’s new tome Monsoon up at The National UAE: Recall America’s imperial past, understand its present. The policy readers of this book will find it sober reading. The empire, which does listen to Robert Kaplan, will surely invite him to speak to groups with shiny brass and shinier [...]
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Gentle Readers, I am sorry, but I have been drowning in writing deadlines, some of which will trickle into consciousness here over the next year or so and I will delightfully point to this period of non-activity (seeming). In the meantime, some announcements: A. I AM GOING TO CAIRO!!!. I will be there from Dec [...]
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To the many “Pakistan” related things clamoring for your desensitized attention, may I add a couple more? I. Artist and film-maker Sophiya Pandeya travels to Hingal, Baluchistan and visits “Nani Mandir” of Hinglaj Mata. This darshan tale is touching, illuminating and worthy of your time. You can watch it below. You can also see a [...]
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J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, 1979. Calf-deep in the soothing water I indulge myself in this wistful vision. I am not unaware of what such daydreams signify, dreams of becoming an unthinking savage, of taking the cold road back to the capital, of groping my way out to the ruins in the desert, [...]
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Just wanted to note here that I taped a show with Worldview last week on Zaid Hamid. Apparently it was posted on the official Syed Zaid Hamid facebook group which generated a lot of comments. Some of the wise ones went over to the CPR site as well, and left comments. I gathered some choice [...]
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I am still -swamped- but thought I’d let y’all know of this first (hesitant) piece I wrote about Berlin and which appeared in Express Tribune‘s Sunday Magazine this past weekend. The print layout is nicer so here it is embedded.
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I will update this with other hospitalities in the war zone as I encounter more data points. Others please contribute. Date 2007-02-07 00:00:00 Following the formal discussion, they set a table of finger foods and chi [sic]. We continued to talk discussing more personal histories and the two officers were very open and candid. We [...]
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I shall be in London next two days. Come say hi.
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*The punishment is called “Murgha bana na” (to make one into a rooster). One is to grab the ears from behind the legs (not like this). Uncomfortable! And quite popular in schools across South Asia as well as in other settings. The gentleman above, holding the Murgha pose, was washing his rickshaw in the surf [...]
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Maya Yazigi, “Defense and Validation in Shi’i and Sunni Tradition: The Case of Muḥammad b. Abī Bakr” Studia Islamica, No. 98/99 (2004), pp. 49-70 One further factor needs to be taken into account. The horrific death that Muhammad b. Abi Bakr met in Egypt at the hands of Mu’āwiya’s men made him a perfect exemplar [...]
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Since moving to Berlin, I haven’t watched any Fox or gone to political websites or kept up with all that stuff. Guido keeps me up. Check this, though. Huma Imtiaz and Rahma are twittering across Sindh/Punjab and beyond (follow them here and here) and snapped this at a bazaar in Multan. The reason it makes [...]
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3 QUARKS DAILY PRIZE IN ARTS & LITERATURE: We are now going to do the Arts and Literature Prizes, and here’s how it will work: we will soon begin accepting nominations for this prize. After the nominating period is over, there will be a round of voting by our readers which will narrow down the [...]
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Hasan demands that this headline exist somewhere, and so it does. Here is a statistical analysis of over 210 million facebook accounts which one can query by country etc. Pakistan’s lists of group likes are quite instructive: Vin Diesel, for example, beats out the Prophet Muhammad. “I really hate slow computers” tells you something more. [...]
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My friend Atiya Khan has a piece in The Platypus Review, The poverty of Pakistan’s politics (PPP), in which she takes me and Faisal Devji (finally, together!) to task for making “concessions to the Right” by not understanding, or not conceptualizing, or not realizing the “crypto-fascism” of the Taliban. This, accordingly, corresponds to the death [...]
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Who among us hasn’t dreamed of unearthing rare historical treasures in old cast-aside trunks? Ok, maybe you haven’t but I stay up all night dreaming such scenarios. Jeremy Kahn, Kulwant Roy: Indian history in a yellow crate of negatives, NYT, Tuesday, June 17, 2008. Also, some of the photos are on Outlook India. I especially [...]
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