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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A german nursery rhyme, that I just found. I need coffee, desperately. C-a-f-f-e-e / C-o-f-f-e-e C-a-f-f-e-e / C-o-f-f-e-e trink nicht so viel Caffee! / Don’t drink so much coffee nicht für Kinder ist der Türkentrank / Not for children is this Turkish drink schwächt die Nerven / Weakens your nerves macht dich blaß lassen und [...]
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Charles Taylor, The philosopher-citizen: In our time, we can almost fear that the public intellectual is an endangered species. On the one hand, the role can be trivialized by the proliferation of collective petitions for fashionable causes which it is very easy to sign. On the other, in the making of policy the intellectual is [...]
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Yasmin Khan, whose Great Partition is highly recommended, has an excerpt up on Random House India site*, The Ghost of Udham Singh: But the story of his life poses interesting challenges for the historian interested in ‘facts’ – for the stories about Singh are fragmented and seem sometimes only to take sustenance from their repetition. [...]
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Seriously! In the list of horrible waste of tax-payer’s hard earned money exposed by Fox News, I saw this: $50,000 to build a computer model of an ancient city in Pakistan complete with “animated and interactive ‘inhabitants’. If history is our guide, it won’t be long before these inhabitants fall to radical ideologies and turn [...]
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This, for some strange reason, popped up from the archives of my email. All of us, even when we think we have noted every tiny detail, resort to set pieces which have already been staged often enough by others. We try to reproduce the reality, but the harder we try, the more we find the [...]
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I recently picked up Hyderabad: A Biography by Narendra Luther but gave up a little too soon into it. I need to furnish a lot more context of the 19th c. city into a course I am planning for next term. A classic in the field is Margit Pernau’s The Passing of Patrimonialism: Politics and [...]
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There are probably no more readers left, but CM is exiting its long hiatus. Just to catch up, here are a few things I, um, failed to note properly. 1. On the Jaswant/Jinnah “Controversy”, one can begin with this op-ed by Sugata Bose, Why Jinnah Matters and then continue to Naim Sahib’s front-page corrective, Jaswant [...]
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Below the fold, two great events in NYC coming up. Do attend and support.
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