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Browsing All posts tagged under »Islam«
Pakistan’s Atticus Finch:Salman Taseer
by Usmann Rana In Harper Lee’s much celebrated novel ‘To Kill A Mocking Bird’ , my favorite character is not that of the children but of their father, Atticus. Atticus Finch, the brutally honest, highly moral, an extremely opinionated tireless crusader for good causes (even hopeless ones). Today I can say that at least a […]
Blasphemy Laws
by Nadia Siddiqui Q: What is Blasphemy? A: Saying something what you don’t believe in. The laws against blasphemy are so apparent to give power in the hands of ruling authorities who can exercise their control in the name of religion. It is so evident from the case of Aasia Bibi, a Christian by […]
Contestations of Ijtihad: The Need For Debate
by A.A Khalid In liberal circles of religious scholarship there is a contention that ‘’ijtihad’’ is the epistemic tool which will solve all our grapples and puzzles of establishing a suitable religiosity for our time. Ijtihad is elevated from its formal place as a mere tool of legal reasoning restricted in the classical tradition to […]
Is the Koran a constitution?
By Dr. Abbas Zaidi Now that Fauzia Wahab has apologized in the face of Islamofascism at its worst (or best, if you may), it is only appropriate that someone should try to put her remark in its context. Unfortunately, no one—either liberals or the PPP leadership—has come to support her claim that during the time […]
Faisal Shahzad’s anti-Americanism
by Pervez Hoodbhoy DAWN – May 8, 2010 The man who tried to set off a car bomb in Times Square was a Pakistani. Why is this unsurprising? Because when you hold a burning match to a gasoline tank, the laws of chemistry demand combustion. As anti-US lava spews from the fiery volcanoes of Pakistan’s […]
Allama Iqbal in Favour of Ataturk’s Secularism
By Tarek Fatah Excerpted with gratitude from his book Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic lllusion of an Islamic State’. Available for download at Let Us Build Pakistan The movement to restore the Ottoman caliphate was strong in India, under the leadership of none other than Indian nationalist Mahatma Gandhi. As in Egypt, Muslims in India […]
Cold War, Holy Warrior
By Robert Dreyfuss Published: Mother Jones – January /February 2006 Issue Ike was president. Washington was desperate for Arab allies. Enter an Islamist ideologue with an invitation to the White House and a plan for global jihad. In the fall of 1953, the Oval Office was the stage for a peculiar encounter between President Dwight […]
Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy: “Islam and Science Have Parted Ways”
Middle East Quarterly Winter 2010, pp. 69-74 Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy (b. 1950) is one of South Asia’s leading nuclear physicists and perhaps Pakistan’s preeminent intellectual. Bearer of a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , he is chairman of the department of physics at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad where, as a high-energy physicist, he […]
Paradise Lost
By Nusrat Pasha Europe drew wisdom from pragmatism, and eventually separated the Church from the State. Ataturk had to struggle ardently to emancipate Turkey from its theocratic past and lead it to a secular and secure future. Secularism, as some people misleadingly propose, does not at all imply being anti-God, anti-Religion or atheistic or even agnostic; it only […]
Islam, cricket and Pakistan
By Dr Hasan-Askari Rizvi Published Daily Times- Sunday, February 07, 2010 Two mutually unrelated incidents last week show the growing dilemma of a large number of Pakistanis to relate themselves in a meaningful manner to the imperatives of citizenship of a nation-state. They may talk of Pakistan and its sovereignty when it is relevant to […]
State Religion
By Nusrat Pasha Interfaith Harmony is unattainable until there is Interfaith Equality. Equality, on the other hand, is bound to remain a fantasy as long as there is a State Religion. As soon as you start talking about a State Religion and involve that religion in legislative matters, you inadvertently open the door to theocracy. […]
Jinnah’s Will to the Nation He Founded
By Nusrat Pasha This nation still has hope if it succeeds in reverting to Jinnah’s Will : 1 : “….Religion should not be allowed to come into Politics….Religion is merely a matter between man and God”. [Jinnah, Address to the Central Legislative Assembly, 7 February 1935] 2 : “….in the name of Humanity, I care more […]
Role of Youth in the Current Situation
From Institute of Peace and Secular Studies The Institute for Peace and Secular Studies (IPSS) organized a day long youth convention with the theme of Terrorism and Peace under the title “The Role of Youth in the Current Situation” (on December 12, 2009). The convention was attended by over 200 youth including university students from […]
State and Religion in the Perspective of Muslim History
By Hassan Jafar Zaidi (hjzaidi@hotmail.com) (The author delivered his lecture on the same subject in Conway Hall, London on January 7, 2007) Courtesy Danishkada.com God did not create state. Man evolved and created state in the shapes and forms suited to him according to growth of means of production and the level of organization required […]
Revisiting the Pakistani Grand Narrative
By Zia Ahmad Courtesy Pak Tea House “Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives.” (Jean-François Lyotard) Most of the cultures around the world have an innate tendency to view themselves at the center of the universe. As with individuals this may be owing to the inability for some to live outside […]
The Myth of Ghazwa-tul-Hind
By Ale Natiq Cross-Posted from Ale’s blog (Thanks to Pakistani intelligence agencies for their illegal Denial of Service (DOS) attacks on Ale’s blog) Religion has quite frequently been used as an excuse for military motives. Talking specifically about Islam, hadees has been used as a tool to invent excuses for political motivations and military interventions/attacks […]
Suicide Bomber was My Cousin
By Sahar Saba Sahar Saba is the spokesperson for Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) For rest of the world, victims of Afghan war remain nameless and faceless. Not for us in Afghanistan. I myself have mourned number of such victims including my real uncle (father’s brother). Three weeks back, there was yet […]
Patriotism and Religiosity in Pakistan
By Umayr Hassan I can appreciate, why you don’t want this to be yet another discussion about Zaid Hamid. It is indeed difficult to reasonably discuss a commentator disinclined to cite his sources. (I will underline, though, the constant parading of the “Syed” part of his name: his supposed ancestry does not already make him […]
Profile of the Religious Right
By Eqbal Ahmad Dawn- 7 March, 2009 In two earlier essays l had argued one, that all religio-political movements are products of the shift from the agrarian/pastoral to the capitalist/industrial mode of production and the many forms of dislocations that it entails and two, that the religious tradition they invoke is more imagined than real, […]
Islam and Politics
By Eqbal Ahmad Islam, Politics, and the State, ed. Mohammad Asghar Khan (London. Zed Press, 1985 ) In writing about Islam and politics, one faces special difficulties. The field of Islamic studies, strewn with ancient potholes and modern mines, is dominated by apparently different but complementary adversaries-the “traditionalist” Ulema and the “modern” Orientalists. Their methods […]
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Secular Pakistan 
January 7, 2011 by Awais
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