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Browsing All posts tagged under »Political Islam«
No More…. by Chauhdry Ahmad Khan
Pakistan is reeling from the murder of 70 of its own citizens-massacred due to their faith by the self-appointed guardians of faith. Anyone with a shred of conscience left in Pakistan should declare themselves as Ahmadi – “I am an Ahmadi” should be the call of the day. Just as they should have declared themselves […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
Distorted Histories
Eqbal Ahmad Interviewed by David Barsamian Eqbal Ahmad, activist scholar, was born in India probably in 1934. He’s not quite sure. In 1947, he left with his brothers for the newly created state of Pakistan. He came to the United States to study at Princeton in the 1950s, and then went to Algeria. Ahmad worked […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Rewriting the History of Pakistan
by Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy and Abdul Hameed Nayyar [Source: Islam, Politics and the State: The Pakistan Experience, Asghar Khan (ed.) Zed Books, London, 1985, pp. 164-177.] From indoctrination’s foul rope Suspend all reason, all hope Until with swollen tongue Morality herself is hung. Introduction Education in Pakistan, from schools to universities, is being fundamentally redefined. […]
The Myth of History
by Prof. Shahida Kazi DAWN- March 27, 2005 History is a discipline that has never been taken seriously by anyone in Pakistan. As a result, the subject has been distorted in such a way that many a fabricated tale has become part of our collective consciousness Does mythology have anything to do with history? Is […]
In a Land Without Music
by Eqbal Ahmad from The Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad (Editor’s Note: This first hand narrative of Afghanistan during Taliban regime should be read by those who believe in absurd notions of ‘Good Taliban’ and ‘Bad Taliban’) I have seen the future as envisioned by contemporary Islamists. It horrifies and does not work – anywhere. […]
The Clash of Ignorance
by Edward Said Published in The Nation – October 22, 2001 Samuel Huntington’s article “The Clash of Civilizations?” appeared in the Summer 1993 issue of Foreign Affairs, where it immediately attracted a surprising amount of attention and reaction. Because the article was intended to supply Americans with an original thesis about “a new phase” in […]
The Roots of Violence
by Eqbal Ahmad Making Enemies, Creating Conflict: Pakistan’s Crises of State and Society. Edited by Zia Mian and Iftikhar Ahmad (Mashal Books, Lahore, 1997)., 1997 Contents Proliferation of violence has become the most serious soc ial problem in Pakistan today. Not a week, often not a day, goes by without so me terrible act of violence […]
When Science Teaching Becomes A Subversive Activity
To the Islamic orthodoxy science is still dangerous by Pervez Hoodbhoy I cannot quite decide which is the more dangerous of the two: George Bush and his obsession with ensuring U.S. global military dominance or the exploding power of brutal fundamentalist religious forces in countries such as mine. Believing only in their own version of divinely […]
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Secular Pakistan 
May 29, 2010 by aliarqam
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