Roughly speaking, the political and social aspects of Islam in Pakistan can be seen as existing in and emerging from three distinct sets and clusters of thought. These clusters represent the three variations of political and social Islam that have evolved in this country: modern, popular and conservative. The modern aspect of Islamic thought in [...]
After enjoying a little more than two years of relative peace, Karachi was rudely dragged back on the mutilated map of terror today. A single suicide bomber managed to slip his dynamite strapped body inside a large procession of Shia mourners on Karachi’s M A Jinnah Road and blow himself up, killing and injuring dozens [...]
The Supreme Court’s verdict on the NRO was certainly an unprecedented event. However, the night the verdict was announced, every famous TV anchor was jumping and hyperventilating; some almost foamed at the mouth as if struck by a strange, sudden bout of happiness. What is this, I thought? Have we won Kashmir? Have we triumphed in [...]
There is nothing new anymore about the suggestion that over a span of about 30 odd years, the Pakistani military and its establishmentarian allies in the intelligence agencies, the politicised clergy, conservative political parties and the media have, in the name of Islam and patriotism, given birth to a number of unrestrained demons which have [...]
Ever since Field Martial Ayub Khan toppled a blundering conglomerate of civil servants and politicians in a military coup in 1958, as a culture, Pakistan was moulded into a desperate group of people to whom democracy was akin to corruption and chaos. But compared to the 1950s, corruption scaled unprecedented heights during the Ayub dictatorship, [...]
RECENTLY I was fortunate enough to be a part of an excellent ten-minute news video prepared by the New York Times’ reporter, Adam Ellick. Tastefully called ‘Tuning out the Taliban,’ the video has created the right buzz amongst young middle-class Pakistanis. Adam treats his report as a way to understand why many educated, westernised and [...]
Islamabad, November 18: Famous anti-India TV personality, Zion Hamid, was caught yesterday watching Shakuntali, a popular Indian TV soap opera. The discovery was made by one of his fans who Hamid thought was his milkman. When Hamid opened his door, the fan heard and saw the TV in the background where episode No. 5, 904 [...]
The day after the terrible terrorist attack at Islamabad’s Islamic University that took the lives of eight innocent students, certain TV news channels ran a footage of a dozen or so angered students of the university pelting stones. The first question that popped up in my mind after watching the spectacle was, what on earth [...]
While driving to my office the other day, I almost crashed head-on into a motorcycle. The burly man riding the bike was coming in from the wrong way on a one-way street. After braking, I gestured to him as to what on earth was he up to. The motorcyclist gestured back and then shouted: ‘Are [...]
Only a few days ago, while channel surfing on a slow-moving evening, I came across a show where an ‘alim’ and his ‘scholar’ guest were discussing the Islamic edicts on the issue of wife-beating. As the ‘scholar’ insisted that the husband could use whatever degree of violence on a ‘disrespectful wife,’ the host, who usually [...]
