For over 70 years, the vision of the founding father Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah has been a matter of intellectual debate, where points and counterpoints are made by writers in order to prove validity of their own personal views and vision of Pakistan. Dialogue, discussion and even debate always helps in at least understanding the […]
1. Introduction ‘Muhammad Iqbal – lawyer, jurist, and poet – rests in a simple tomb just outside the main entrance to the Badshahi mosque in Lahore. That simple tomb is a place of pilgrimage to me. For Iqbal was a man who belonged to all races; his concepts had universal appeal. He spoke to the […]
Love Conquers The World (محبت فاتح عالم) I thought of contemporary love as a feeling of deception that you have for somebody, enslaving you to inferior desires. It was not until I read عشق کے پانچ درجے1 by Khurram Ali Shafique and discovered Iqbal through his Marghdeen2. This change introduced me to that powerful love […]
So, August arrives again. Like every year, channel logos change to green. Youth begins placing flags on their roof tops, buying badges and flags only to find them on the floor beneath our feet the next day. More deceitful promises and more lies by dearly loved leaders; more national songs and a load of new […]
In a society stricken by war, insecurity and poverty, where everyone seeks a safe and prosperous life for themselves and their families, and people live lives day to day, we have somehow become self-centered feeling relieved if our families are safe, no matter what disasters are befalling in the other parts of the country. The […]
My attempts at landing upon an official Tableeghi Jamat statement on the attacks on a Tableeghi centre in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (Pakistan) and on Tableeghi Jamat members in Karachi fell in vain. I ceased to wonder when I chanced to meet a lady who was an acquaintance of one of the victims of the mosque target-killing in […]
Feminism (Oxford definition) – the advocacy of women’s rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes. EQUALITY! Not supremacy. Feminism is all about advocating women’s rights not advocating their supremacy above any other human being and certainly not about loathing men like some sort of filth. Then why exactly do some self proclaimed “feminists” […]
Depression and psychological complex amongst sacrificial animals would be highest during Zilhaj if they could comprehend the criteria of ‘khoobsurat janwar’ which Pakistanis have created. Similar to how the advertisements make us believe that we need products to look good and for example, men and women who use fairness creams excel both in professional and personal […]
Parallax errors of selective historical and contemporary view points A simple definition of Parallax would be “an apparent change in the position of an object resulting from a change in position of the observer”. By some accounts on October 12 Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas [1]. 521 years later a girl, Malala Yusufzai, from Swat, Pakistan […]
The catalogue of bloodbath in the Muslim world is harrowing and sickening. I want to know who is responsible for it all. It has been a bloody week – the Westgate shopping centre massacre in Nairobi that left 67 people dead, the killing spree of students in North Eastern Nigeria has left 50 students dead, […]
