Asfar Moin’s work, The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam is a study of the articulation of sovereignty in Mughal India. But in looking at sovereignty, he eschews textual narratives and focusses on the practices of sovereignty. So one of the departures this book makes is to move away from the theories to the practices of sovereign power. In looking at the practices of sovereignty, Moin develops the notion of sacred kingship arguing that the Mughal kingship was invested with sacrality.
This is a work based on the PhD the sis of the author submitted to a university of Pakistan. It studies the challenges faced by the All India Muslim League (AIML) during the period which is generally not considered to be of bigger significance for the growth and development of the Muslim League.
The word ‘evil’ is generally avoided by contemporary writers. Or it is reserved for deeds that almost everyone can unhesitatingly condemn. Nonetheless it is an accepted synonym for ‘wrongs’ or ‘wrong’ and an antonym for ‘good’ or ‘right’, even if others would rather use ‘wrong’, ‘iniquity’ or ‘injustice’. Along with two other significant words, Vinit Haksar employs ‘evil’ in the title of this important book on Gandhi’s thought.
The widespread contemporary availability of research studies is unprecedented. Researchers have taken their work into ever more detailed aspects of their subjects; extended this across the ages, from prehistoric times all the way into the future; as also spanning continents and civilizations, in the search for the hidden nooks and crannies, as it were, all the possible areas as yet unexplored.
The book under review investigates the ideology of the ISIS and its worldview, its recruitment strategy, its financial system and its appeal. It also studies the war against ISIS and its challenges. Edna Fernandez argues that the ISIS aims to destroy the ‘greyzone’ (a place where the Muslim and non-Muslims live together).
2018
The blood-strewn saga of the Bhutto clan exemplifies the tortuous political history of Pakistan. The books under review are political biographies of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and his equally illustrious daughter, Benazir Bhutto, by an Indian and a Pakistani author respectively. Benazir became Pakistan’s as well as the Muslim world’s first female Prime Minister at the dramatically young age of 35 in 1988, within a decade after the brutal hanging of her father in 1979.
Mehr Tarar’s book Do We Not Bleed? Reflections of a 21st-Century Pakistani in several ways breaks the pattern and monotony prevalent in the post- 9/11 discourse on Pakistan. The book is a digression as this narrative is not solely tangled in the hard-core security paradigm on which most of the recent published works on Pakistan are modelled.
The ten member-states of ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations) is, at times, an inspiration and, at other times, a house divided. That is how most outsiders would invariably react to the organization. Criticisms fly high when the grouping seems ineffective in handling regional issues such as human rights atrocities perpetrated by regimes from within the regional bloc.
This is a documentary study—compilation of 2523 documents spread over five volumes—introduced and edited by Avtar Singh Bhasin, formerly of the Historical Division of the Ministry of External Affairs. The 60-page introduction recapitulates the relationship covered by the documentation.
This book is about three riots—two in eastern UP, one each in Mau (2005) and Gorakhpur (2007) districts, and the third one in Muzaffarnagar and Shamli (2013) districts in western UP. It largely draws upon secondary sources, interviews, discussions and field work, and attempts to address changes in political economy and communal mobilization in eastern and western UP, the former in the urban and the latter in rural settings.
Matthew Mutter’s book examines four literary writers—Wallace Stevens, Virginia Woolf, WB Yeats and WH Auden—for the intricacies of modernist relations to secularism in this erudite and well-researched work. He argues, following Charles Taylor’s ‘subtraction theory’, that these writers constructed ‘new imaginaries’ to modify, redistribute, and privatize religious ideas in a ‘new, secular cosmology’
(p. 8).
At a time when trolls act as gate-keepers to power and a motley group of hecklers, vigilantes, and vandals define what is permissible to speak, eat, dress, and consociate, definitions and redefinitions of democracy, even if qualified as Indian democracy, are required.
Armed conflicts have a devastating impact on children, and despite records and documentation of the use and abuse of children in conflicts, the international community has been unable to create measures for safety, security or adequate rehabilitation for such children.