Despite the fact that an overwhelming majority of Muslims live outside the Middle East, the words Arab and Muslim are used synonymously and the Arab world continues to remain the ‘center’ of the Muslim world. It takes bomb blasts for the world to sit up and notice that something is happening in the ‘Islamic periphery’ as well…
Fakirs with their puppet shows exhibit military conflicts which end with the flight of the English. Songs resound the praises of our enemies and reports are industriously spread to rouse thenative troops and inferior classes of inhabitants in action . . . The very salt we manufacture is said to be mixed with the blood of cows or swine, Hindus and the Musulmans’…
R.C. Dutt, the first ‘condenser’ of the Mahabharata’s one lakh slokas, chose to spare the Western reader the ‘unending morass’ and ‘Monstrous chaos’ of episodical matter by leaving out whatever he felt to be superincumbent.
Close to 300 insurgency-related deaths were reported from Balochistan in 2009, which is a marginal improvement over the previous year’s toll of 350. Such ‘statistics’ notwithstanding, the Baloch insurrection remains a critical problem for the nation building exercise in Pakistan. Pakistan’s attempt to enter into a process of dialogue…
Alyssa Ayres’s 217-page book is a mas-terful exposition of the role that language has played in ‘engineering’ the ‘idea of (modern) Pakistan.’ Divided into ten chapters, Ayres fleshes out Pakistan’s experience with the Urdu language, used by the state as a means to justify the ends of nationalism and national unity…
The partition of India is once again big news. Last year the BJP stalwart, Jaswant Singh in Jinnah: India-Pakistan-Independence, New Delhi: Rupa and co.), was summarily expelled from the party for daring to suggest that it was the intransigence of leaders like Nehru and Patel that compelled Jinnah to go down the road of a separate homeland of Pakistan for Muslims of India.