 Home and madressah education, knowledge of Arabic, vast study of earlier texts on Islam and almost no exposure to modern education, yet ability to write colorful language, playing with high sounding words and experience in journalism was his qualification. A body...
|  Since 1988, Pakistan has seen six governments (interim set-ups excluded) including a Khaki one. The Fazal faction of Jamiat Ulema Islam has been part and parcel of all these governments. A few years ago, in a telephonic interview with JUI boss, Maulana Fazl...
|  It must not be surprising today that socio-political discourse in Pakistan has been turned into mullah’s domain. Notwithstanding the apparent opposition by some religio-political parties and Muslim religious leaders, Pakistan was created in the name of Islam.
|  There is no doubt in my mind that when Mr. Jinnah mobilized the Muslim identity as a marker of difference from Majority Hindus, it was only a strategic assertion. The creation of a new and separate homeland for the Muslims of India, in Muslim majority areas...
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| Farooq Sulehria | INTERVIEW |
‘If you support such a naked act of colonial intervention as the attack on Libya, you are not "progressive"; you are regressive,’ says John Pilger. Filmmaker, journalist and writer, John Pilger hardly requires any introduction even in Pakistan. Born in Sydney, Australia, Pilger in the early 1960s arrived in London. First, he freelanced, then joined Reuters, moving to the London Daily Mirror, and reported from all over the world, covering numerous wars, notably Vietnam. Moving to the United States, he reported the upheavals there in the late 1960s and 1970s. He was in the same room when Robert Kennedy, the presidential candidate, was assassinated in June 1968.
| Farooq Sulehria | EXCLUSIVE |
Many discourses have emerged with regard to the phenomenal rise of political Islam, also referred to as Islamic fundamentalism, or integrisme in French. These discourses, however, are often found lacking when it comes to the political economy of ‘Islamism’ and consequences of successful takeover of state power (Saudi Arabia, Iran, Sudan, Afghanistan) by Islamists. Either the collusion between imperialism and fundamentalism is stressed, though justifiably, or the failure of Arab nationalists/left is pointed out in such discourses. Chomsky, for instance, in a dialogue with Lebanese intellectual Gilbert Achcar calls political Islam ‘mainly a reaction to forces of unrest in the world’.
The tea was delicious. It was perhaps the milk that gave it such a smooth and creamy taste. Honey had been used to sweeten it up--enough but not too much. “Wait a minute!--You said, you’re a mix,” I said, gulping the last bit of tea from the cup, my eyes focused on Pir. “What’s a mix?” Pir looked away and watched Chacha instead, as he loaded the sac on the back of his bicycle. He cleared his throat to get Chacha’s attention. “Chacha, I thought you would take our guest across for a ride, to show him the Other Side.” “I changed my mind. I don’t want to spend my remaining days feeling guilty,” Chacha said, as he looped the rope around the sac, fastening it to the carrier.
| Adnan Farooq | PROBING HEADLINES |
In an email to his fellow journalists, Shakil Chaudhary points out: “Nusrat Mirza, a columnist for the Jang and former adviser to Nawaz Sharif, has written in the Jang the U.S. was to blame for the 2005 earthquake and the 2010 floods in Pakistan. His overly fertile imagination does not end there. He has also held the U.S. responsible for the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan. To the best of my knowledge, no Japanese has blamed it on the U.S. but that is no reason for columnists like Nusrat Mirza to hold their imagination in check. Shame on Jang for publishing such rubbish. Still our newspapers think they are better than Western newspapers”.
As a consequence to the heinous act on 11th September in the year 2001 and many more similar incidents, the furious west tried to suppress the folk with the notion of absolutism. Resultantly the AfPak region got polarized between the poles of the WEST and the REST. Moreover, both the poles were so much rigid in its stance against the other that for the moderate masses, the policy at both ends was “it’s my way or highway.”
| Muhammad Nafees | COMMENTARY |
There have been at least 51 cases wherein blasphemy suspects were either extra judicially murdered or died in jail (see Viewpoint Online issue# 43: ‘Blasphemy toll’ reaches 51). Of the 51 extra-judicial killings, 34 claimed the lives of accused women. The data on accused women shows: of the 34 women extra-judicially killed, 4 died in blasphemy-related Gojra violence, 1 died in jail, and 1 unidentified mentally-challenged woman was burnt alive. Women are normally considered to be more religious than men. Yet, in a country that is claimed to have been created in the name of religion, we find women committing blasphemous acts. Either the teaching of religion was not right or there was a gross misuse of blasphemy law. What makes it more surprising is that the number of accusation has gone significantly up since the Jamia Hafsa incident in 2007. Although, religious Ulema have been demanding death against...
London. March 25: The Trade Union Congress demonstration took over four hours to move off, such were the numbers: a veritable human flood. Media reports of it being quarter of a million do its number no justice. Ex Norwich MP Ian Gibson estimates it was a million. It mainly consisted of people who had never demonstrated before, all ages. In the Unison section of the march there was a lot of noise vuvuzelas, whistles and jeering and booing as we passed Downing Street. Compared to other demos, there were relatively few chants of slogans and demands. I took this to be a feature of the newness of this movement, noise rather than thought-out ideas.
| Redaktion |  |
It is during the revolutions masses’ creativity is at its best. They create their own organizations, novel ways to deal with the problems of everyday life, innovative methods to communicate and new traditions of expressing themselves. Facebook or no Facebook, they invent their own system of communication. They turn walls, work places, houses, squares, trees, stones, mountains---you name it---into newspapers. The whole world becomes a canvass, a living mural for the artists of the revolution. We have seen it in the past. We have seen it elsewhere. Now we are witnessing it in the Middle East. A group of media students at School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) has collected some samples of artistic expression emerging out of the Arab world.
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