I hear a low rumbling noise, the same my grandmother so dreaded of. They must be at it againโ the worldโs largest pickle factory, deftly manufacturing history. The news of his death lies deserted on the streets; Newsstands are selling the first snowfall in Kashmir. I see the sinews of the earth, moving beneath my…
Despite its selective take on Abdullah, the book makes a good, informative read and creates a good base for someone who wants to delve into the history of the place and unearth the truth. Nyla Ali Khanโs Islam, Women and Violence in Kashmir: Between India and Pakistan is primarily a non-fictional recollection of memories and…
The ghazal evolved as a highly formalized poetic form with rhyming couplets, and a refrain. The origins of Urdu have been well documented as first emerging as a pidgin โ a negotiation between Hindi, Persian and Arabic, and evolving to establish itself as one of the most spoken languages in the world. Historians broadly agree…
Originally an Arabic verse form dealing with loss and romantic love, medieval Persian poets embraced the ghazal, eventually making it their own. Consisting of syntactically and grammatically complete couplets, the form also has an intricate rhyme scheme. Each couplet ends on the same word or phrase (the radif), and is preceded by the coupletโs rhyming…
Very few books can be emotionally as promising as โThe Road to Meccaโ. Written by a famous and yet obscure author, Muhammad Asad (earlier Leopold Weiss). The book is a memoir, chiefly of his days in Arabiya. Born in Austria to Jewish parents, Asad was introduced in the study of the Torah apart from secular…
Jerusalem or al-Quds is one of the three holiest sites in Islam, the reference of which has been found both in ambiguous and in unambiguous terms; both in The Holy Quran and in the Hadith literature. The city has been in the centre of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. I would attempt to see the โHoly…
From the past few weeks, nearly every human being on this planet is living a thought that reigns our mind eerily. The global populace, the normal lifeโ as it is suggestedโ was in a rush about almost everything. The rush, if you did not participate at whatever pace, meant that you were lagging behind. That…
Introduction It is a common argument, made both implicitly and explicitly in Islamophobic rhetoric, that Islam, on the whole, is antithetical to modern secular notions of human rights. Whether it is through the lens of the rights of women in Islam and the oppression of women in the Muslim world, or through cited components of the shariโa regarding…
Throughout history, there are numerous examples of how the divide-and-conquer tactic has been used as a precursor to total destruction. We know that much of the science of anthropology was born in genocide โ to meet the need of their empires to understand a people, and ultimately to destroy them. I think this is perhaps…