Posts Tagged ‘History’

    LUBP Editors express their profound grief over the demise of Hamid Akhtar, veteran progressive scholar, activist and columnist. In the last few years, we have always supported, valued and published Mr. Akhtar's bold columns which were originally published in Daily Express and some other newspapers. His support for [...]

In the following two columns published in daily Express in March 2009, veteran columnist (late) Hamid Akhtar offers some excerpts from Hasan Jafar Zaidi's article "hamari tarikh fehmi aur humara fikir aur siasi bohran" which was published in the "Adab-e-Latif" journal (Urdu). Amongst other things, the author also clearly highlights that Muhammad [...]

Any historian of Islam would shudder at what passes in Pakistan for instruction in Islamic history. Some Years ago, I queried an M.A class in this subject at a major Pakistani university. None of the 25 odd students there had an inkling of the issues which defined the first major schism in Islamic history - the khawarij movement. None gave [...]

Americans roam in Pakistan and treat the country as their colony because nearly 65 years ago the founder of Pakistan saw the United States as a saviour and defender of his new State.  Just before the division of the Indian Subcontinent, the British trained lawyer and leader of the All India Muslim League, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, had communicated to [...]

Violent ghosts Ever since 2009, the secular Awami League government in Bangladesh has been moving the country’s law enforcing institutions and courts against various members of the Bangladeshi Jamat-i-Islami and other rightist groups. The League accuses their members of taking part in the genocide that took place against Bengali nationalists [...]

Abbas Ather's take on Shah Mahmood Qureshi and the Raymond Davis case. Mr Ather also offers a detailed history of the PPP, its ideals, struggles and internal divisions as a context of recent developments. (Source: Express, 21 Feb - 8 March 2011)

A Tunisian man who put himself on fire has set ablaze the spirit of revolution various Arab countries in Africa and the Middle-East. It is a remarkable turn of events triggered by a disgruntled Tunisian vendor who became an angry human torch after police confiscated his wares and humiliated him. I have heard a number of young Pakistanis [...]

A bureaucrat, mutated into an ‘intellectual’, hogs the waves of an Urdu television channel and tells the ignorant television viewing public what it wants to hear. One of his not-so-recent gems was about the country that is now Pakistan being a wild and savage land until illuminated by Islam in the early 8th century. That, until that time, [...]

Related articles: Student politics in Pakistan: A history, lament and celebration – by Nadeem F. Paracha Special Report on PPP – by Amir Mateen A review of PML-Q and other factions of PML – by Amir Mateen Special report on Jamaat-e-Islami – by Amir Mateen Understanding Nawaz Sharif – by Amir [...]

Part-1: First steps In 1947 the only established student organization in the newly created country of Pakistan was the Muslim Students Federation (MSF), the student wing of the ruling Muslim League. MSF had been formed to assist the Muslim League in recruiting students and young Muslims of undivided India and help it achieve its goal of [...]

Veteran journalist MJ Akbar’s latest book is Tinderbox: The Past and Future of Pakistan, a title rendered even more relevant by the recent assassination of Salman Taseer, governor of the province of Punjab in Pakistan. The man, Akbar tells Open, would likely have been alive had he been an Indian Muslim. An interview: Q Yours is a book about [...]

There was a naughty boy, And a naughty boy was he, He would not stop at home, He would not quiet be. – John Keats There are so many memories of those days gone by, that it is almost impossible to be coherent about them. Suffice it to say, that as I was seven years old when Salmaan was born, I ‘brought him up by hand’, as did Pip’s [...]

People say good leadership is like a prized perfume. Its very first scented waft announces its presence with astonishing freshness. Bad leadership like skunk just stinks. Democracy is not a separate ideology from Islam. In fact democracy is very much there in Islam. There is no concept of dictatorship, popism (mullaiyat) and totalitarianism in [...]

Author, journalist, ad man, technical writer, political activist and family man, Tarek Fatah stands as a prominent opponent of Islamofascism today.  From confronting the IJT thugs of Karachi University in the late 1960s to taking on the lobbyists of the Muslim Brotherhood and Khomeini in Canada, Tarek represents one of the few voices of sanity in [...]

Justice and Remembrance: Introducing the Spirituality of Imam Ali By Reza Shah-Kazemi; IB Tauris 2006 Pp 254; Special price Rs995 Available at bookstores in Pakistan This is a book from The Institute of Ismaili Studies, London, and is dedicated to Syed Hossein Nasr, the great Iranian Twelver Shia scholar, indicating a coming together of [...]

Photo: Dawn Related article: A Rebuttal to Dr. Safdar Mehmood’s article “Did Jinnah Aspire to a Secular Pakistan” – by Naveed Ali قائداعظم پر بہتان لگانے والے صبح بخیر…ڈاکٹر صفدر محمود گزشتہ چھ دہائیوں سے یہ بحث جاری ہے کہ بانی پاکستان [...]

We talk about minorities in India but are strangely unaware of the existence of the same in neighbouring Pakistan. Even before Independence Hindus, Sikhs, Parsis, Jews and Christians existed in undivided India. There was large scale migration/exodus post partition (gadar) on either side. Despite being unofficially classified as 'terror state', [...]

Jinnah’s funeral, Karachi (1948) Jinnah, … was wont to describe himself in public as neither a Shia nor a Sunni. His stock answer to a query about his sect was: was Muhammad the Prophet a Shia or a Sunni? After 1947, Pakistan adopted the position of denying that the population of the country was divided between Shias and Sunnis, [...]

Related article: Jinnah, Ayesha Jalal, Safdar Mehmood, Irshad Haqqani, Khurshid Nadeem – an interesting debate سب اپنے اپنے مفروضوں کے حق میں دلیلیں ان سے پاتے ہیں بیک وقت جناب قائد اعظم کے اقوال سبھی کے کام آتے ہیں بیک وقت (انور [...]

Related articles: Ameer-ul-Mominin Ali: “The First Fighter against Islamism” – by Shaheryar Ali Horr – by Dr Ali Shariati Allama Iqbal and Ahlul-Bayt Imam Hussain, Karbala and Khilafat – by Maulana Muhammad Ishaq Female leaders in Islam have been overlooked by the mainstream Muslim world for hundreds of years. The truth to [...]

While browsing, I came across this resignation letter by the first Chairman of Constituent Assembly as well as first Minister for Law & Labour of Pakistan, Mr. Jogendra Nath Mandal. Mr Mandal (1906–1956) was a Hindu Dalit politician; he was a trusted friend of the founder of Pakistan Muhammad Ali Jinnah who appointed him as the first minister of [...]

In Britain’s hour of need, when she faced the might of the German Army, it was not America that came to her aid but the fighting men of the Indian subcontinent. They came from Bangladesh, India and Pakistan and most of all the province of Punjab. These men were in effect allied to the British Raj, a state that had subjected their land to more [...]

Compiled by: Abdul Nishapuri Qudratullah Shahab Shahab at a UNESCO session in Paris with Sahibzadah Yaqub Ali Khan At a sufi shrine in Canton, China, with Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto Shahab with General Ayub Khan in a function of Pakistan Writers' Guild Qudratullah Shahab with Faiz Ahmed Faiz Iffat Shahab Qudaratullah [...]

We have previously published a number of articles on LUBP providing a critical analysis of the "Objectives Resolution" which was the first formal step towards mullahcracy in Pakistan. Today, Dr Safdar Mehmood, whose academic credentials are as dubious as his religious and political impartiality, has written an op-ed in daily Jang in defence of [...]

Book review: Creation of the state of Pakistan —by Iftikhar Ahmad Jinnah: India-Partition-Independence By Jaswant Singh Oxford University Press; Pp 565, Price Rs 995 It is claimed that Jaswant Singh’s book, Jinnah: India-Partition-Independence, attempts an objective evaluation. It is for the impartial reader to pass a verdict. The focus [...]

Related post: Jagan Nath Azad did not write Pakistan’s first national anthem – by Dr Safdar Mehmood Cross Posted from Beena Sarwar's Blog Complete version of the tarana by the Lahore-based poet Jagan Nath Azad, who was asked by Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah to write Pakistan’s first anthem. Thanks to his son Chander K. Azad in Jammu [...]

Those who want us to believe that an obscure colonel forced Pakistan into a war without the knowledge of the top political leadership, especially someone of the stature of Jinnah, are insulting common sense In his comment, ‘Jinnah’s role in the Kashmir War’ (Daily Times, March 24, 2010) on my op-ed a week earlier, ‘The 1947-48 Kashmir [...]

The Supreme Commander of both Indian and Pakistan forces Sir Claude Auchinleck followed Mounbatten's policy and advised the C in C of Pakistan Army to openly defy orders of the Pakistan Governor General In his article ‘The 1947-48 Kashmir War’ (Daily Times, March 16, 2010), Dr Ishtiaq Ahmed has insinuated that there is overwhelming [...]

The Pakhtun culture is reflected in Ghaffar Khan’s non-violent movement, in the mysticism of Rahman Baba’s poetry and in the romanticism of Ghani Khan’s poetry. This is a society that produced hundreds of anti-Taliban lashkar leaders all over Pakhtunkhwa who were target killed because they insisted that Talibanisation is the antithesis of [...]

Humanising the monster Dr Mohammad Taqi My life with the Taliban By Abdul Salam Zaeef Translated from Pashto and edited by Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn Hurst/Columbia University Press; Pp 331 In his foreword to Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef’s book, Professor Barnett Rubin of New York University sets the stage for the launch, [...]

Update: Correction: The following article is considered to be fake, hence readers are advised to post no further comments on a fake article. We have decided not to delete this post in order to preserve the comments in this thread. The following is a historic interview with Maulana Azad, an advocate of Hindu-Muslim unity and an opponent of [...]

Book Review Title: Muhammad - A Prophet for Our Time By: Karen Armstrong 249 pages. $21.95. HarperCollins/Atlas Books. Reviewed by Laurie Goodstein - in The New York Times (International Herald Tribune) The religion with the most adherents on the planet is Christianity, and few people would say they are unfamiliar with the story of its [...]

There are some people who, in view of the present religious extremism, believe that if Sufi teachings are revived, religious intolerance and fundamentalism may be controlled. The attempt to revive the past system and old ideas is not a new phenomenon. Those societies which are backward and have no creative and innovative capability to come up with [...]

Recent NRO verdict is an attempt to distort our 64 years of political history. And the thing which makes me sad the most is that how easily Supreme Court picked up Benazir Bhutto's book (Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West) and took a single story from an almost thousand page book and treated it as an evidence against NRO. And the thing [...]

"Why do many Pakistanis spend more time celebrating Islamic history of regions outside India (especially Arabian), the ummah, and seem to show more concern in what is happening to their brethren in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and Kashmir." Writes Nadeem Paracha in his article titled "The minor majority" in (more...)

Ahsan Abbas Shah offers an in depth historical perspective on the Supreme Court of Pakistan's decision against the process of national reconciliation in the country. He warns that any unconstitutional step to derail democracy may result in dire consequences for Pakistan. (more...)

By Rauf Parekh Monday, 09 Nov, 2009 (Dawn) COMMENTING on the genre of biography, Oscar Wilde said: 'Formerly we used to canonise our heroes. The modern method is to vulgarise them. Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable.' Probably this is truer in modern days than it was in [...]

The backwards forward Posted by Nadeem F. Paracha There is an urgent need in the Muslim world to think anew about a lot of issues, not to appease the West, but to co There is an informative debate show on a local private channel called Alif. The show is mostly about the various philosophies of Islam and their place in Pakistan and rest [...]