There is something unusually compelling about his combination of total coolness, gentle innocence and self-deprecating humor. At 46, he still has a child’s heart. At last year’s Brookings Institution conference on Muslim-American relations, in Doha, Qatar, he sort of owned the place: With every appearance, he was immediately surrounded by admiring wonks, wanting to bask in his aura of peaceful energy. There is even a healing quality about him. Perhaps it’s because he has just been dowsed.
Samina, Ahmad’s wife, whom he met and fell in love with at age 17, is a holistic health counselor. Both are, in fact, physicians--though he had always wanted to be a musician, his parents persuaded him to become a doctor. She’s also accomplished in the kitchen and for six years had her own cooking show on television. She was, he says, the Martha Stewart of Pakistan. Samina recently learned to dowse, which is done with a pendulum-like mechanism. “It’s like prayer,” he says. “It uses positive energy from the universe. It’s not distant from the Muslim tradition.”
“I know,” he says with a laugh, “that it sounds like hocus-pocus, and I was skeptical at first. It’s like a spiritual ouija board. It raises people’s energies.” He says it’s certainly hard to describe, and that it’s not like the divining rods that westerners used to find water. His wife started dowsing him in June, and when she does, he recites a Muslim prayer: I seek refuge in the Lord of Daybreak. He focuses on a specific issue that may be bothering him, making him melancholy or anxious. “It’s a cathartic process,” he explains. “Through prayer and talking, you lift yourself out of it.” More:
The southern swath of Baluchistan is anything but godforsaken. It is, I learn, hallowed land: When Kali, the Dark Mother of the Hindu religion, the Goddess of Death, shattered millennia ago, her torso landed in the mountains.
Baluchistan, then, is not simply hallowed; it is one of the holiest tracts in Hindu mythology. Several years ago, L.K. Adavni, then-leader of the Hindu fundamentalist party in India, was stirred when he visited Nani Mandir. (On his return, he was temporarily dismissed from the party because of “pro-Pakistan” statements he made to the press.) Asphalt roads were paved in anticipation of his advent.
The approach to the temple is unremarkable: An iron gate opens into a narrow esplanade nestled in a valley, presumably a riverbed in the rainy season. Simple single-story cement rooms stand on either side. A makeshift cupboard-sized shrine houses a statuette of Kali, arms perpendicularly extended, tongue rolled out like Gene Simmons. Burnt incense sticks are pitched in the surrounding earth and empty coconut husks litter the periphery. In April, thousands of Hindu pilgrims, both local and from across the border, make the journey on foot. They shave their hair and shed their clothes. We follow in their tracks, passing mossy pools littered with Frooto boxes and floating locks. There is graffiti in Sanskrit on the boulders, and a pair of vertiginous eyes.
Unlike the temples in and around Karachi — Sri Swami Narayan on Bandar Road, Ratneshwar Mahadev in Clifton — Nani Mandir is not grand; there are no spires, arches, no detailed stonework. More:
Nadia Naviwala, a student at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and a former national security aide in the U.S. Senate, in the International Herald Tribune:
More women are finishing college and getting jobs, and they have traded traditional baggy shalwars for trousers and capris. The city has been aggressively transformed by a mayor so impressively capable that he seems misplaced in a culture of corrupt politicians and broken bureaucracies.
If I sound like a wide-eyed Pakistani-American, it’s because I am. Pakistan today is more open and progressive than Pakistani communities in the United States. My parents’ generation in America has worked hard to preserve the Pakistan they left behind in the 1980’s.
Pakistani-Americans whisper and shake their heads about the wild parties they hear go on in Pakistan today. It’s true: alcohol, although illegal, is everywhere. And when I celebrated Christmas in Karachi this December, it was a Pakistani-American girl I met there who commented disapprovingly. Meanwhile, my Pakistani friends didn’t believe me when I tried to tell them that, having grown up in the United States, I have never met a Muslim who celebrated Christmas. More:
Najam Sethi, editor in chief of The Friday Times, Pakistan, in The Wall Street Journal:
On initial appearances, the first high-level bilateral talks between India and Pakistan since November 2008 weren’t a success. When the two foreign secretaries convened in New Delhi on Feb. 25, at times it was as if they were at different meetings. The Indians tried to focus on terrorism sponsored from within Pakistan, while the Pakistanis wanted a broader dialogue. In the end, there was no noteworthy result. But appearances in this case are deceiving. This meeting is likely to prove more successful than many expect.
That’s because interests on both sides are at last correctly aligned to give talks a shot at success. For India, it has been a matter of reaching several conclusions at the same time. First, New Delhi has failed to browbeat Islamabad into steps like cracking down on Lashkar-e-Taiba, the terrorist group responsible for the Nov. 2008 Mumbai attacks. Indian saber rattling alone hasn’t done the trick, just as in 2002 when India’s armed forces tried but failed to intimidate Pakistan into halting the flow of jihadis into the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir. More:
Last month, we had the opportunity to listen to Zia Mohyeddin. He had been invited here as part of the Aman ki Asha programme that Jang and the Times of India have organised. It’s an excellent initiative because in the absence of trade, and given that we can hardly agree on anything else, culture is the one thing we can share comfortably.
A few years ago I had read about Mohyeddin’s famous annual recitations in Pakistan. A friend from Lahore then sent three compact discs of his performances recorded at what I think were functions of Pakistani-Americans.
The recordings included an irreverent one about different Pakistani communities and their cultural traits. There was one funny story about Chinioti traders. There was also a smoothly delivered dialogue in English between man and God about the nature of woman. I had read about Mohyeddin’s readings of Ghalib’s letters, but those were not included in the recordings.
These were the sort of things I had wanted to listen to from Mohyeddin. I read that Mohyeddin had revived the more traditional style of reciting Urdu poetry. This had been eclipsed 50 years ago by the hammy style of Z A Bokhari, brother of humorist Patras. I looked forward to understanding what that meant.
The event was at the Bandra fort, built by the Portuguese in 1640, and overlooking the Mahim bay. The fort has been restored partly, from funds provided by actress and legislator Shabana Azmi, and an amphitheatre has been built in it where cultural events are frequently held. More:
Shekhar Gupta in The Indian Express on what a weak America means for India:
There was nothing un-Holbrooke-like about his utterly insensitive statement that the Kabul attack had not particularly targeted Indians. The use of really awful language, “I do not accept [that this was like the attack on the Indian embassy]” and “let’s not jump to conclusions”, was also true to form. In fact, coarse directness of this kind is so much his hallmark that, talking about him when his appointment was announced, a former American envoy — who himself was not exactly some Mr Congeniality — told me, “You guys will learn to deal with Holbrooke… he will make me look so diplomatic to you.” It follows, therefore, that there was also nothing so unusual about what should normally have been shocking insensitivity. What kind of a guy — other than Holbrooke, of course — speaks like this when four Indian victims of that terror attack are still battling for life in the hospital? His tone was dismissive, almost an admonition of those (read the Indian government) who “jumped to the conclusion” that this was an attack specifically on Indian interests. More:
A choice for change
Sherry Rehman, Pakistan’s former information minister and currently a member of Parliament’s National Security Committee, in The Times of India:
There is no denying that the only game-changer in the battlefield can now be a shift in anti-Taliban operations across the Durand Line. By arresting much of the dreaded Quetta Shura Taliban, Islamabad has demonstrated two things: that it can swoop down tactically where the US has been unable to tread, and that if given the right strategic incentive, it can draw down on fresh reserves of political will. India was at pains to avoid the word mediation, but clearly, New Delhi hopes that the Saudi card may give it a seat at the Afghan table, as well as open a channel as interlocutor to Islamabad.
As it stands, the motors that work to tip the scales on this razor-edge between war and peace are predictably already at work. Almost as soon as Pakistan’s foreign secretary, Salman Bashir, crossed the Wagah border into Lahore, the debris from the Taliban attack in Kabul, where Indians were also killed among others, infected the air. The Jaish-e-Mohammad disclaimed its hand in the incident, blaming it on a fidayeen Afghan attack, but the terrorists who always seek to disrupt talks reminded everyone how they can affect both headlines and deadlines in this terrain. More:
Carlotta Gall from Rawalpindi in The New York Times:
With his white turban, untrimmed beard and worn army jacket, the man known uniformly here by his nom de guerre, Col. Imam, is a particular Pakistani enigma.
A United States-trained former colonel in Pakistan’s spy agency, he spent 20 years running insurgents in and out of Afghanistan, first to fight the Soviet Army, and later to support the Taliban, as Pakistani allies, in their push to conquer Afghanistan in the 1990s.
Today those Taliban forces are battling his onetime mentor, the United States, and Western officials say Colonel Imam has continued to train, recruit and finance the insurgents. Along with a number of other retired Pakistani intelligence officials, they say, he has helped the Taliban stage a remarkable comeback since 2006.
In two recent interviews with The New York Times, Colonel Imam denied that. But he remains a vocal advocate of the Taliban, and his views reveal the sympathies that have long run deep in the ranks of Pakistan’s military and intelligence services. More:
The Taliban’s jihad, like rock and roll, has passed from youthful vigor into a maturity marked by the appearance of nostalgic memoirs. Back in the day, Abdul Salam Zaeef belonged to the search committee that recruited Mullah Omar as the movement’s commander; after the rebels took power in Kabul, he served as ambassador to Pakistan. “My Life with the Taliban,” published this winter, announces Zaeef’s début in militant letters. The volume contains many sources of fascination, but none are more timely than the author’s account of his high-level relations with Pakistani intelligence.
While in office, Zaeef found that he “couldn’t entirely avoid” the influence of Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence. Its officers volunteered money and political support. Late in 2001, as the United States prepared to attack Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, the I.S.I.’s then commanding general, Mahmud Ahmad, visited Zaeef’s home in Islamabad, wept in solidarity, and promised, “We want to assure you that you will not be alone in this jihad against America. We will be with you.” And yet Zaeef never trusted his I.S.I. patrons. He sought to protect the Taliban’s independence: “I tried to be not so sweet that I would be eaten whole, and not so bitter that I would be spat out.” More:
Robert M. Hathaway in The Wilson Quarterly. Robert M. Hathaway is the director of the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Asia Program. His most recent book is Powering Pakistan: Meeting Pakistan’s Energy Needs in the 21st Century (2009). [via 3quarksdaily]
An American visitor in Pakistan can’t help thinking at times that he has arrived in a parallel universe. Asked about the presence of Al Qaeda on their country’s soil, Pakistanis deny that there is any evidence of it. They lionize A. Q. Khan, who created the country’s nuclear weapons program and sold essential nuclear technology and knowledge to Iran, North Korea, and Libya, and they are incensed by American worries about the security of their country’s nuclear assets. Suicide bombings and political assassinations are near-daily occurrences, yet many Pakistanis are astonishingly complacent about the murderous groups behind them. They rail instead against the government that is powerless to prevent these attacks and an America that would like nothing better than to see an end to them.
Last October, when I visited, Pakistanis were fuming over the U.S. aid package recently approved by Congress. The $7.5 billion Kerry-Lugar bill tripled American support for Pakistan over a five-year period and reversed the overwhelmingly promilitary slant of previous U.S. aid. Instead of going almost entirely to the armed forces, American dollars will flow to schools and clinics, economic development, and efforts to promote the rule of law and democratic governance. Pakistan’s friends in Washington were jubilant. Yet most Pakistanis I spoke with insisted that because the aid came with conditions—the U.S. secretary of state must certify that Pakistan is working to end government support for extremist and terrorist groups, for example—it was an affront and a threat to their country’s sovereignty. One legislator complained that what Pakistan was being asked to accept was less an aid package than a treaty of surrender.
Denial is a national habit in Pakistan. With a long history of failed governance and political leaders who put their personal interests first, Pakistanis point their fingers at the United States, their arch-enemy India, or the all-purpose malefactor often described in the local news media as the “hidden hand”—anyone but themselves to explain their nation’s past failings and precarious present. More:
A new generation has made militant networks more sophisticated. From The New York Times:
Lahore: Umar Kundi was his parents’ pride, an ambitious young man from a small town who made it to medical school in the big city. It seemed like a story of working-class success, living proof in this unequal society that a telephone operator’s son could become a doctor.
But things went wrong along the way. On campus Mr. Kundi fell in with a hard-line Islamic group. His degree did not get him a job, and he drifted in the urban crush of young people looking for work. His early radicalization helped channel his ambitions in a grander, more sinister way.
Instead of healing the sick, Mr. Kundi went on to become one of Pakistan’s most accomplished militants. Working under a handler from Al Qaeda, he was part of a network that carried out some of the boldest attacks against the Pakistani state and its people last year, the police here say. Months of hunting him ended on Feb. 19, when he was killed in a shootout with the police at the age of 29. More:
In advance of talks in New Delhi on Thursday between Indian Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao and her Pakistani counterpart, Salman Bashir — which touched on a number of sensitive issues — a Pakistani newspaper suggested that Mr. Bashir’s delegation included a secret weapon: a diplomat “who can read the faces of people and predict what they are actually thinking and feeling — an art known as physiognomy.” More:
Below, the report in The News, a Pakistani newspaper:
When Pakistani negotiators start their dialogue with the Indians in New Delhi on Wednesday, they will be informally helped by one of their team members who can read the faces of people and predict what they are actually thinking and feeling — an art known as physiognomy.
Director-General for South Asia, Afrasiab Hashmi, may turn out to be a treasured guide for the country’s delegation by reading the faces of the Indian negotiators.Few people know about the God-gifted quality of Hashmi. He is an expert in judging a person’s character or personality from that mans facial characteristics and structure. Physiognomy and its practice dates back to the ancient Greece but was abandoned later.
Hashmi is said to have harboured this skill by birth, not learning through any special courses. It becomes very difficult to hide one’s inner-self in front of Hashmi, people close to him say, though he gives his frank opinions only to frank friends. More:
In The Hindu, Siddharth Varadarajan analyses the first official talks between India and Pakistan since the 2008 Mumbai attacks:
So accident-prone and politically fraught is the relationship between India and Pakistan that conventional diplomatic metrics for measuring the success or failure of a meeting between them must invariably be discarded for more esoteric markers.
The absence of a joint statement or joint press conference at the end of Thursday’s meeting of the two foreign secretaries clearly meant the bilateral gulf was still enormous. But the fact that Nirupama Rao and Salman Bashir spoke of taking small first steps, stopping the “regression” in the relationship and rebuilding confidence and trust suggested their encounter had served its original purpose: of opening a path for a new process of engagement. More:
Only after a careful process of identification did Pakistani and American officials realize they had captured Mullah Baradar himself, the man who had long overseen the Taliban insurgency against American, NATO and Afghan troops in Afghanistan.
New details of the raid indicate that the arrest of the No. 2 Taliban leader was not necessarily the result of a new determination by Pakistan to go after the Taliban, or a bid to improve its strategic position in the region. Rather, it may be something more prosaic: “a lucky accident,” as one American official called it. “No one knew what they were getting,” he said.
Now the full impact of Mullah Baradar’s arrest will play out only in the weeks to come. More:
Karachi is Pakistan’s largest and most diverse city, frequently plagued by religious and political turmoil, and those headlines will not go away. This week it was in the spotlight when it was revealed that the Taliban’s military leader, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, had been seized by Pakistani and US operatives in a slum on the city’s edge.
But Hanif and his collaborators have a different vision of the city. Their venture means Karachi will become the latest in a number of Asian cities that host increasingly high-profile festivals, with best-selling authors participating in talks and discussions at locations ranging from Shanghai to the Sri Lankan port of Galle. One of the best known, held every January in Jaipur, is organised by the British historian William Dalrymple.
Indeed, the organisers of next month’s event in Karachi hit upon the idea after attending last year’s festival in Jaipur, which has itself highlighted a number of Pakistani writers. More:
A dazzling beauty and full of life, Ruttie had exquisite taste and affable manners. Quick-witted, she was easily one of the best dressed and most popular women among the elitist circles of Bombay. She was intellectually far more mature than other girls of her age, with diverse interests ranging from poetry (Oscar Wilde being her favorite, whom she often recited) to politics. Her large collection of books, which remained in Jinnah’s possession after her death, reflected her deep interest in poetry, literature, history, occultism, mysticism and sorcery. She was an excellent horse-rider. She attended all public meetings and was inspired by Annie Besant’s Home Rule League. A fierce supporter of India for Indians, Ruttie was once asked about rumors of Jinnah’s possible knighthood and whether she would like to be Lady Jinnah. She snapped that she would rather be separated from her husband than take on an English title.
Jinnah on the other hand also had a special interest in acting and in Shakespeare’s dramas. While in London, he had acted in some Shakespearean plays and even considered seriously taking up acting as a profession. It was his dream to play Romeo at The Globe in London. Khwaja Razi Haider thinks it was probably Jinnah’s deep interest in Shakespeare that gave him insight into the intricacies of the human character, which he was to use for grasping the essentials of Indian politics.
Jinnah was thirty-nine and Ruttie sixteen, but the age difference proved no obstacle in their love. Love has no logic. He was enamored by her beauty and charm and she was awe- struck by “Jay”, as she called him. Jinnah asked Sir Dinshaw for Ruttie’s hand in marriage, who became furious and refused. Jinnah repeatedly pleaded his case but Dinshaw never gave in, as Jinnah had a different faith and he was more than twice Ruttie’s age. Their friendship ended and Dinshaw forbade Ruttie from meeting Jinnah while she lived in his house. He even got a court injunction restraining Jinnah from meeting her (a pity no biographer has yet traced the court papers). The couple continued to meet secretly, and patiently waited for two years until February 1918 when Ruttie turned eighteen, and was free to marry. She walked out of her parental home to which she was never to return, and converted to Islam at Bombay’s Jamia Mosque, under the Muslim Shiite doctrine, on April 18, 1918. More:
Michael Crowley in The New Republic (via 3quarksdaily):
On August 26, 2008, Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, touched down for a secret meeting on an aircraft carrier stationed in the Indian Ocean. The topic: Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
The summit had been arranged the previous month. Mullen had grown anxious about the rising danger from Pakistan’s tribal areas, which Islamic militants were using as a base from which to strike American troops in Afghanistan and to plot terrorist attacks against the United States. He flew to Islamabad to see the country’s army chief of staff, Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. Kayani is Pakistan’s most important general, commanding its 550,000-man army. By some accounts, he is also the ultimate source of power in a militarized society that reveres its generals more than its politicians. Mullen had been blunt with Kayani: The United States needed Pakistan’s army to take on the militants flourishing along the border, he said. The days of Pakistan looking the other way–cutting deals and playing double games with the radicals–had to end.
It was hardly a painless request; the Pakistani military is organized for warfare against its arch-nemesis India, and many of its mid-level officers are sympathetic to the Taliban and, at best, wary of the United States. More:
A road that runs through a mountain gorge between Kabul and Jalalabad holds its own terrors. From the New York Times:
Sarobi, Afghanistan — Even in a nation beset by war and suicide bombings, you would be hard-pressed to find anything as reliably terrifying as the national highway through the Kabul Gorge.
The 40-mile stretch, a breathtaking chasm of mountains and cliffs between Kabul and Jalalabad, claims so many lives so regularly that most people stopped counting long ago. Cars flip and flatten. Trucks soar to the valley floor. Buses play chicken; buses collide.
The mayhem unfolds on one of the most bewitching stretches of scenery on all the earth. The gorge, in some places no more than a few hundred yards wide, is framed by vertical rock cliffs that soar more than 2,000 feet above the Kabul River below. Most people die, and most cars crash, while zooming around one of the impossible turns that offer impossible views of the crevasses and buttes. More:
How Pakistan-born Mushaal Mullick fell in love with Kashmiri militant-turned-separatist leader Yasin Malik. From Open:
Mushaal is the kind of face the cameraman would pick up in a packed cricket stadium. She is the sort of girl who would keep as souvenirs the cinema tickets of her first-ever date. She is a girl in whose purse you’d find a mirror, a comb and, perhaps, lip salve. She likes Phil Collins and Shakira, and in poetry her taste varies from Rumi to Sylvia Plath. She is, you’d say if you ever met her, full of life. She has a teenage intensity, if there is any such thing. She writes the way she speaks, and like most youngsters, likes to be on Facebook, adding friends so frantically you would think she is on an undercover mission to make the Facebook server collapse. She writes ‘you’ as ‘u’ and makes careless mistakes such as referring to her school principal as ‘principle’ in emails. The 24-year-old Mushaal was in Delhi recently, with her husband, former militant and now Kashmir’s prominent separatist leader, 43-year-old Yasin Malik. “You could write that Yasin is an Aries and I am a Scorpio,” she told me. And, before I could react, she blurted, “Oh, forget it! It will look so childish.” More:
Aman Ki Asha is a brave peace initiative by the two leading media houses of India and Pakistan -- The Times of India and the Jang Group. Below, the TV ad:
What can one say about Imran Khan? A great former cricketer, a compassionate philanthropist … a sorry excuse for a politician. But his continuing forays into bad politics and tactical blunders can be excused, for he is yet to understand that politics is not a game of cricket, and that the democratic election process does not follow the selection policy he enforced as the captain of the Pakistan cricket squad.
The truth is, Khan’s penchant for picking up talented players seemed to have gone haywire when he decided to pick his early political mentors.
Coming from a highly educated, cultivated, and somewhat liberal background, Khan had slipped into reverse gear by the time he decided to enter politics in the early 1990s. In other words, instead of looking forward to becoming an integral part of a new, democratic, and General Zia-less Pakistan, Khan struck an ideological partnership with shadowy characters who were hell-bent on keeping the country stuck in the 1980s – a decade when Pakistan pulled and damaged all of its important political, economic and social muscles under the stressful weight of a myopic dictatorship and the damaging jihad that a dictatorship sponsored in Afghanistan. More:
James Zug in Squash Magazine [July 2004]. From 3quarksdaily:
Hashim Khan, who I think can fairly be described as the greatest squash-racquets player of all time, made his American debut in the winter of 1954.
Hashim Khan, may his tribe increase, completely changed the course of events in the game of squash racquets.
The more I think about it, the more firmly convinced I am that the greatest athlete for his age the world has ever seen may well be Hashim Khan, the Pakistani squash player.
That was how Herbert Warren Wind led off his three epic articles on squash in the New Yorker, in 1973, 1978 and in 1985. Being the New Yorker, the articles were rigorously fact-checked, and all hyperbole was stricken with a red pen. These three sentences were true then and are true today.
There is outrage in Pakistan over the exclusion of Pakistani cricket players from the latest IPL auction. But where was this sense of ‘outrage’ in the aftermath of 26/11, writes Rajdeep Sardesai in the Hindustan Times. Competitive rage is easy to manufacture in the context of Indo-Pak relations.
Indo-Pak cricket, like diplomatic relations between the two countries, suffers from schizophrenia. Rewind to January 1999 when a Chennai crowd gave a standing ovation to Wasim Akram’s men after they had just beaten India. Six months later, the two countries met again in a world cup match against the backdrop of the Kargil war and fans of both sides abused each other. In 2004, we were treated to a Pakistani crowd singing, “Balaji, zara dheere chalo” every time he ran in to bowl. Eight years earlier, I had watched a Karachi crowd hurl bottles on the field when their team lost to India in a dramatic last over. Two years ago, Sohail Tanvir was the toast of the inaugural Indian Premier League (IPL). Today, Tanvir and his other Pakistani teammates find themselves unwanted by their IPL owners. more
A black goat is slaughtered almost daily to ward off ‘evil eyes’ and protect President Asif Ali Zardari from ‘black magic’. Does this, and the use of camel and goat milk, make the beleaguered president appear to be a superstitious man?
Well, not to his spokesman. “It has been an old practice of Mr Zardari to offer Sadqa (animal sacrifice). He has been doing this for a long time,” spokesman Farhatullah Babar told Dawn on Tuesday. More:
Interestingly, in the early years after Partition, the dupatta’s symbolism was more national than religious. For example, the uniform of the Pakistan Women’s National Guard that was formed during the Kashmir War included a dupatta. ‘Since Pakistan was a Muslim state, the dupatta was naturally part of the uniform. However, it was just a sash across the torso…a starched V-shaped dupatta,’ recalls former Sergeant Abeeda Abidi in an interview with the Citizens Archive of Pakistan. Clearly, this sash was meant to be more of a comment than a covering.
The years that followed saw leaders such as Fatima Jinnah and Begum Rana Liaquat Ali Khan enter politics. Unlike their female predecessors in the armed forces, these women made public appearances with their heads covered with a dupatta, which was deciphered as a symbol of modesty. Since they had set the trend, women who stepped into politics in subsequent decades were expected to follow suit.
In 1966, the uniform for the PIA airhostesses, designed by Paris-based fashion sensation Pierre Cardin, also included scarf-like dupattas over graceful tunics. In this incarnation, the dupatta was viewed more as an attractive accessory than a symbol of Muslim womanhood.
Although a dupatta has always been part of the attire of female politicians of this predominantly Muslim state since the beginning, trends among the masses have been slightly different. It was only in the late 1950s that the dupatta became an integral part of the urban-middle-class woman’s outfit. Before then, some women wore burqas and chadors. But younger women who were looking for some form of covering increasingly opted for dupattas as they proved to be a less stringent alternative. More:
Jarret Brachman, a senior consultant to the U.S. government on al Qaeda issues, at Foreign Policy:
When Humam Khalil al-Balawi exploded himself at a CIA base in Khost, Afghanistan, last month, killing seven CIA officers, his suicide attack did not just have repercussions for the NATO effort in Afghanistan — it also represented a giant leap forward for al Qaeda’s global Internet movement. In the minds of Web jihadists, Balawi was more than just another suicide operative. He was one of them, someone whose thinking they trusted, knew intimately, and had been reading for years.
Before he became a Jordanian “triple agent,” Balawi was the jihadi online pundit Abu Dujana al-Khorasani. Under that moniker, Balawi had been anonymously feeding his online readers a steady stream of jihadi missives since early 2007. His climb from eager chat-room participant to elite jihadi Web forum administrator to revered Internet pundit to triumphant suicide bomber helped forge a path that Web jihadists could finally hope to emulate.
The number of Web jihadists who make the transition to real-world terrorists is growing. Terrorists who have been radicalized online include Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, Badr al-Harbi — the Kuwaiti who posted more than 1,000 times on an al Qaeda Internet forum before blowing himself up in Iraq — and now Balawi. In doing so, they have taught other Web jihadists how to upgrade their keyboards into suicide vests. With his many screeds posted to forums lionizing those who carry al Qaeda’s torch, Balawi helped narrow the distance separating the global jihadi movement’s fighters and its online sympathizers. More:
Also readThe worst of the worst: Some of the jihadi pundits who are making waves on al Qaeda’s Web forums.
Two days ago, armed Sindhi and Pashtun activists exchanged tit-for-tat murders in the middle class Gulistan-e Jauhar area. Since the start of this year, targeted killings have claimed the lives of over 41 political workers. And in the last six months of 2009, there were 256 political assassinations in the city, according to Pakistan’s interior ministry.
An uptake in ethnic and political violence in Karachi is cause for concern for the prospects for Pakistan’s political stability and national cohesion. Karachi is a microcosm of Pakistan as virtually all of its ethnic groups and power brokers are represented there.
Massive civil unrest in Karachi is an indicator of the strength of centrifugal tendencies inside multi-ethnic Pakistan, which has historically been deeply challenged in managing its diversity. More:
The first few weeks of the year may finally witness the execution, 35 years after the fact, of the killers of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the founder of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh who led the 1971 Bangladesh war for independence from Pakistan. The marathon time lapse between the arrests of the killers, disgruntled Bangladesh Army officers, and their execution is inextricably intertwined with the ups and downs of Bangladeshi politics.
The countdown to the execution began with t he signing of the death warrants on Jan. 3. The warrants have been served on five of the killers in Dhaka Central Jail, where they have been imprisoned. Six more who have been charged with the assassination are still on the run. Under Bangladesh law, if the convicts fail to get pardoned from the president, they are to be executed 21 to 28 days after the issuance of the warrants. A pardon is hardly likely since the president, Zilur Rahman, is understandably sympathetic to the prime minister,Sheik Hasina Wajed, Mujibur’s daughter and one of only two of his family who weren’t killed by the plotters in the events of August of 1975.
Soon after the gory incident, the Mujib-led Awami League government, which Sheikh Hasina has headed since her father’s death, was turned out of power and Khondker Mushtaque Ahmed took over as president. Khondker promulgated an indemnity ordinance on September 26, 1975 with the aim of stopping the trial. The next 10 years after the killings witnessed snail-like progress. More:
In India – where 4,000 year-old stories still inspire death threats – historians, mathematicians and nationalists are going to battle over an ancient civilisation’s script. S Subramanian reports. in The National:
In 1856, searching for stone to anchor the railway tracks they were building between Karachi and Lahore, William and John Brunton, engineers working for the East India Railway Company, followed the directions of local residents to the site of an old, ruined town. There, they found 93 miles of perfect, kiln-fired bricks – and discovered the remains of Harappa, one of the two chief cities of the Bronze Age civilisation in the Indus valley.
The Harappan ruins had been known previously, discovered by various explorers rambling around present-day Pakistan. But in the course of meticulously picking apart the bricks, the Bruntons unearthed enough artefacts to attract the attention of archeologists; their continued excavations revealed a record of an ancient civilisation whose urban ruins were scattered all across the vast Indus river basin.
The discovery of Harappa revised, in one stroke, existing theories of ancient Indian history. Until then, the earliest known Indians were believed to be the literate Hindus who lived by the Rig Veda in the Second millennium BC. Modern Hindus trace their origins to this “Vedic civilisation”, whose language and religion were considered wholly indigenous to the subcontinent. The existence of a separate pattern of settlement, an advanced civilisation predating the Vedic era by a few hundred years, raised confusing – and politically charged – questions. If the Indus Valley peoples were not Hindus, who were they? And where, then, did the Hindus come from? More:
In Karachi, the men might buy the art, but it’s women — many single and young — who control the market. H.M. Naqvi at GlobalPost:
Karachi: Defying the global downturn in art and perhaps common sense, another gallery opened in Karachi last month, the second in three weeks. Both are run by women.
More intriguing than the dynamics of the market is the fact that the entire Pakistani art scene is run by women, single women.
Sumbul Khan is a spritely thirtysomething of vaguely Pathan extraction. She returned to Karachi several years ago after completing a masters in art history in the United States. After teaching art history and theory, she pitched a program on art in Urdu to Indus TV, the first independent channel in Pakistan. After the program was aired, the head of Indus TV, the legendary Ghazanfar Ali, asked her if she was interested in setting up a gallery in a cove of vacant rooms within the premises of MTV Pakistan (owned, in part, by Indus TV). Khan readily agreed. She named it Poppy Seed. More:
