Published in Daily Times on June 8th 2014 Acid burned, honour killed and choked, the Pakistani women who make the headlines are literally out of a nightmare. Like Farzana Parveen who recently was murdered by her own family with bricks outside the Lahore High Court, there are...
Published in The Daily Times on June 1st 2014 Persecution has existed since antiquity. You have to, however, be a special kind of unfortunate to be persecuted by Muslims. There will be no mercy. There will be no hope. No one in power will stand up...
Published in Daily Times on May 17th 2014 I recently returned from Istanbul where the streets in Taxim were choked with protesters rallying against the mismanagement of the mining tragedy that killed hundreds in western Turkey. There erupted a Twitter campaign against a person close to...
Published in Daly Times on May 11th 2014 In 2011, I penned a column in this paper on Imran Khan: ‘Imran Khan: why I’m a believer’ (Daily Times, November 1, 2011), linking him to the greats like Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Iqbal for giving us then...
Published in Daily Times on May 4th 2014 There is an Urdu columnist whose content is oddly blinkered in its focus on historical revisionism, whipping the liberals for being immoral and chastising women who are not invisible. However, a few days back, he wrote about press...
Women’s status in Muslim societies creates a pulviscular cloud of religious discourse that surrounds it, but always results in shaking off the dusty image of an emancipated woman as a model. It is no surprise that Pakistan is making its women suffer so insidiously for being...
Published in Daily Times on March 30th 2014 I was at a social media event in 2011, in it an expert from the US was talking about how he follows news in Pakistan. “I just follow @razarumi and I know what is going on in Pakistan –...
Jamshed Dasti, it seems does not have a degree, but that’s not the only education he lacks. The ilm of Bullay Shah, the one where you quit fighting with the devil and fight your nafs first, is also absent. You’d think as a son of...
Published in The Express Tribune, December 12th, 2013. Underneath the fierce nationalism of some statesmen, a new narrative has emerged. It talks of the cultural repression of Muslim women, the drift towards bigotry and the wondrous architecture of buildings and language — this narrative says that...
Delivered on November 4th 2012 at Avari Hotel I’d like to begin by thanking Faith Matters and its leadership, for inviting me to speak on this very important topic of interfaith harmony in Pakistan, and in particular between the Christian and Muslim communities. The work that...
