It goes without saying that when a guest comes to your house you don’t ask difficult questions. This is perhaps why Imam Kaaba Sheikh Al-Ghamdi was so overwhelmed by the love and support he got from Pakistanis during his visit here. This is actually supported...
The frequency with which you get to know how phenomenal a person was by reading their eulogy is increasing. First it was the marketing director of a popular English daily, Masood Hamid, for whom there were only words of admiration: the people he mentored and...
Pakistanis turn vicious when forced to conform to the diktat of the US. They call any such attempt to alter Pakistan’s foreign or domestic policy imperialist and hegemonic. Yet strangely, replace the US with Saudi Arabia and it almost reads like it is supremely ordained...
Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar called the lynching of two Muslims by Christians in Lahore “the worst kind of terrorism”. This is binary thinking: Muslims lynching innocent victims being a lesser form of terrorism versus Christians lynching innocent victims being an insult to our intellect and...
It is odd that the protection this country provides its citizenry is directly proportional to their power. The most vulnerable are left to the mercy of chaos: the Ahmedis, Shias, Christians and those random trespassers who are falsely accused of blasphemy either because they did...
The modifications outside my children’s school are seemingly significant: fortified walls, concrete barriers, barbed wire and the ageing sniper who is often caught scratching his ear, but the reality is different — the walls are just as penetrable and the children just as susceptible to...
No other country is a better case study for society facing chronic terrorism and suicide attacks than Israel. And the study of Israeli society in the second intifada reveals that there was a counterintuitive trend: society did not become increasingly traumatised when terrorist attacks and...
There was another terror attack in Pakistan. The gods have forgotten to reshuffle our fate; week after week we are brought from a crawl to a standstill. This was possibly a suicide blast in Shikarpur, Sindh, a place that is known more for Sufi Islam,...
It does not inspire much confidence in the government to have the counterterrorism plan acronymed NAP; they should have at least rolled it on their tongue to make sure the name does not give terrorists a psychological advantage. This National Action Plan (NAP) claims the...
There was so much blood in Peshawar, the blood of children. It was painful, painful but apparently replaceable. Replaceable. The outrage of the Peshawar attack should spin the country into a vortex of mourning for years. Each of those 132 children could have held Pakistan’s...