Days of Rage

I don't have anything original to say about Dalrymple and I confess I have so far liked "The last Mughal", but I think he does tend to favour the florid statement rather than the simple one and some of the accuracy of his statements have been questioned by people like Farrukh Dhondy and Irfan Habib. I of course know very little about Ms.Jehangir other than what I have read in newspapers.

Incidentally this article was published in the New Yorker a couple of months ago.

naqshabandi...you're eligible for the canadian MM visa and a few million rupees..based on what happened to your great great grandmother...if things don't work out in londonistan or jihadis'r'us, there's always canuckistan....

madani...you forgot...pakiland is ahead in space technology too..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAB-wnHwHF0

im not in canada and never have been you fool arjun.

no wonder naqshabandi loves the moguls...they gave his great great grandmother a canadian visa(does that apply even though there was no canada then?)

Re: # 61
Still war of fantom fighters going with fantom east India companies and indians are leaving us in dust.Its disease to go back to history and waste energies. People are getting hot and cold about Palestine, Iran, lebanon and not worried about fires burni g around of kashmir, Waji.stan, B.stan. Never understand what is use of studying details of Mr. g or J, what they said. Mr. J s basic message of faith unity and discpine was disbanded and only his western servitude and and submission to vice left. It is pathetic people who so lost completely , like movie addicts to past.
Good night.

Re: # 9
WOW!

Very true.

When I first read this guy and his work I thought he was okay. BUt soon realised that after a certain point his intellect is pretty mediocre and that the RAJ and EAST INDIA Company was his meal ticket - given that DEsis are the worst historians and don't see the need for historical record and a story.

Added to this, he carries a baggage of Catholic guilt - he afterall studied in teh top Catholic public school of England (which is that one located in Yorkshire - wehre all the catholic go) - Ampleforth College
http://www.yorkshirenet.co.uk/acadinfo/external/links/link.asp?ID=1133 and he carries all that baggage.

BUt as they needs be...he is one of the few people who has taken the trouble to dig through the messy archives and lern the laguage to compile a series of stories.

Nevertheless his journalistic stuff is mudane and rather pedestrain.

HP - hats off to you for calling at as is...

I agree with HP.

these hindus have fork tongues, churi ki dhaar se bhi tez

Look muslims look, these hindus keep critcising us about blasphemy laws and look at how their secular india treats a slandered who is not even a blasphemere because he said nothing against the hinoods religion:

Man held for slur on Shivaji
2 Sep 2007, 0430 hrs IST,TNN

SMS NEWS to 58888 for latest updates
PUNE: The cyber and economic cell of the city police on Saturday arrested a Bangalore-based software professional for allegedly uploading defamatory statements about the Maratha warrior-king Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj in November last year.

A team comprising of additional commissioner of police (crime) Rajendra Singh, deputy commissioner of police (cyber, economics) Sunil Phulari and assistant commissioner of police Netaji Shinde arrested Kailas Laxman K (25) of Bangalore. Singh told TOI that Kailas has been working in a giant information technology (IT) firm in Bangalore since 2001 and hails from Tamil Nadu.

The team first found out the internet protocol (IP) number of the computer from which the defamatory statement was uploaded in a community page of the Orkut website. "The police took help of Google officials in Bangalore to locate the computer with the detected IP address," he said.

The police also obtained the records of the computer from a private telecom company and then made the arrest. Kailas has been remanded to police custody till Monday. Kailas told police he shared his place with his friends. He refused to admit that he uploaded the defamatory statements.

He said it might have been done by his friends. The police claimed it was Kailas’s computer that was used to upload the statements. It may be recalled that Dhiraj Ghate (32) of Ambilodha colony lodged a complaint in this regard with the Vishrambaug police on November 11, 2006. On that day, infuriated members of various political parties and organisations forcibly closed down city’s cyber cafes

[...Before the arrival of Timur's son, what was India?
After the departure of Babar's sons, what is India?...]

Wow - only pakis can display such profound ignorance and stupidity...

No wonder pakis are so effed up... :)

Re: # 51
I second you opinion.
It is my feeling why we are backward is our colonial ELITIST attitude as MR.Masadi has elaborated in his seminal book.
Pakistani problem
WE DO NOT DO EASY GOOD DEEDS AS THEY ARE EASY , WE DO NOT DO DIFFICULT THINGS AS THEY ARE DIFFICULT. RESULT WE DO NOT DO ANY THING.
This problem I feel after 60 years living in this world.
SO sure we are destined to be ruled by overlords till we start doing little things.

Re: # 54
Heart of military airmachine is engine and armaments/electronics.
JF17 pakistani and china combined airmachine is best in world according to china airmachine makers. But they have to use engine from Russia ( same as indian supplied Sukov air machine.) I wonder the heart of Irani air superiority jet is chinese made or Russian made. There are always strange things in politics, economy and army. Iran has one of best jets as they say but they have to import high speed disel and petrol as no refinary including from India. Iraqis destroyed coming up Abadan refinery by japanies.What a loss , Iran full gas and oil but short of petroleum. Iranian regime will survive till they can subsidise petrol to countryside if not islamic radicals will take over. It is surprising withh all IITs India canot produce military jets while pakistan and China can. China pakistan can put India to shame by bidding for supplying jet to india airforce.

Here is special preview for the Cantonment Kuttaa[
in case the bitchchode is pretending to have missed it ]


Iran tests new home-made fighter jet
+ -
07:20, August 06, 2007

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Iran on Sunday made a successful test flight of its second home-made fighter jet, state media reported.

According to the semi-official Fars news agency, the fighter jet, "Azarakhsh" (Lightning), which was said to be "comparable" to the U.S. F-5 fighter jet, made a successful flight in a ceremony in the central city of Isfahan.

Defense Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najjar and some other senior military officials attended the ceremony, it said.

"The domestically developed fighter plane is another example of the technological achievements of Iran," Isfahan governor Morteza Bakhtiari was quoted as saying by the official IRNA news agency.

"When the United States is selling its arms to its allies in the region, our country's experts are making huge progress every day toward self-sufficiency in defense," he added.

Azarakhsh is Iran's second homegrown fighter jet after Sa'egheh (Thunder), which has been described as a parallel to the U.S. F-18 fighter jet.

Source: Xinhua..People's Daily of China

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

Pathetic the way most of us always trying to belittle anyone who tries to make a contribution to nation building. Some may not agree with Asma Jahangir & her work but then what is the point in trying to push scorn & ridicule in her direction? Positive contribution from any one is welcome, these are the sons & daughters Pakistan is proud of. Not the bunch of whiners who have never lifted a finger to help a fellow Pakistani.

#50 mrs. jehangir has an easy job? protecting women from poor families from the dangar jahils in Pakistan is an easy job? Give me a break!!

EXTREMELY ONESIDED VIEW.... MRS JEHANGIR HAS AN EASY JOB ALL HER LIFE AND THAT IS TO CRITICIZE EVERY THING..

True. However, inbetween killing people and extending his dominions to feed his ego, Timur sought to be the "magnanimous king" by patronizing (i.e. by giving away part of his stolen wealth to writers and artisans) literature and arts, notably turkish and persian.

Re: # 47
Timur did not like Iranians.He slaughtered them. He was from Samarkand, Bukhara area.

naqsh #42: Before the arrival of timur, India was a great civilization. And after the departure of the mughals, India set on the road that has made it a great democracy.

Meantime timur's spiritual homeland (persia) is still bumping around between kings and maulvis.

Next question.

hey in this new version of chowk i cannot add pictures/videos to my posts with html anymore!

help!!!

Re: # 44

where have i been arrogant? ignorance i can admit.

Again you show your ignorance and arrogance

Ghaus e Aazam ba man bay-sar o saamaan madaday!
Qibla e deen madaday, Ka'aba ye eemaan madaday!

translations of the Farsi in my last 2 posts...
"Darling, I gave you my life, not my faith!"


--
Before the arrival of Timur's son, what was India?
After the departure of Babar's sons, what is India?

One of my favourite quotes of the Mughals is Jahangir Badshah's comment to his wife, Nur Jehan, who was a Shia (Jahangir was a Sunni and murid of Hazrat Mujaddid e Alf e Thani): Jaan-e-man, jaan daadam, imaan na daadam!

Qabl as aamad e pisr e Timur ra, Hind che bood?
Ba'd as raft e pisr-haa-ye Babar ra, Hind cheest?

:-)

Naqsh, your knowledge of India is limited and is Mughal centric.
The forts and palaces of Rajasthan and other states are not copies of Mughal architecture most predate the Mughals. Most foreign tourists visit Rajasthan, Goa, Kerala, Himachal Pradesh where you hardly find any Mughal influence.

amansandhu,
i know india's tourist industry is vast and not jst about the taj--did i say that? but you have to admit that most people go to see the various Mughal built forts and palaces and gardens or those built in the Mughal-style by other petty and local kings and rulers. the exception is in south india i guess where the Mughal influence wasn 't as much as in the north.

-----------------

echo bhai, ba'd az salam arz hai ke aap ka post bilkal darust hai!

i love that slogan!

31 Posted by Naqshbandi on September 1, 2007 3:06:35 pm but if it wasn't for these benign 'dictators' you wouldn't have a tourist industry!!!

Naqshbandi, Indian tourist industry is not about the Taj Mahal alone. You have the palaces and forts of Rajasthan, the beautifull temples of the South, the majestic beaches of Goa, Kerala to name a few. Udaivillas, a beautifull Rajastani palace turned hotel has come out as the best hotel of the world- 2007.

lol....i just saw the lalloo prasad sa re gama, that guy is something special :) apparently he can hold a bull's horns and stand on its head ....why oh why are pakistani politicans not half as talented as him?
Lahori Mussarat kicks ass he is fantastic!!! so is Lucknow's Poonam!! ....i was really sad about harpreet and especially about the way he took it :( i posted his wonderful rendition of vaada tera vaada on UP.

Re: # 9

impressive name dropping --HP! -- especially with that great word 'matherchod' -- what a clean jump over the Chowk's electronic fence c/s/ensors.....)

Lemme see if your word again scales over the Chowk moral sensors -- undetected.

The Kanjaroons have finally been recognised & are being outed on the street.

Maader-RATES, Maader-RUNS & roshan-khayali-pulaaOs time is coming to an end

FULL report here:
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/tariq_ali/2007/08/sinking_together.ht ml
============================================================
The mood among sections of the street - I am currently in Lahore - is summed up in a cruel taunt: "People's Party de ballay, ballay / ade kanjar, ade dallay" (Marvel at the People Party / half-whore and half-pimp).

LOL, as I write this, Zee TV is showing Lallol Prasad Special of Sa Re Ga Ma. This promises to be fun. There are also two enormously talented Pakistani kids in it.

That's my type of Moghul. I am going to focus on watching that now. :)

(NYC, you should watch this episode as well. It seems really good.)

Naqsh, there may well be something to that. But if Mr. Dailyrumple is to rise above Hindu-Muslim imbroglio, he has to first move out of the celebrity page. IF that is his ambition.

perhaps people are being too harsh on dalrymple--he is a superb writer and fair but he is, all said and done, still an orientalist with all that entails.

btw, i can understand why the hinduans are upset at mr. dalrymple glorifying the great Mughals--after all it is these Mughals who turned India from a god-forsaken place into the wonder of the world. but they were Muslims--gosh most of them were orthodox too (Akbar was the sole exception--and only in the latter part of his life. As the great Aurangzeb said: "Jadd e man, Akbar, akbar neest, akfar ast!" ) so I can see why it might get your goat but if it wasn't for these benign 'dictators' you wouldn't have a tourist industry!!!

GT:
I think a short answer would suffice.

Muslims, are strictly prohibited to interfere in the religious practices, rituals, cultures of those who are NOT muslims.

Once they convert they are supposed to adhere very strictly to the Islamic practice & culture & give up the pagan/non-muslim practices.

Fundamentalism ( GOOD word) is not applied one sidedly.


Babur , the great Mughal, specifically intructed MUSLIMS to be very discreet about cow slaughter. It is also in his will to Hamayoun his emperor son.

SATI:

This indeed is very disturbing but even then there was no interference EXCEPT on one occasion & one occasion ONLY.

and that was by Sher Shah Suri.

Once during his exile days he was given sanctuary by a hindu woman who had called mother because of some childhood memories [ I forget detail]. It so happened that when he was appointed the adminitrator of a certain district, some 20 years later, he was aghast to find out that it was that same woman who was to be sutteed , by her "will" of course..because that was what was expected of her..no choice then.

Sher Shah intefered & stopped it..but then the Pundits all went to the governor & complained. The Governor immedeiately reprimanded Sher Shah and told him that their in a social-contract that no rel;igion wiill interfere in another religion {sounds like pristine "secooolarism]. Sher Shah backed off but was determined to curb it whenever he would get a chance.

Whe he took control of Bihar, the first thing he did was to summon a large assembly of Pundits & brahmins & arranged a debate , without any coersion yet in control, to somehow work towards alternatives.

Sati was stopped then by the Pundits & Brahmins themselves agreeing that it was not necessary. You might call it his power & influence..but still it was not decreed & no one was punished if they did so. There IS a difference.

After him they all went back to their old ways. You might also be aware that sati gets more "honourable" either in famine or in plenty.

After a lull, HP seems to be in full flow. He has written a great piece on FP and a pertinent interact here. I too feel that this article is not far removed from Indian soap-operas. It is a good article that Hamid's aunties should memorize and throw around bits and pieces in Islamabad's cock-tail parties for bringing in the 'intellectual' effects. But that is evident to most FP interactors. I thought that HP's interact was pertinent because of the question posed to echo.

As far as I am concerned I find interactors like kaal, HP, echo, swarrier, zee etc. much beyond the ken of Dalrymple. In this context I find Echo's affinity to the Mughals (or is it their court) a bit perplexing. Echo, what is it that draws your respect to these authoritarian zombies? If this great guy Akbar was so illuminated why did he not ban sati? No Muslim monarch, I repeat ... no Muslim monarch opposed or tried to ban the evil practices of the caste system. Having a Muslim name did not differentiate them from those bas@$%^s who had Hindu names except in their choice of villages on whom they fancied genocide. Echo get a life ... or get out of your inherent fascination of what is 'white'. The enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend.

(This is my last interact on this thread which follows a stupid Bollywoodish article).

tahmed32, beej seems to have a collector's fetish. So he might love all that :)

Is this article is a work of fiction? Probably not. But it surely is the work of a fiction writer whose sight does not stretch beyond the lifestyles of rich and famous, and their present and past glories.

bjkumar #20: Asma Jehangir has a place of honor with all true Pakistanis - and that is why she was leading the Lawyers procession that Dalrymple reports on. We can give you one-slightly used general (along with his uniform) though - and throw in some some holy men and one oxford graduate as well for free!!

bjkumar:

Your observations are correct..and I notices that too.

When the referees start kicking the ball themselves this is what happens. Editors become interactors. wearing TWO hats & non-disclosure, in essence the numero uno bane of the EAST..& especially Pakistan. WILL NOT SHED THE UNIFORM!

The CHOWK staff is cutting, pasting, highlighting passages to promote their non-mulla & pro-nanga agenda [ I'll spare the Oons word here..they CONTROL!).

A lot of the stuff getting published here is a mishmash for the paradoxical & at-odds purpose of generating clicks & unflinching idOlism.

Like a marriage of a Marxist to an Adam Smithist hoping to bear a baby who would be Hilton Hippie..like Paris Hilton.

#22 kaalchakra: I am sure all chowkies are rich and famous (and I am flattered to be in the company of these celebrities)...but is Dalrymple's attached article fiction?

IB #23 Habeas Corpus means the government cannot imprison a man without any charge. If this man had "proven links to Al Qaeda", why did Musharraf not do the right think and present them to court?

Re: # 14
Thanks to your 'saviour' CJ, Naeem Noor Khan, a dangerous man with proven links to Al Qaeda, is today a free man. The Chief Justice secured the militant’s release by dragging the director of the F.I.A. to his chamber and warning him that he would haul the chiefs of military intelligence to the Supreme Court if the ‘missing persons’ – the term used by rights activists for those detained by the spooks – were not released.
Detention without court order is a debatable point here. But the combative mood of the Chief Justice, combined with his refusal to hear the case against these ‘missing’ persons, leaves no room to doubt that his hard line has more to do with politics than with judiciary.

tahmed32, writing about Jahangir or Akbar does not break the author's obsession with (white) moghuls. Mr dailyrumple's "democracy" does not include factory workers, street hawkers, rickshaw pullers, office clerks, small farmers. He is merely a fiction writer for the rich and famous.

#20 bjkumar

(re: side note to chowk editors:
I concur with bjkumar...seriously, what was that mashup? Some of us read the whole thing you know :)

(Side note to chowk editors:
Dear lazy bums, please take the trouble to READ the damn piece for inadvertently missed lines, scrambled text and other screw-ups BEFORE you put it up and end up revealing either your own absolute mediocrity or the badly-needing-updating state of your eyeglasses – to the whole world! Thank you.)

William Dalrymple,

In spite of the fact that a lot of information in this (long) article has been part of several ongoing topics of discussion on this site, I enjoyed this piece tremendously. I especially enjoyed the part which discusses the background and the personality of Asma Jahangir. (Perhaps you should have focused more on the individual and cut back on some of the other more mundane, political stuff.)

Great individuals like Ms. Jahangir are a credit to wherever and whatever they come from. Pakistan is lucky to have her. Even I – not a Pakistani, feel so proud of her!

If Pakistanis don’t want her, we Indians would like to have her!

Einsteinwallah:18

Your query is not new & a lot of stuff has already been written on that here & elsewhere.

I might get carried away with a very very long reply.

Pointers:

1. The debate & the conclusions of St. Thomas Aquinas & Imam
Ghazali (1100/1200 AD?) & continuing till now with Huntington & Lewis as DEFENDERS, APOLOGISTS, & WARNERS...because there is a growing school of thought now which considers GHazali to be right.;.these are the Post-Hiroshimaists, ecologists, Greenpeacers, "lefties", DE-Progress-ers, etc etc.

2. Mongol invasion & occupation [ before they were Muslims]
brought destruction spanning from China to Hungary.

Mongol's conversion to Islam brought glory to all the
under their control or occupation.
3. The relentless crusades first against the Byzantine Orthodox church & then against Muslims in the MUslim ruled lands destroyed a lot of infra-structure but also enabled Europe to learn Science, technology, & philosophy from the great Muslim empire & COMMONWEALTH ( a term stolen from muslims by Britto-Babboons) under ONE Khalifaa stretching from China to France [Pacific to Atlantic]. Babur had to seek permoission from the Khalifa to call himself a King & had the "khutba" in all Jumaa prayers read in his name.
Otherwise one was always a mere Sultan,Nizam, Nawab.

As Iqbal has said the Ocean is yet churning & is always in turbulence...As long as Muslims & Islam continue to grab headlines, for good OR bad, there is always hope for a resurgence that will bring forth pearl-oysters to the
seashore.


The knowledge that appears today to you so "obvious", self-evident truth, most enlightening,"modern & advanced" will all be reduced to a heap of nonsense.

Just be ready for it...

Have you ever wondered why fewer drivers suffer/die in a car, full of passengers, in a crash?

#6 by echoboom

[Their empire was effectively built in coalition with India's Hindu majority and succeeded as much through conciliation as by war.This was particularly true of the Emperor Akbar (1542-1605), who issued an edict of universal religious tolerance, forbade forcible conversion to Islam and married a succession of Hindu wives. At the same time that Jesuits - and those who sheltered them - were being hanged, drawn and quartered in London, when most of Catholic Europe was given over to the Inquisition, and while in Rome Giordano Bruno was being burnt for heresy in the Campo dei Fiori, in India Akbar was summoning Sunnis and Shia Muslims, Hindus of both Shaivite and Vaishnavite persuasions, Jews from Cochin, Parsis from Gujerat and Jesuits from Goa, as well as groups of Indian atheists, to come to his palace and debate their understanding of the metaphysical, declaring that 'no man should be interfered with on account of religion, and anyone is to be allowed to go over to a religion that pleases him'.

All this is important to remember at a time when simplistic and inaccurate notions of Islamic history and theology have wide currency, both inside and outside the Islamic world. For Orientalists such as Samuel Huntingdon and his master, Bernard Lewis, the Ottoman and the Mughal empires are potent symbols of Islam at its most threatening and aggressive. Lewis's books consistently depict two fixed and opposed forces at work: on one hand the West, which he envisages as a vulnerable citadel of pluralistic and open minded Judeo-Christian civilisation; and on the other hand, quite distinct, a hostile Islamic world hell-bent on aggressive conquest and conversion.Yet such simplistic binaries quickly fall apart on any sort of fair-minded examination. Both Akbar and his son Jahangir (1569-1627), for example, were enthusiastic devotees of Jesus and his mother Mary, something they did not see as being in the least at variance with their Muslim faith: over the main gate of the principal mosque at Akbar's capital is an inscription which still bears the legend: 'Jesus, Son of Mary (on whom be peace) said: The World is a Bridge, pass over it, but build no houses upon it. He who hopes for a day, may hope for eternity; but the World endures but an hour. Spend it in prayer, for the rest is unseen.']

If this is true then what is the explanation of the fact that Islamic people are on the run everywhere? What went wrong between now and then? Could it be that Mughal empire was great in spite of and not because of Mughals? Could it be that Baniya logs (and jews) were responsible for India's past glory?

"But, if idealism is naïveté, then so be it. It is ideals that move history forward—think of Gandhi or Martin Luther King.'

Manto hates Gandhi being himself Paki ,Hindus shot him too for being idealistic....Till now not being realist is poetry ,bollywood and Gulberg ...If Asma wants to be like the queen who said let them eat cake when the country was starving there is pertent poetry

"Unhi kaliquon ko hai lazate lutfe baharan ke

jo kaliyan ibta umer se kanto maine palte haine"

Only those flowers have right to bloom

who grow among thorns

That masy be another idealistic poetry

relity is that matters

Kaun jita hai tere zulf ke shar hone tak



"Many thought they were politically naïve, but it was they, not the realists, who succeeded in changing the course of history.”

We DONT live in IDEAL world.
Both Gandhi And Martin Luther were Assasinated .violence And Segregation is realism

HP: Why all this anger? Of course the buildings around Constitution Ave. Islamabad are palatial. And of course the rich in Pakistan live in mughal-like splendour compared to the poor.

#12 Kaalchakra: Where do you see "Mogul wannabe" in this article?

IB #10 you mean the "Supreme National Interest" of General Hai-Meri-Wardi-Na-Utaro? Thank God for courageous people like Asma Jehangir and the Chief Justice who fight to protect the people of Pakistan from rogues like him!!

Totally unconnected but something interesting for Indians, about a really credit worthy person mentioned in this article - Aung San Su Ki. Many may not know, but she lived in India for a while, and is an alumnus of LSR in Delhi.

Beginning: White Moghul Wannabe
End: White Moghul Wannabe

I am yet to come across a sentence of Bill that gloriifed British rule in India! Calling a refined writer like Dalrymple as ahole and all the stuff????

HP needs to see Dr. Sohail.

Is this guy for real ?
Asma Jhangir? I always have doubts about people of this sort - they seem not to care about national intrest.
She's a bit like Dr.A.Q Khan - 'elf glorifier' and nothing more.

When I first read this guy, I thought he had some substance but one article after another I just see another matherchod trying to glorify British rule in the Indian Subcontinent. The ahole sees the army house and remembers the Scottish villas. This bugger sees big houses and thinks of Mughal rule.
He is really pissing me off.

“There are similar properties throughout Gulberg, where large houses with tropical gardens, carefully watered lawns, and expansive pools lie hidden behind high brick walls. It was a reminder of one of the paradoxes of Pakistan. Although the country is frequently depicted in the international media as a failed state, and India, its neighbor and rival, as a burgeoning superpower, the distinction is not always so clear on the ground.”

This man has not seen defense, Mohd ali society, KDA scheme# 1 and Clifton in Karachi. Gulberg pales in comparison. Gulberg also is not the top locality in Lahore anymore.

Shame on you Echo for posting that nonsense about the Mughal rules.

I am surprised that Asma did not tell this hero worshipper, Dalrymple that in 1964 when someone attempted to kill her father, a poor Baloch journalist Mir Baqi Baloch was shot instead. It is true that Asma and Hina’s father was a strange character. I can be totally wrong but I remember my father telling me that the reason he left his civil service job was really Nawab of Kalabagh. Ayub Khan appointed Kalabagh, the governor of West Pakistan and that sorry ass Munim Khan, the Governor of East Pakistan. Malik Ghulam Gilani perhaps hated Nawab of Kalabagh and left the civil service because he did not want to work under him. He might have told different stories to his daughters.

The kalabaghs were big names but they were not the richest Punjabi feudal. Asma Jilani’s(Jahangir now) family and I think they are related to Col Abid Hussain’s family of Jhang. Which means they are related to Abida Hussain and Fakhar Imam and the current Minister Faisel saleh Hayat. And if we extend it, then they are also related to Jugnu Mohsin, wife of Najam Sethi, who is a cousin of Abida Hussain. Jugnu Mohsin owns the Daily Times and the Friday times. Their dark complexion confirms to me that they are from the Jhang area.

We are actually talking about one of the richest family in Punjab. No wonder this admirer of the British rule in India, Dalrymple still fondly talks about a famous British crony family in Pakistan. Well, I shouldn’t say this; only Col. Abid Hussain was a crony and the rest of the family after the creation of Pakistan worked hard for the liberal causes.
Both Asma and Hina have done a tremendous job but saying that Asma is the only one with balls in Pakistan is reducing the poor Baloch, Sindhis to the pedestrian level. Asma has the balls because she is from the elite of the Pakistani society. It is the poor who really show their balls to fight the army.

Zihida Hina recently wrote an article remembering the political prisoners that were killed by the Zia regime in different army brigs and the FIA tortured cells. I recognized some of the names. I knew some of them.

Re: # 6

At least pakistan has something from the moghuls, it has a national anthem in persian, the language of the moghul, but no one in pakistan understands.

drsohail #1

There is yet another pakistan, that the elites of pakistan like the tahmed, YLH etc try to create along with the US ambassador to pakistan.

The poor letter write from dawn of today, below, has no idea that mujra is an indian dance and hence no no for pakistan. belly dancing is arabic and is pakistani, ask shail bin tahmed of faisalabad pakistan.

/////////////


Cultural gaffe?


RECENTLY I had an invitation from the embassy of Pakistan in Washington DC to attend a fashion show in collaboration with the National Geographic Society in honour of the 60th independence day of Pakistan.

I was appalled when the show opened with a dance number by exotic belly dancers from the Far East. Through your esteemed paper I would like to ask the Pakistan ambassador, Mehmud Ali Durrani, to enlighten us as to what, if any, is the connection between Pakistan Independence Day and those scarcely-dressed exotic belly dancers?

Just in case we were trying to give some sort of a message to the members of the National Geographic Society present at the occasion that Pakistan is an enlightened and modern nation with ample entertainment value, then I must say a ‘mujra’ number by our Lollywood darlings would have been a better choice. At least it is something authentic and has a cultural value.

AYESHA KHAN
USA

The BEST of Dalrymple....published in the telegraph today.

Who needs democracy, South-Asia needs Mughals!
___________________________________________________________
Islam's history is not all blood-soaked


William Dalrymple reviews The Mughal Emperors And The Islamic Dynasties Of India, Iran And Central Asia, 1206-1925 by Francis Robinson


In 1526 Zahir-ud-Din Babur, a young Turkish poet prince from Ferghana in Central Asia, descended the Khyber Pass with a small army of hand-picked followers; and with him he brought some of the first cannon seen in India. With these he defeated the Delhi Sultan and established his garden-capital at Agra.Babur not only established the Mughal dynasty in India, he also wrote one of the most fascinating diaries ever produced by a great ruler. In its pages he opens his soul with a frankness and lack of inhibition similar to Pepys's, comparing the fruits and animals of India and Afghanistan with as much inquisitiveness as he records his impressions of falling for men or marrying women, or the differing pleasures of opium and wine.advertisement



In time, Babur's new Mughal Empire grew to be the greatest and most populous of all Muslim polities, with around 100 million subjects - five times the number ruled by their nearest rivals, the Ottomans. Indeed the Mughals were partly responsible for shifting the centre of gravity of the Islamic world eastwards, so that today more Muslims live to the east of Afghanistan than to its west.

In Milton's Paradise Lost, the great Mughal cities of Agra and Lahore are revealed to Adam after the Fall as future wonders of God's creation.This was hardly an understatement: by the age of Milton, Lahore had grown larger even than Constantinople and, with its two million inhabitants, dwarfed both London and Paris. From the ramparts of the Fort, the Great Mughal ruled over most of India, all of Pakistan and Bangladesh, and great chunks of Afghanistan. The Mughals were really rivalled only by their Ming counterparts in China. For their contemporaries in distant Europe they became potent symbols of power and wealth - connotations with which the word Mughal (or Mogul) is still loaded.Yet if the Mughals represented Islamic rule at its most powerful and majestic, they also defined Islam at its most tolerant, pluralistic and eclectic.

Their empire was effectively built in coalition with India's Hindu majority and succeeded as much through conciliation as by war.This was particularly true of the Emperor Akbar (1542-1605), who issued an edict of universal religious tolerance, forbade forcible conversion to Islam and married a succession of Hindu wives. At the same time that Jesuits - and those who sheltered them - were being hanged, drawn and quartered in London, when most of Catholic Europe was given over to the Inquisition, and while in Rome Giordano Bruno was being burnt for heresy in the Campo dei Fiori, in India Akbar was summoning Sunnis and Shia Muslims, Hindus of both Shaivite and Vaishnavite persuasions, Jews from Cochin, Parsis from Gujerat and Jesuits from Goa, as well as groups of Indian atheists, to come to his palace and debate their understanding of the metaphysical, declaring that 'no man should be interfered with on account of religion, and anyone is to be allowed to go over to a religion that pleases him'.


All this is important to remember at a time when simplistic and inaccurate notions of Islamic history and theology have wide currency, both inside and outside the Islamic world. For Orientalists such as Samuel Huntingdon and his master, Bernard Lewis, the Ottoman and the Mughal empires are potent symbols of Islam at its most threatening and aggressive. Lewis's books consistently depict two fixed and opposed forces at work: on one hand the West, which he envisages as a vulnerable citadel of pluralistic and open minded Judeo-Christian civilisation; and on the other hand, quite distinct, a hostile Islamic world hell-bent on aggressive conquest and conversion.Yet such simplistic binaries quickly fall apart on any sort of fair-minded examination. Both Akbar and his son Jahangir (1569-1627), for example, were enthusiastic devotees of Jesus and his mother Mary, something they did not see as being in the least at variance with their Muslim faith: over the main gate of the principal mosque at Akbar's capital is an inscription which still bears the legend: 'Jesus, Son of Mary (on whom be peace) said: The World is a Bridge, pass over it, but build no houses upon it. He who hopes for a day, may hope for eternity; but the World endures but an hour. Spend it in prayer, for the rest is unseen.'


Francis Robinson is one of the country's great authorities on Islamic and South Asian history and his new book is an excellent introduction to this often surprising world. It is no whitewash - the Emperor Timur, for example, is depicted in appropriately blood-thirsty colours pushing his Luristani and Armenian prisoners en masse over cliffs, and riding heavy cavalry right over the choir of Koran-holding singing children sent out of the town of Sivas to beg for his mercy.Yet The Mughal Emperors remains a vital corrective to the influential but partial and wrong-headed readings of the flag bearers of intellectual Islamophobia such as Naipaul, Lewis and Huntingdon, all of whom continue to manufacture entirely negative images of one of the greatest and most varied civilisations in world history.In an age when a working knowledge of the world of Islam is no longer a refinement but a necessity, Robinson's book is an excellent introduction to the history and culture of not only the Mughal Empire, but also the other Muslim dynasties that shared their Persianate Central Asian civilisation. Presented as a sort of illustrated biographical dictionary to the rulers, and arranged chronologically by dynasty, it gives a clear and readable panorama of a sphere that needs to be far better understood if we are ever to understand the Muslim world that impinges with ever greater frequency on our daily lives.

Long but not boring.

Asma is the only woman in Pakistan with testicles.....

We dont has Asmas in India.

first dibs on blaming the US elite and American imperialism for Pakiland's lack of democracy(nevermind the fact that pakis were dancing in the streets when nawaz was deposed)...

masadi...beat you...

... what an amazing woman! ...... i wish we had more men like her ......

days of rage, and Asma Jehangir looks really pissed off in that picture!

dear william dalrymple....a wonderful article. enjoyed reading it.
it is sad to see a nation caught between militant muslims and army dictarors...what a choice?
for me democracy is more than elections....in the west democracy prospered in countries where there was
...high literacy rate
...respect for women and minorities
...fight for human rights
and
....a big middle class
for pakistan to have genuine democracy she has to distancce herself from american politics...after first gulf war i had written a small urdu poem that translates as
american foreign policy
whoever sleeps with her
is killed the next morning
but still
there is a long line of lovers
outside her bedroom
i lived in peshawar in 60s and 70s and saw the elctions when zulfiqar bhutto lost elections to mufti mehmood. his taliban used to go from door to door asking innocent people...are you going to vote bhutto or quran?
for democracy people have to believe that human beings are more imprtant than gods....democracy is a secular phenomenon. it is hard to have democracy in a state that has transformed from pakistan to islamic republic of pakistan. i can foresee pakistan dividing further in two pakistans the secular pakistan...with lahore as centre...and islamic pakistan with peshawar as centre...what do you think?
thanks again for this wonderful article....sincerely sohail