Days of Rage

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

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

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

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...

Long but not boring.

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

We dont has Asmas in India.

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

Who needs democracy, South-Asia needs Mughals!
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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.

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.

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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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Beginning: White Moghul Wannabe
End: White Moghul Wannabe

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.

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!!

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

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.