Hands Across The Border

Re: Dionysus #204

You said that I had `discredited Pakistan`. Allow me to speak on the subject. I make a distinction between the average Pakistani citizen and the Pakistan regime. I mean no offence to the citizen. In fact, until Partition, my own family had lived in what is today Pakistan for dozens of generations. I feel as much a sense of belonging to Pakistan, as probably you do. How can I verbally attack a layman Pakistani, without assaulting myself and my own heritage in the process? I operate under the hypothesis that the average Pakistani is no different from me. I cannot be persuaded that the average Pakistani should be discredited. If that were to hold true, then I would find myself not holding myself in any regard either.

I do however feel strongly about the Pakistani regime (mostly the military ones) that it does not adequately represent the goodness of the average Pakistani, and in the process brings a bad name to them. Perhaps, I should be careful in the future by making the distinction explicit. Also, please read my posts in the same light, ie. where I may have criticized Pakistan, I had really been critical of its regime. I hope that this clarifies things a bit.

............ a long time ago , in my long-haired pot-smoke clouded communist days, i once said to my father that india had been divided so that the bourgeois alongwith their minions, the petty-bourgeois, could continue to exploit the miserable proletariat .... needless to say, my father, who has a potrait of The Quaid staring down from the wall in every room of the house, almost threw my pink posterior out of the house ........... `` YOU have never lived with the Bania, `` he roared .... ``you don`t know what it is like to be kicked out of their kitchens or have to drink Muslim Pani at the railway station or be denied any job that pays more than four annas a day - HE is treacherous``............at that time i thought the old man was a petty-bourgeois who had been out in the sun too long ..........

....... of course, at that time i had not met the Bania Devil from the wrong side of the border - but now that i have met hundreds of them, i think i know what he was talking about ...

....... however, now we are faced with a bigger dilemma: who is the bigger devil - the dhoti-wearing bania or the shalwar wearing jihadi ........ in my mind ( what little is left of it ) the bearded lashkars are a much bigger threat to civil society in pakistan than the pony-tailed hare-krishnas .... and here i have to agree with jay - the lashkars are winning ..... may ram and allah have mercy on all of us !

Re: Dionysus #204

Reasonable people can agree to disagree. However, reasonable people should not be impolite, arrogant and rude. If I am guilty of the last three, then I will not blame you for responding in kind.

YLH,

It seems my friend you have been reading too many books on the Ottomans by Orientalists of the past 100 years! Come on man these images of the hedonistic, bacchanalian Ottoman Sultans are discredited as a European fantasy by all serious scholars of history in the West today! Read Halil Incarlik`s book on the Ottoman Empire which is considered a classic.

And the shar`iat (of the Hanafi school) WAS the Law throughout the lands of the Ottoman Empire. The dispensations you talk about for Christians etc are part of Islamic Law!

Where do you get your facts from?!!

Yes, when the great conqueror of Islam Sultan Muhammad al Fatih conquered Constantinople he took great care of the existing christian sites and population but that is cos it is a part of shariat to do so. His converting to christianity and shiasm!!? What a joke! He had a Sufi Shaykh in the Qadiri tariqah called Shaykh Shamsuddin and the Ottomans were pious Muslims. If they had concubines--so what? It is not forbidden in Shar`iat. As for them being bisexual!! Come on!

Granted not all the Ottomans were pious but all the well known ones were and Sultan Mehmet The Conqueror certainly was. He in fact spent his whole life in jihad.

Check out this site which is a modern Turkish site and do a search for Ottomans :www.hizmetbooks.org

also www.naqshbandi.org and see the section on the ottomans--a detailed history including biographies and portraits of all the Sultans.

* * * * * *

Aurangzeb Alamgir rahmatullah alayhi is accepted as being in his personal life an extremely devout humble and pious Muslim who never missed a prayer, fasted often and read from the Qur`an daily. In fact he used to sew caps for his own private income and when he died he explicitly instructed that his grave be a humble affairs. He was a wali. Man, even non-Muslim writers now accept his personal piety and devotion to Islam (except Hindus writing in India) though they do criticize his policy to try to enforce Shar`iat throughout the Indian subcontinent but that is expected from them. THAT is why i write rahmatullah alayhi. The Fatawa Alamgiri (or Fataawa al Hindiyya as it is known in the Arab world) is the largest compilation on Hanafi fiqh in the history of Islam and not a small achievement. Why do you mock that which you don`t understand?

Hazrat Aurangzeb was the murid of the great-grandson (I think) of Hazrat Imam e Rabbani Mujaddid e Alf al-Thani Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi al Naqshbandi radhi allah anhu who revived Islam in India when Akbar and his courties threatened to extinguish it. His shrine in Sirhind is still a place of pilgrimage for millions.

Also, he had more hindu ministers in his court than any of the other mughal kings..go figure

About his great-grandfather Akbar he said

``Jadd-e-man Akbar, akbar neest akfar ast``

(My ancestor Akbar was not akbar [great] but a great kafir [akfar]).

It`s sickening to hear the people who invented and sanctified racial apartheid talk about `plurality`, `diversity` and `democracy`. And then to try to use this (alleged) `plurality` etc as a licence to invade and occupy foreign countries and to justify their country`s imperialism and expansionism.

---

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/south_asia/newsid_1186000/1186101.stm

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Indian `apartheid` condemned

Discrimination: these low-caste voters were barred from polling booths in last year`s elections Human Rights Watch has criticised the Indian Government for stifling debate over caste-based discrimination.

The New York-based rights groups says Delhi is trying to avoid discussion of the issue at a major United Nations conference on racism in South Africa in August.

Human Rights Watch spokeswoman Smita Narula says Indian officials argued against including caste at a meeting on the conference agenda in Tehran earlier this week.

But Ms Narula says caste divisions affect millions of people in India, the world`s largest democracy.

Lobbying for inclusion

The lower-caste Dalit community and a number of other South Asian groups are lobbying for the caste system to be discussed at the South African meeting.

They argue that more international attention is needed on what amounts to hidden apartheid.

Human Rights Watch says the caste system inflicts great social harm, including the sexual abuse of women and children.

No final decision has yet been made on the agenda. Mary Robinson, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, told the Tehran meeting that no country or region could claim to be free from racism.

The conference has been organised to mark the International Year for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

Shammi 178,179

Have you no shame at all?? You asked me to tone down my posts and to post constructive ideas on how to solve the Kashmir dispute. In response, I held back from tearing you to shreds and promised to reciprocate if you and other Indians stopped posting anti-Pakistan drivel. But Chowk`s resident Indian Nazi, Sadna, couldn`t control her fascist impulses and I had to respond to her.

You have taken my restraint as a sign of weakness and you seem to think that you now have a free hand to attempt to discredit Pakistan on this message board. But don`t worry, I will cook your goose.

hamidm,

Your particular vice is that you think being critical of everything absolves you of the necessity for thought.

For example, you use that oxymoron ``secular Pakistani`` without blushing ...

-Arun Gupta

hamidm,

I have to agree with you, the posts of indians could p/iss off the so called liberal pakistanis, but they are so few and a vanishing breed, found only in the sanitized preserving cold climates of the west. Let them just spend their last days and is no consequence in the unfolding jihadic pakistan with Qartaba as the capital.

regards

jay

hamidm #199
Std Pakistani two-faced same-old-same-old : Indian secularism is pretentious, Indians piss off secular Pakistanis by daring to speak up on a discussion board.

Secular Pakistanis are NOT pretentious, merely have an honest hatred for those only worth hating, and how dare secular Indians get pissed off when they(the secular honest Pakistanis) send over religious warriors armed to the teeth, who btw are the holier-than-thous you ought to be berating.

And spare us the holier-than-thou attitudes of your great Pakistani generals whose scorched-earth policies of achieving `strategic depth` have already made an example of a devastated Afghanistan(which btw is a problem at least 20 years old)

Why make an export business of all this religious war crap which you ought to be enjoying on your own side of the fence ?

http://www.timesofindia.com/today/25home4.htm
``... Geelani disclosed that people within the APHC are conspiring against one another which can lead too precarious a situation for APHC to continue at this critical juncture. He said time has come when people have to decide whether to support secular politics or politics based on Islamic principles.

Lashing out at Lone, the firebrand pro-Pakistan Jamaat-e-Islami leader said there was no room for secular politics in Kashmir and urged the people to reject secular politicians.

`Time has come when people of Kashmir have to decide whether to support secular politics or politics based on Islamic principles,`` Geelani said and asked people to extend their full support to the politics supported by religious tenets.

He said the on-going movement drew inspiration from Islam and he did not believe in ``la-deen`` (anti-Islamic) politics....``


I ask again why should Indian Kashmir be denuded of its diversity? What makes so-called `Indian hegemony` an acceptable alibi for the so-called secular Pakistanis?

Sadhana

Perhaps hamidm, who finds a Keralite and a Delhite being members of the same nation extremely strange ``as they have nothing in common but Hinduism`` may want to reflect on how New Yorkers and Georgians are members of the same nation, having nothing in common but English.

-Arun Gupta

sadna and shammi

......... you two smug literatis are almost as rabid as urstruly and the farangi killer and asif naqshbandi when it comes to hatred of pakistan and pakistanis ...... the only difference is that you are a a little bit more sophisticated, don`t foam at the mouth with religious dribble and generally manage to hide behind pretentious crap about secularism in ramaland ..... as for the fanatical jehadis in allahland - I agree with you that they are a horrible menace to all ...... but we must remember that this plague has surfaced in the last ten years or so, and the problem with kashmir preceeds them ........ these wild-eyed bearded hordes are the result of the political vacum created by the generals who let them out of the bottle ..............it is also true, that inspite of the fact that they could never win at the polls they now have considerable influence and pose a real threat to whatever little civilization is left in pakistan ............ but all this still does not justify india`s dastardly hegemonic behaviour - why should it strut around like a drunken brahma bull while we run around like scared sheep to find ourselves dishonorable graves ........ and don`t give me this kaka about ashoka and akbar .... ashoka was a killing machine before the battle of kalinja, and akbar was an opium eating idiot who would do anything to hang on to his harem of hindoo women - although i do think his idea of din-i-elahi was brilliant .....

........... so get off your holier-than-thou perch and stop preaching to us ..... what folks like F_K and urstruly and Asif naqshbandi need is a good spanking and not a lecture on secularism - you can`t argue with people who have god and his lieutanant in their corner ..... but, you are also pissing off secular pakistanis whose hatred for india is simply based on old fashioned nationalism and flag-waving patriotism ...... and there is nothing wrong with old

yasser #192

have you ever read ``Lords of the Horizons``? Its a history of the Ottoman Empire published in the last few years. I can`t remember the name of the author. Micheal something. He`s British. It was pretty good.

#184 Sadna

Bravo!

For all their faults, Indian secularism and democracy are at least an attempt at equality. Pakistan has no such pretensions. To equate the two is to do violence to reason.

Krashid

I thought so :)

Isnt Fatawaa al Alamgiri the book that says that it is in Islamic norm to offer your slave girl for sex to your guest...

Yasser Hamdani

Urstruly #187
So? Still the sun rises.

ylh #186

It is probably because of Fatawa-e-Alamgiri.

But blinding a liberal like Shah Jehan and killing an even more liberal Dara Shikoh might be the reason.

May be crusade against liberals is a must for becoming RAH (Rahmatullah Aleh). Everyone is trying hard these days for coveted titles.