A new year in the land of Hitachi
The beginning of a new year in the land of the rising sun was a very memorable experience for me. I learned a lot about Japanese culture when I spent my first new year away from my homeland here. Like the fact that Hitachi is defined by many Japanese people as the ‘rising sun’, where hi means ‘sun’ and tachi means ‘to rise’. December 31 and January 1 saw hordes of people on the streets, making their way to shrines, temples, and matsuris (festivals). On December 31, I made my way to Kyoto, the old capital of Japan. It is a small city full of ...
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Message to literalists: You are a minority
The Pakistani Taliban’s suicide bombers attacked the shrine of Syed Ahmad Sakhi Sarwar in Dera Ghazi Khan district, killing 50 people. The dead include children, women, the elderly and handicapped. Self-destructing suicide bombers who kill innocent people show that they are against the Islamic ideology of saving humanity from self-destruction. Taliban’s confused ideology The Taliban (including Wahabis, Salafis and all Muslims who kill other Muslims) cast a shadow on their status as Muslims. The classical scholar Hasan alBasri calls Muslims who kill other Muslims “the grave sinners”, whereas Wasil ibn Ata called such Muslims neither “believers” nor “non-believers”. Ironically, the predecessor of all ...
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Talking about Sufism: Faiz vs Askari
The national politics have brought us to a point where everybody is engaged in a religious debate. While my contemporaries brave the treacherous ocean’s currents, I, for one, have to plead ignorance of the finer points of the Quran and Hadith studies. Akbar’s verse – I never entered a debate about religion, for I always lacked the extra intelligence it required – has served me well in the perilous times we live in. So it’s not as if I am preparing to enter the debate now; just wondering about the blessed moment when Faiz Ahmed Faiz did. A word first ...
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Tolerant Islam under attack
Every Thursday, as the drums would roll, the colourful devotees would crowd, the rose petals would float, the excited children would hop, the cars would swerve, the buses would gather, the food would overflow, the lights would glow, and I would wonder anew at the hospitability and attraction of the Abdullah Shah Ghazi mazaar. Abdullah Shah Ghazi is said to have arrived from Iraq in the eighth century to preach the brand of tolerant Islam that is still followed by the majority of people here. Many people claim to have been granted their wishes here. Apart from the faithful, there ...
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More security? Yeah, right
Security was ‘beefed up’ or ‘put on high alert’ after the bombing at Abdullah Shah Ghazi’s shrine in Karachi which resulted in killing at least 10 people and left more than 60 injured. Question: Why could security not have been beefed up earlier so as to avoid the incident all together? In a country like Pakistan, where incidents of terrorism occur on a frequent basis, there really shouldn’t be any question as to when it would be the right time to put security on high alert. Right after the incident, a minister on TV said that the security at the shrine was ...
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Terrorised again: Welcome to my world
It’s been a while since I wrote about my country’s current state of affairs or the multiple attacks that continue to make me believe I’m a soldier living in a war-zone. On any given panic-holiday, I meet my friends for brunch and talk about how good it feels to finally have a day off – you will never find us complaining about some extra hours of sleep. You see, we Karachiites are completely desensitized to disgustingly worrying levels of poverty, bomb threats and suicide attacks. Living in Karachi, you grow up and you learn to toughen up and just deal with things. We ...
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Attacking shrines: The new fundamentalism
The explosions at the shrine of the Sufi saint Abdullah Shah Ghazi are yet another glaring testimony to the belief that a new-fangled brand of ‘Islamic’ fundamentalism has emerged as a force to be reckoned with. But under the garbed reality of civilian genocide, intelligence failure and staggering chaos which have devastated the lives of the Karachites, a more scathing assault has been launched on the Naqshbandi Sufi order. Upon glancing at Trimingham’s The Sufi Orders of Islam some months ago (the contents of which have been sourced mainly from Taj al-Din ibn Mahdi Zaman al-Rumi’s Risala fi sunan al-Ta’ifa ...
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Lahore, Sufi saints and the militant mindset
Data darbar, over 40 dead and over a hundred injured and I could have been one of them. Lahore Challo This was my family’s first trip to Lahore together, and we were determined to go despite admonishments all around. “What about the Punjabi Taliban?! Its not safe!” “You’ll get blown up. That’s for sure.” “It’s ridiculously hot. You’ll pass out halfway through sight-seeing.” “No” I replied to all of the above. “We are from Karachi, we can take it.” A night on the town My mother, my two sisters and I have just finished consuming an enormous meal at a roadside café in old Anarkali, and it ...
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Tea and biscuits for the hated
It seems like every day there’s a new steaming pile of nonsense published in the mainstream media about the Muslim world. For a geographically disparate grouping of countries that’s so incredibly important geo-politically it certainly isn’t easy to find informed comment and analysis, certainly not in the papers that constitute regular reading for many people in the West. If people are still beating the ‘clash of civilisations’ drum and decrying that ‘they hate our feedom’ then we know we have a problem. Take National Geographic, a magazine that claims to have been “inspiring people to care about the planet since ...
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