From Karachi, with love, Islamic Society, Islamic Society, NewAgeIslam.com

Islamic Society

From Karachi, with love

By-Rafia Zakaria

The Karachi I grew up in was haunted by memories of Mumbai. My father, grandparents and aunts had all left Mumbai in the decades after Partition, chasing jobs and the promises sold to the Muslims of the subcontinent. At every dinner table conversation, every afternoon tea reminiscence, and every late night stroll, we were accompanied by the omnipresent ghost of Mumbai. Against the mythic Mumbai of their memories, Karachi always fell short: the fish was fresher in Mumbai, my father sighed, and the nights were cooler, my grandmother complained.

The imagined Mumbai that punctuated my Karachi childhood was an idyll of fresh food, better infrastructure, kinder people and those glorious Bollywood movies that lit up our screens courtesy of borrowed VCRs. Impressionistic remembrances muted all dissonance. The imagined Mumbai my father brought with him had been delivered of the daily annoyances that everyday life in the city would undoubtedly have had.

The Karachi of my childhood thus existed very much in relation to and in conversation with a Mumbai whose reality for me was only defined by other people’s recollections. Saddened by the discontent of the transplanted grown-ups, I wanted to exorcise the ghost that seemed to be the ever present lament of my father that inevitably distanced him from loving Karachi, the only city I knew and loved. How could he love me and not love Karachi, I wondered? My twin brother and I, united in our devotion to Karachi would mount vehement arguments in its favour. Our childish reasons for loving Karachi were constructed both from our childlike love for the only home we knew and the propaganda about India that we were regularly fed at school.

http://newageislam.com/from-karachi,-with-love/islamic-society/d/2152

Major Hassan Nidal: Identity or insanity?, Muslims and Islamophobia, NewAgeIslam.com

Muslims and Islamophobia

Major Hassan Nidal: Identity or insanity?

By Rafia Zakaria

Wednesday, 25 Nov, 2009

US soldiers take part in an Action Control Class at the Army Center for Enhanced Performance part of the Resiliency Campus on Fort Hood Army post used to help soldiers with their mental and spiritual health in Fort Hood, Texas November 9, 2009. – Photo by Reuters.

‘Sometimes an extremist is really an extremist’ was the title of a recent column written by Los Angeles Times columnist Jonah Goldberg this past week. The subject, unsurprisingly, was the ongoing investigation into the motives of Maj Hassan Nidal who shot and killed 13 people in Fort Hood, Texas.

In his piece, Mr Goldberg exhorts Americans to ‘admit it … Major Hassan is a Muslim fanatic, motivated by other Muslim fanatics’.

The debate over whether Major Nidal was plain crazy or a motivated scheming fanatic has escalated in the past few weeks with new discoveries of his contacts with Yemeni cleric Anwar Al Awlaki and the discovery of business cards in his apartment that described him as a ‘soldier of Allah’.

Conservative commentators like Charles Krauthammer of the New York Times, have criticised the ‘liberal left media’ in the United States for ‘medicalising’ the incident and refusing to look at the writing on the wall. Those alleging that Maj Nidal’s actions were an act of insanity have thus been accused of wearing rose-coloured goggles that refuse to take seriously the threat of ‘homegrown terror’ in the United States.

http://newageislam.com/major-hassan-nidal--identity-or-insanity?/muslims-and-islamophobia/d/2142

Taliban: Constructing a New “Islam” fit for the pre-Islamic Jahiliya, Radical Islamism and Jihad, NewAgeIslam.com

Radical Islamism and Jihad

Taliban: Constructing a New “Islam” fit for the pre-Islamic Jahiliya

Taliban: a response to modernity

By Rafia Zakaria

Friday, Apr 10, 2009

The scene is chilling. A crowd of men watches as a 17-year-old girl wails in pain and humiliation as she is flogged by a masked man. Her punisher, unflappable and untouched by her remonstrations, does not pause as he metes out the punishment. Another man holds her down as she flails and writhes in pain. This is the Taliban justice at its best: a rapt crowd, a female victim crying out in pain, and a world stunned into silence. There is much to be said about the scene: its barbarity, its theatrics, and its channelling of the medieval are all visible in a tableau now being routinely enacted before the world by the Taliban and its affiliated groups.

The conspiracy theories of the video represent the unwillingness of some within the Pakistani establishment and news media to disregard the group’s barbaric onslaught on women and essentially provide a cover for its unabashed brutality. Questions abound about the act: westerners balk at the ability of the Taliban to carry out such public punishments with impunity, and Pakistanis question the devolution of justice in a country that was led by a woman a mere decade ago.

These are all important questions, with answers that can be located in structural explanations of economics, sociology, and history, all of which present pieces of the complicated denouement that has led Pakistan and the Taliban to this juncture. Beyond these structural explanations, however, lies the less visible saga of how the uneasy ideological relationships between the modern and the post-modern, the authentic and the inauthentic, and ultimately the indigenous and the foreign have colluded to produce the particular appeal of the Taliban in Pakistan. To investigate this ideological appeal, then, is not to deny the existence and pertinence of structural factors in the rise of the Taliban, but to point to the particular conglomerations of the critique of the modern, particularly in relation to the act of justice and power, that are operative in the modus operandi of the Taliban and its very particular construction of Islam.

http://newageislam.com/taliban--constructing-a-new-CislamD-fit-for-the-pre-islamic-jahiliya--/radical-islamism-and-jihad/d/1316