The plight of Gaza civilians has shaken many a torpor-ed digital selves recently. This was notable because the ordinary condition of Gaza, the daily quotidian plight is in itself a crisis of unbelievable moral and humanistic severity. Yet the now-sanctioned ritual sharing of photos, of inflamed or inflammatory opinion pieces, of outrage on social networks [...]

Barkha Dutt has expressed incredulity on Twitter at being included in my essay “Bal Thackeray’s Poisonous Legacies” as an example of those in the worlds of media, celebrity, and politics who were soft-pedaling Bal Thackeray’s legacy. Dutt’s argument, expressed here and here, is that [...]

The Indian elite’s reaction to Bal Thackeray’s death raises profoundly disturbing question, argues Rohit Chopra.

With news breaking earlier this evening of Bal Thackeray’s death, the movers and shakers of Indian society have been in overdrive as have been their lesser-known followers, minions, and acolytes on Twitter. The event is being milked [...]

Rohit Chopra continues the series on South Asia with a reflection on the anti-Sikh riots that followed the assassination of Indira Gandhi on October 31, 1984. Close to three decades after the pogroms, most of those responsible for the violence have not been brought to justice.

In [...]

CM announces a series of writings on political life and public culture in South Asia, guest curated, gathered, and edited by Sanyasi. The idea is to present here a range of perspectives –by writers, journalists, academics, artists, and others–on the entanglements of culture, public life, and the political in and about the vast swath of [...]

At the recently concluded 41st Annual South Asia Conference at Madison, WI, I chaired a panel on dreams in the medieval Islamicate world. Most of my paper was part of a chapter in the book, but I thought I share a bit of it here (in light of CM’s long standing tradition of sharing conference [...]

The cricketers gather under the stone columns of Olympiastadium. The majority are brown. I knew no one, and sat at a respectable distance and watched the easy camaraderie among the others. I caught whiffs of punchlines and scents of anecdotes. After a while, S.K bounded over and introduced himself. I followed him to the field.

[...]

the first in a new series, gentle readers. i apologize for the protracted silences here. i am now settled in new york city. new job, new city, etc. i didn’t write about berlin much, but here we go.

On a nondescript straße – lined with oaks – his restaurant abuts a motorcycle and waterski [...]

Musharraf Ali Farooqi’s Between Clay and Dust is microscopic examination of a mood. The mood is nostalgia or if that word evokes more negative connotations, wistfulness.

Then Ustad Ramzi’s attention wandered away. He could not tell how long his mind was blank. When he regained his attention, Gohar Jan was saying:
‘A girl’s [...]

[A shorter version of this essay appeared in Dawn.]

Empires carve out and sustain their political and economic privilege with unrelenting violence, but, without a hint of irony, deem their mission moral and ethical, verging on the altruistic. A necessary counterpart to this blindness, is a paranoid fear of a dark, hostile world. Islamophobia [...]

[Editor's note: We thank Hussein Omar for contributing this essay. This review was commissioned by Bidoun for issue #27. We especially thank Bidoun for allowing us to run it. ]

by Hussein Omar

On the 15th of June, 1914, an obscure Egyptian newspaper based in Geneva printed a rousing call-to-arms:

To you, my [...]

A snippet from my review of Irfan Husain’s Fatal Faultlines: Pakistan, Islam and the West:

The Global War on Terror has spawned a cottage industry of commentators and “experts,” who simply repackage the American public’s commonly held beliefs and serve it back to them: The Muslims are crazy, they hate America (and each other), and [...]

by Sarah Waheed

From that moment, like the maniyan fly, an unknown fear began to envelop my mind. An irrational doubt began to grip me, a feeling that this journey was not leading me to the Gulf life that I had been dreaming about and craving for. The Gulf I had learned about from [...]

There is no real sense of how Maula Jatt changed Pakistan. Real as in what to quantify and how to do it. At some point, it was everywhere and then it remained. The man playing the role of Maula Jatt was named Sultan Rahi né Mohammad Sultan who was born in 1938 in Uttar Pradesh [...]

My friend and Berlin-based American artist, Rajkamal Kahlon’s artist book, The Winning of the West, is now available. You can browse through the book here, and if you are near Ludwigshafen who can go to her solo show. In the book, there is a conversation/interview between us, that I am presenting for [...]

I reviewed Alia Malek’s Patriot Acts: Narratives of Post-9/11 Injustice for Dawn. You can read the full review here.

On March 21, 2012, Shaima Alawadi, a 32-year-old Iraqi woman, was fatally beaten with a tire iron in Southern California. A note found near her said, “This is my country. Go back to yours, terrorist.” The [...]

Here is how I introduced Jahangir earlier:

I walk down towards the rooms – there is an old man, in white wife-beater, a dhoti, and two fistfuls of shockingly white beard. He is sitting in front of a canvas on which is a bucolic village scene with a tube-well and a date palm. [...]

The christian colony, the milk colony, the officers colony, the even more ridiculously named murghi-khana (hen coop) neighborhood, all packed together, surrounded by acres upon acres of open spaces teeming with puchal parei, churail, jinn, chalawa.

[A version of this essay was published in Counterpunch.]

During the run up to the invasion of Afghanistan, three burly American classmates jeered at me. They said, “We’re gonna kill Osama.” Presumably, I would be especially aggrieved at Osama’s death, since I am a Muslim, and therefore, an Osama sympathizer if not also a [...]