Pakistan has been described as a ‘tinderbox’ by the Indian journalist M J Akbar, and as sliding towards oblivion by a string of western academics and writers. Somehow Allah, Army and America have all conspired to create a declining security state. Yet, Pakistan is still there!
2.1 | The Idea of Islam
It is a scene that still carries fond memories: the sight of the postman standing outside the front door of my grandfather’s Karachi house laden with a cardboard box marked with the Royal Mail’s trademark red livery. The box would contain books from England, carefully packed by my father who was working in London while… Read more »
Robin Yassin-Kassab recounts his journey to Iraqi Kurdistan to meet writers who’ve lived through the worst of the country’s recent past.
An unashamed Orientalist fantasy, Sex and the City 2 was contemptuous in its portrayal of Muslim men as misogynist while depicting Islamic society – through the oh-so-representative prism of Abu Dhabi – as repressed and oppressive.
Is Islam an imperial idea, forever beholden to the perpetuation of a historical order to which ‘conquering the world’ is intrinsic?
Muslim cosmopolitanism seemed to me the most natural of dinner table topics. But my family and friends around the dinner table had other ideas.
So what is your idea of Islam? To what extent and in what way is there or should there be a choice?