From the ports and beaches on the Arabian Sea to the south, Karachi crawls haphazardly north over green mangrove swamps and along the Lyari and Malir rivers, west to the lunar mountains of Baluchistan, and northeast into the flat scrubland of Sindh. Each year, the city colonises a little more of the desert to make space for thousands upon thousands of new residents.
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Failed states, Pakistan-specialist Anatol Lieven declared afterwards, don’t hold literature festivals. Perhaps Lieven assumed too much: there are festivals in Iraq and Palestine. And novelist Mohammad Hanif provided a grimmer perspective during his very well-attended and gently provocative session when he said ‘even places that don’t have running water want to have a literature festival now.’
Like the sword of Damocles, a perennial question mark hangs over Pakistan. Can Pakistan survive? Can it continue to endure the ‘war on terror’? Will it see out drone attacks, the Taliban, violent fundamentalists, the insurgency in Balochistan, inter-provincial rivalries, rampant corruption, economic meltdown and twenty-hour daily electricity blackouts? Given that it ranks high on the Failed States Index and is characterised by ‘perversity’, US-based journalist Robert Kaplan goes as far as to phrase the question as: should Pakistan survive?
My own experience with self-loathing came as a nagging feeling which initially I could not name. The lack of a name to that feeling translated into the lack of a definition and lack of recognition. It simply became ‘that’ feeling, whose voice should be silenced at all costs before it grew louder and threatened the integrity of my faith.
Just days before the Tottenham fire that set alight petrol lakes of the inequality and hopelessness that exists right across the UK, a meticulously coiffured tour guide in Cairo (even his eyelashes appeared sculpted), surely from a respectable middle class family, told me that the poor people of Egypt were generally happy with their lot, and, ignoring the contradiction, in the same breath explained how Mubarak lost his way by not spreading the wealth that the rich were harvesting as a direct result of his neo-liberal economic reforms. Despite my guide’s faulty reasoning he had exposed the connection between economic and social injustice and the revolt against tyranny — the self-same inequality and lack of control experienced by large numbers of people in Britain.
The mere mention of sects raises a set of linguistically inescapable terms that have become so emotionally charged as to make rational debate a rarity.
On 9 January 2012, the Kuala Lumpur High Court acquitted and discharged Anwar Ibrahim, the Malaysian federal opposition leader and former deputy premier, on charges of sodomising his former political aide. This was the second time Anwar had been tried for homosexual sodomy, and the second time he had been acquitted. Back in 1999 the… Read more »
Recently I took a Muslim friend to study the buffet of print laid into the Liberty University bookstore. The university and its bookstore sit on Liberty Mountain in Lynchburg, Virginia, where an SUV trimmed with stickers reading ‘Not I, but Christ’ and ‘Socialism isn’t cool’ abridges the local temper.
What is characterised as Hindu fundamentalism is in fact the everyday ordinariness of a religion such as Islam, and ‘even the slightest spiritual movement among the Hindus is immediately branded by the minority communities as Hindu-chauvinism, Hindu backlash or fundamentalism.’
After the spectacle of the flag-burning, the camera zooms in on one section of EDL members, to demonstrate from the skin colour of their forearms that this gathering includes black men as well as white. In the description that accompanies the video on YouTube, a supporter has written: ‘How anyone can call this group far right fascist Nazis is beyond belief. Since when were Nazi groups multi-race?!? It’s not racist to oppose Islamic Extremism!’