Dhurandhar 2 Trending At Number 1 On Netflix Pakistan Despite Theatre Ban In Country, Claims Viral Video

Dhurandhar 2 crashed server in Pakistan After releasing on Netflix. : r/Dhurandhar

It seems despite so much alleged Anti Pakistan content Dhurandhar is doing very well in Pakistan

When the Walters’ house was under construction, General Zia’s “Bakistan” had yet to come into being, and all sorts of new prescriptions had not been written to preserve the purity and piety of women. Even at that time most Pakistani women wore the regular shalwar-kameez. Fashion advancements consisted merely of lengthening the kameez or narrowing the shalwar cuffs a bit. Nothing more than that. It was another matter if someone’s dress was a different type for a special reason, but even then it was expected to conform to the style of some other part of the subcontinent or Arabia — meaning it had to be in keeping with the mores of decency, modesty, and other such things. It couldn’t happen, either then or now, that women from Model Town or Sukkur or Chakwal or any other part of “Bakistan” could say that since this June sun is on fire let’s wear shorts and undershirts or put on swimsuits and jump into the pond or canal and emerge only when needed, to cook food or wash clothes. That way we will not die from sunstroke, nor neglect serving our husbands — the task for which we have been created.

This, and other such shameless things that conflicted with the Ideology of Pakistan, could be allowed to happen neither then nor now. At that time, if anyone wanted to wear a different kind of dress, it had to be at least from a neighboring part of the world where women knew how to cook food properly, wash clothes, and give birth to children. Zakia Khala wore one such acceptable dress, known as the “sari.” Zakia Khala would always wear this dress — in the kitchen, in the bathroom, at bedtime, while speaking on the phone, strolling on the lawn, and while mixing salt in lukewarm water for gargling. In short, all the time.

Our mothers would also dress up this way from time to time, though for them it was something special, to be worn on an occasion like a wedding reception or the head-shaving ceremony of someone’s superfluous child. But Zakia Khala had arrived in Lahore via marriage from somewhere in India and because a large number of women there go around in saris so Zakia Khala had picked up the habit although it isn’t at all necessary that if you are visiting a place or residing there you have to adopt all the habits of the locals. For example, if spitting is a common practice of a group, adopting that habit is neither commendable nor reasonable for everyone in the area or for others coming from outside. But the sari is different. It’s not a bad dress, nor is it reserved for loose women, nor is wearing it a bad habit like spitting, except for the fact that a part of the belly remains permanently visible and at times even the navel is exposed. In Arab countries and in Pakistan there are many who are infuriated by this mode of dress and attack sari-clad women.

So, seeing the petite and skinny Mrs Walter in jeans and yellow or blue skirts suggested that these people were different from us in some ways. Which is why Akhtar Auntie had asked:

“Who are these people building this house?”

And Apa Sughra had added in her harsh voice, as if sounding a warning:

“What kind of people are coming here?”

Apa Sughra was not a free-thinking or modern woman and both her twin daughters, Fari and Pari, wore burqas to school. Had it been up to her, she would never have let the Walters move into the neighborhood. For one, they were ‘Sai’ and, for another, Mrs Walter dressed like a loose woman in blue or yellow skirts and sometimes even in trousers. Were there not Sai women who dressed like our mothers in a regular shalwar-kameez? There were. All over. For example, the cleaning woman in our house, Grace. So why did Mrs Walter have a special need to run around in such dresses with such brazenness? But even more shocking to the senses, horrible, and condemnable was what Apa Sughra had imagined about her and then passed on to Ammi:

“Someone who wears such clothes outside must be going around with her bony ass naked in her own house.”

These words made Ammi tremble because the thought of anyone naked, especially a woman, was so frightening that even the idea of it entering someone’s head was condemnable — whether that woman was thin and emaciated like Mrs Walter or plump and healthy. But Apa Sughra had said it just like that, out of spite, though it was completely wrong to argue that you wore less at home than you wore outside. It wasn’t like that at all. The pious women, who went out in shalwar-kameez, did they wear something else or less inside? Of course not. Maybe they didn’t always wear shoes or put on the dupatta, but not wearing shoes couldn’t be taken as a sign of nakedness or a step towards indecency. And although going outside or talking to a man without a dupatta is considered dubious, whenever such an occasion arose — for example to talk to the mali ( gardener) or to sign for a parcel brought by the postman — these pious women, some of whose husbands often slapped them and some who couldn’t even sign their names, immediately covered themselves with their dupattas. Only after donning this grand symbol of modesty and spiritual purity would they open the door and converse with the postman, the mali, or whoever had brought the newspaper bill.

In Apa Sughra’s life, Christians had only one purpose: to come in the morning, clean the house, and go back to their China Basti or somewhere even further away. She wouldn’t even have them clean the house, but cleaning the toilets, which involved cleaning up one’s own mess, was a task that most people around us considered extremely demeaning and wanted someone else to do. This work was appropriate for Christians, especially in the times when there were many houses without a flush system. One couldn’t just pull the chain and send the waste underground to some unknown destination. The commode pans had to be picked up, taken away, emptied, scrubbed clean, and brought back. According to Apa Sughra, Christians were made for such work because perhaps she had never seen Christians like the Walters, who lived in her own neighborhood and in a house quite like hers. All she knew was Susan who did this work, this dirty work of removing waste from her house. Or, before Susan, Alice. But Alice had to be fired because Apa Sughra had caught her one day in the kitchen drinking water from a glass instead of from her designated steel cup. The glasses were for Apa Sughra and her veiled twin daughters — Fari and Pari. The day she caught Alice in this disgusting act, Apa Sughra was crushed and mortified by the thought of not knowing how long she had been drinking water from glasses defiled by Alice.

“Hai, Nudrat Begum,” Apa Sughra had said to Ammi, “Who knows how long we have been eating and drinking out of these foul dishes? Who knows what else she has contaminated? Now, we will have to throw out all the crockery!”

At the time, Ammi had kept quiet but after Apa Sughra left she grumbled: “Despicable woman! She herself looks contaminated to me! She keeps spouting nonsense! Dumb woman!”

“Despicable,” I repeated. “Dumb woman!”

“You be quiet,” Ammi scolded me and began grumbling again. “She keeps talking about purity and impurity but picks her nose all the time! She always smells of sweat! Does she even wash or bathe?”

After the incident with Alice, Apa Sughra threw out all the crockery in the house. She didn’t even bother to ask anyone else if they might want the dishes defiled by a Christian woman. Okay, it’s possible she might have considered it sinful to ask a Muslim this question but she could have asked a Christian — another cleaning person for example. Or the Walters. Though it was quite likely that the Walters had better and more varied crockery than she did. Wine glasses, for example, which are such that the part in which the wine is poured rests on top of a long stem which itself stands straight on a circular flat base — who knows why.

Ammi was irritated by Apa Sughra’s discourse on piety and impiety because she sensed that these were sly attempts at conveying a message. That was perhaps the case for Apa Sughra was an unsophisticated woman and because in our house the religion of the servants — or of anyone really — didn’t have any special significance and we could employ Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, pre-Islamic Arab idol-worshippers, in short any type of servant, without compunction and could even eat food cooked in utensils washed by them. That was the reason Apa Sughra expressed her displeasure through sarcastic hints.

“You are mashallah very liberal and educated people!” or some other such pointed remark like the one she made when we hired Ismail:

“What a relief. He’s a Shia, but at least he recites the kalma. Next time, Allah will help make a better choice.”

The next part of the story can be read here:

The high culture built by the three great gunpowder empires (Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal) is one of the supreme achievements of human civilisation. All three were Turkic in dynastic origin, Persianate in literary and aesthetic register, and Islamic in faith. The Blue Mosque in Istanbul, the Naqsh-e Jahan complex in Isfahan, the Taj Mahal at Agra: these are not regional artefacts. They are a single coherent civilisational signature, expressed in tilework, ghazal, miniature, garden, cuisine, and chancery prose, across a belt that ran from the Bosphorus to the Bay of Bengal.

The question this post is about is simpler than it sounds. Who inherits it?

When we look at the other major civilisational matrices, the answer is usually one polity, or at most two. Western high culture has a clear custodian in the Euro-American complex. Chinese high culture sits, more or less unambiguously, inside the People’s Republic and its Sinosphere periphery. Indian high culture, for all its internal diversity, is held by a single state of 1.4 billion that increasingly understands itself as the civilisational heir. The custodianship is contested at the margins but not at the centre.

Sixty States

Islamicate civilisation has no such custodian. It is split between fifty-five and sixty Muslim-majority states, none of which can credibly claim to be the seat of the inheritance. Turkey has the Ottoman archive but spent a century half-disowning it. Iran has the Persianate aesthetic core but is sealed off by sanctions and theocracy. Pakistan has the Mughal afterlife but lacks the depth of state capacity to project it. The Arab Gulf has the wealth but, conspicuously, has chosen Saint-Tropez over Istanbul. The wealthiest Muslims on earth holiday in the south of France rather than in the capitals of their own past.

A Global Southern Division

This is not unique. It is the recurring pattern of the global South. Latin America shares a language, a religion, and a colonial history, and has produced no meaningful bloc; the Bolivarian project collapsed in the nineteenth century and nothing has replaced it. Sub-Saharan Africa shares a colonial substrate and a thickening pan-African discourse but no operational unity, and the African Union has nothing like the weight of the EU or ASEAN. The Muslim world is the third instance of the same phenomenon: a vast cultural commons fragmented into nation-states, none of which can carry the whole, and an OIC that has never functioned as anything more than a debating chamber. ASEAN is the partial exception, and it is instructive that ASEAN’s coherence is procedural rather than civilisational. Only the West, China, and India have managed to keep the high-cultural inheritance and the political vehicle inside the same container.

Lost Potential for PakIran

We judge Pakistan and Iran by their potential, which is the only honest standard for nations of that historical weight. Both have fallen short of it, and the reasons are structural rather than moral. Iran’s 1979 revolution closed off the country at exactly the moment its Persianate soft power could have become the organising centre of the Islamicate world; the Pahlavi modernisation, whatever its faults, had been pointing in that direction. Pakistan accepted, at partition, a piecemeal share of the Mughal inheritance and then spent seventy-eight years in a posture of conflict with India that has kept it poor and kept the inheritance illegible to the wider world. The Ashraf elites who chose partition accepted, perhaps without fully understanding it, the partitioning of the legacy itself.

Singing in Urdu while banning it

Meanwhile the legacy survives by being appropriated. India, which is the largest single repository of Islamicate material culture outside the Arab world, has formally turned against Urdu and yet cannot stop singing in it. Hindustani classical music is unthinkable without its Muslim lineages. The biryani, the kebab (Persian in origin, Muslim in diffusion), the qawwali, the ghazal: these continue to do civilisational work inside a polity that is officially uninterested in crediting them.

Our own Faith is itself a Qajar-era inheritance, born in Iran in the 1840s and exiled by the late Ottomans to Akka, and its aesthetic sensibility remains moored in that nineteenth-century Persianate world. The Guardianship that followed, from 1921 to 1957, unfolded entirely inside the Anglo-American hegemony, and the Faith’s institutional centre of gravity migrated with it. We are, in a small way, another example of the diffusion.

Islamicate is everywhere but nowhere

This is the paradox. The Islamicate legacy is everywhere and nowhere. It has no capital, no flag, no custodian state, and yet it shapes the food, music, and architecture of half the world. India erases Urdu from its schools and then puts it back into its film songs. The Gulf builds skyscrapers in a global modernist idiom and flies its families to the Côte d’Azur. The inheritance disperses, gets relabelled, gets absorbed, and continues.

If the Ummah is to recover anything resembling civilisational coherence, it will need a socio-cultural-political pole, and at present there is no candidate for it. Until then, the inheritors will be unofficial: a Hindu nationalist humming a ghazal, a Bahá’í drawn to a Persianate aesthetic, a Frenchman ordering a döner. That is not nothing. But it is not custodianship either.

One caveat first. When we write or administer here, we do not speak for our Faith in any official capacity. We are members of it. That is the limit of our standing.

The clearest statement of the Bahá’í position comes from the pen of the Beloved Guardian of the Faith, Shoghi Effendi, who in July 1947 was asked directly by the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine to clarify the relationship of the Bahá’í community to the country and its political future. His reply, written from Haifa and reproduced in The Bahá’í World, Volume 11, is as close to a foundational text on this question as exists. We quote it at length, because paraphrase would not do it justice.

Letter to the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine

On July 9, 1947, Shoghi Effendi received a letter from the chairman of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine requesting a statement on the relationship, which the Baha’i­ Faith has to Palestine and the Baha’i­ attitude toward any future changes in the status of the country. From Shoghi Effendi’s reply, the following paragraphs are quoted in The Baha’i­ World, Volume 11 (1946-1950), pp.43-44.1

HAIFA, ISRAEL—15 July 1947

“The position of the Baha’i­s in this country is in a certain measure unique: Whereas Jerusalem is the spiritual center of Christendom it is not the administrative center of either the Church of Rome or any other Christian denomination. Likewise although it is regarded as the second most sacred shrine of Islam, the most Holy site of the Muhammadan Faith, and the center of its pilgrimages, are to be found in Arabia, not in Palestine. The Jews alone offer somewhat of a parallel to the attachment which the Baha’i­s have for this country, inasmuch as Jerusalem holds the remains of their Holy Temple and was the seat of both the religious and political institutions associated with their past history. But even their case differs in one respect from that of the Baha’i­s for it is in the soil of Palestine that the three central Figures of our Religion are buried and it is not only the center of Baha’i­’ pilgrimages from all over the world but also the permanent seat of our Administrative Order, of which I have the honor to be the Head.”

“The Baha’i­ Faith is entirely nonpolitical and we neither take sides in the present tragic dispute going on over the future of the Holy Land and its people nor have we any statement to make or advice to give as to what the nature of the political future of this country should be. Our aim is the establishment of universal peace in this world and our desire to see justice prevail in every domain of human society, including the domain of politics. As many of the adherents of our Faith are of both Jewish and Moslem extraction, we have no prejudice towards either of these groups and are most anxious to reconcile them for their mutual good and for the good of the country.”

“What does concern us, however, in any decisions made affecting the future of Palestine, is that the fact be recognized by whoever exercises sovereignty over Haifa and Acre, that within this area exists the spiritual and administrative world center of a world Faith, and that the independence of that Faith, its right to manage its affairs from this source, the right of Baha’i­s from any and every country of the globe to visit it as pilgrims (enjoying the same privilege in this respect as Jews, Moslems and Christians do in regard to visiting Jerusalem), be acknowledged and permanently safeguarded.”

Three things are worth drawing out.

“The House of the Báb in Shíráz, one of the most holy sites in the Bahá’í world, was destroyed by Revolutionary Guardsmen in 1979 and later razed by the government” by Baha’i Media Bank.

First, the Bahá’í World Centre sits in Haifa and Akka, in present-day Israel, not by political choice but because that is where the three central Figures of the Faith (Bahá’u’lláh, the Báb, and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá) are buried. The siting is theological, not strategic. Bahá’u’lláh was exiled to Akka by the Ottomans as a prisoner of the Sublime Porte; the geography is a residue of nineteenth-century Persian and Ottoman statecraft, not twentieth-century Zionism.

Second, the Faith is officially and constitutionally non-partisan on the political future of the land. Shoghi Effendi was being asked, on the eve of partition, to take a side. He declined, explicitly, and on principle. That principle has not changed in the seventy-nine years since.

Third, what the Faith does ask for is institutional independence: the right of pilgrimage, the right to administer its world centre, the right of Bahá’ís of every nationality (Iranian, Jewish, Arab, Muslim, Christian) to access its holy places on the same footing as the Abrahamic faiths access Jerusalem. That is the only political ask, and it is procedural.

Clarification is not partisanship. It is simply the record.

Farhat Auntie’s apprehension had been lingering for many years. She once told Ammi she suspected Fizzu Uncle didn’t believe in Allah and had perhaps become a Hindu. Farhat Auntie’s suspicion was aroused when Fizzu Uncle obtained the Hindus’ thick religious book, the Gita, from somewhere and began reading it with concentration. When Ammi heard this, she bit her nails and agreed with Farhat Auntie that her husband had always reeked of idolatry. She added without thinking that she was sure he had always been an idolater and had tricked Farhat Auntie into marriage by passing himself off as a Muslim. Ammi also expressed the opinion that one didn’t become a Muslim simply by having the azaan recited in one’s ear. Faith was the real thing.

Farhat Auntie took this to heart. When she reached home that day, she told Fizzu Uncle bluntly he would have to own up to his religion. Had he become a Hindu or some other type of unbeliever? Had he always been like this and married her deceitfully or had he only recently become a non-Muslim?

Uncle replied that he hadn’t deceived her because she had never asked his religion. Farhat Auntie was stunned. She said everyone was Muslim and if he wasn’t he should have let her know. He lied to her. Fizzu Uncle was surprised to hear that everyone was Muslim, but remained quiet at the time. Farhat Auntie started screaming that he shouldn’t sit calmly and think she would put up with this. She would seek a divorce if she had to. Fizzu Uncle reminded her there wouldn’t be need for that; he had already conceded her the right in the marriage contract, precisely so that if one day she no longer wanted to live with him, she wouldn’t have to run around the courts getting him to divorce her.

“But what’s the need for this? We are getting along fine,” he had said.

“Getting along fine? Fine? We Muslim women cannot marry non-Muslims. You must clearly declare your religion.”

Fizzu Uncle had said it wasn’t such a simple issue. There were many complications and he couldn’t yet say with certainty what his religion should be or whether he should even have one. He wanted to study these things and reflect on them so he could reach an informed decision on whether to adopt a religion at all and, if he did, one that would be acceptable to both his head and heart.

“You should also study these things,” he said.

“Study? Study? Stop talking rubbish! I am a Muslim and if you are not a Muslim then our marriage was invalid. That was not a marriage!” Then she started sobbing and said that if he wasn’t a Muslim it meant she had been living a life of sin.

These grim and scary remarks should have prompted Fizzu Uncle to reassure Farhat Auntie or at least remain silent, but he couldn’t keep himself from saying:

“If the marriage contract was invalid, then divorce is also unnecessary. We were never married in the first place. ”

But, fortunately he also said that legally he remained a Muslim because he had never, ever, anywhere, announced he had a different religion and by virtue of being born in a Muslim household, he would be considered one.

This consolation had not done much to soothe Auntie. Instead, she wailed and repeated Ammi’s remark that being born in a Muslim home or having the azaan recited in one’s ear was not enough. If you didn’t have faith in your heart, you weren’t a Muslim.

That very day, Farhat Auntie went back to Ammi and narrated this story. She said she would separate from that man or divorce him or do whatever was necessary. Ammi sympathized with Auntie but didn’t seem convinced that she needed to separate or get a divorce. She didn’t want any such storm in Farhat Auntie’s life and regretted her earlier blunt words that had brought matters to this pass. All at once, she recalled what Fizzu Uncle had said to Farhat Auntie:

“You have a young son. What’s the need for such a huge step? Look, I have no great sympathy for that man but if the law says what he has claimed, then there must be something in it. He hasn’t yet declared he wasn’t a Muslim at the time of marriage. And, if you pay attention, he hasn’t said he isn’t a Muslim now.”

Ammi’s words reassured Auntie a little, but not all that much. She wept some more before regaining control and saying:

“I will go ask what he was when we got married.”

“No, no,” Ammi said. “Don’t ask him anything. Don’t make that mistake. Who knows how he might respond? Stay absolutely quiet and try to ensure he doesn’t ‘study’ anything.”

“But what if he himself declares at some point he is not a Muslim? Then what will I do? Nudrat, would I live in sin with such a man? Shall I live in fear all my life he might say he is not a Muslim or, even worse, that he was never one in the first place?”

“Enough. Be quiet. If you don’t ask, he won’t say it.”

After Auntie left, Ammi told the entire story to Abba, looking at him suspiciously. She finally couldn’t keep from doing what she had told Auntie not to. She went ahead and asked Abba what kind of friendship existed between him and that man? What did they talk about ? Had Abba become a non-believer or a Hindu like him?

Abba first tried to explain that Fizzu Uncle was not a non-believer or a Hindu. He was only searching. And for now, he was most likely a Muslim.

“OK, he’s a real Muslim,” Ammi had said sarcastically. “What’s he in search of, the owl-eyed one? Tell me?”

Abba explained further that Fizzu Uncle thought just as different exercise regimens existed for physical health from which you could choose the one that best suited you, so there were different regimens for the health of the soul. He was only searching to find which religion would be right for his soul.

“Wah Wah!” Ammi laughed loudly. In Punjabi, she said: “He hasn’t ever done any exercise for his body and now he’s so concerned about his soul? He’s talking rubbish, the dishonorable fellow! And if he dies while searching, he will go straight to hell!”

Abba tried to clarify that Fizzu Uncle believed searching sincerely was as good as finding the truth and choosing the right religion for oneself. But he saw Ammi becoming increasingly enraged so he left the remark unfinished and fell silent. Ammi had asked point-blank if Abba was also searching for some such regimen? At once, Abba denied that vehemently and said there was nothing of the sort, God forbid. Ammi must not have been completely convinced but she didn’t pursue the matter further. This time, she acted on the advice she had given Farhat Auntie — to keep quiet and not ask at all lest it be proven correct that one had really been living in sin.

Gaurav’s post on the asymmetry of Hindu and Islamic worldviews deserves a response from the third corner of the room. We are not Hindu and we are not Muslim, though our community emerged from inside the Islamicate and is now demographically clustered in the Indic world. The Bahá’í position on the questions Gaurav raises is not a centrist mush. It is a specific civilisational stance, and it begins with a woman taking off her veil.

We were in Revere earlier this evening, the working-class strip north of Boston that the city has quietly handed over to its Spanish-speaking and Muslim arrivals. The playground was alive. Salvadoran grandmothers, Moroccan mothers, a small republic of children negotiating the slide. What struck us was how many of the pubescent girls already wore the hijab. Not the older women alone, not adults making a choice. Eleven year olds. Twelve year olds.

For most secular observers this registers as a costume detail. For us it lands harder. The hijab is the one piece of Islamic practice against which our faith was built.

Conference of Badasht

In June 1848, in a hamlet called Badasht in northern Iran, eighty one Bábís met to settle a question that had been splitting them for months. Was the Báb a reformer working within Islam, or had he opened a new dispensation that broke the Sharia outright? Quddús held the conservative line. Táhirih did not. She walked into the assembly without her veil. Men fainted. One slashed his own throat in shock and fled the camp wounded. The break with Islam was not announced in a treatise. It was announced on a woman’s face.

A word on who she was, since the present discussion at Brown Pundits has spent its energy arguing about Hazrat Ayesha’s age. Táhirih was an adult. She was a mujtahida in her own right, a poet in Persian and Arabic, trained in the Shaykhí school at Karbala, a peer of the male clerics she debated. Her teacher Siyyid Kázim Rashtí had called her Qurratu’l-‘Ayn, the solace of the eyes, for her scholarship. Bahá’u’lláh gave her the second name at Badasht itself: Táhirih, the Pure One. Four years later the Qajar state strangled her with her own scarf and threw her body down a well. She is reported to have said, before they killed her, that they could kill her as soon as they liked but they could not stop the emancipation of women.

This is why the hijab carries a charge for us that other modest dress does not. We feel nothing in particular when we see a Marwari matron draw her ghoonghat over her face, or a Carmelite in habit, or a married Orthodox Jewish woman with a brunette wig in North London. Modesty as such does not offend us. What the hijab carries, and what those other garments do not, is the specific civilisational opponent against whom our faith defined itself. Táhirih’s gesture was not a vote against cloth. It was a vote against an entire jurisprudential order, the same order in which Kabir, on this very thread, defends chādor aur chārdīwārī as Pakistani cultural patrimony.

We grant that many Muslim women wear the hijab as piety, dignity, identity continuity, or anti-consumer modesty, and we do not contest those readings. Our quarrel is not with the women who choose it. Our query is with the jurisprudential frame that did not historically treat it as a choice. We read Táhirih and we read Kabir and we conclude, without animus, that we are no longer of the same civilisation.

Persianate Pork

The other markers function the same way. We eat pork. Not because pork is nutritious, but because the Qur’anic prohibition is the cleanest possible signal that we are no longer inside the Sharia. We accept progressive revelation. Prophet Muhammad may be the seal of the Prophets but he is not the final one. He is one Manifestation in a sequence that did not close in 632 and will not close with Bahá’u’lláh either. Pork and progressive revelation are real boundaries. The hijab is the founding one, because it was the first to be crossed, and crossed by a woman.

Reverence for Dharma

On the idol question; we find idol worship beautiful. We find the Satanic Verses not so satanic. Al-Lát, al-‘Uzzá and Manát were honoured at Mecca before they were not, and the brief Qur’anic episode in which they were honoured again has always interested us. We read that episode as the road not taken, a moment when the feminine could have been retained. We do not claim Islam should have kept the daughters. We claim that we, looking back, would have. Our sympathy with the Hindu pantheon is not a polite gesture across the table. It is structural.

Allama Iqbal

Allama Iqbal felt this pull, more than his admirers in Lahore tend to admit. In the Javid Nama, his Persian celestial poem of 1932, he places Qurratu’l-‘Ayn in the sphere of Jupiter alongside Hallaj and Ghalib, the noble heretics whose fire he could not look away from. Iqbal flirted with Bábism the way he flirted with Ahmadism, drawn first and then drawing back, because both movements offered a Muslim modernity with prophecy still flowing, and neither could finally be reconciled with the Khatamiyyat he ended up defending. He became, in the 1930s, an architect of the argument later used to expel the Ahmadis from Islam. The poem remained. The verses on Táhirih are among the most generous lines ever written about her by a man outside our faith.

The Ahmadis

The Ahmadi case is worth a paragraph because it is the inverse of ours. Ahmadis are persecuted in Pakistan because they insist they are Muslim. The Shahada itself contains no finality clause. Khatamiyyat is doctrine built around Qur’an 33:40, not the creed proper. Ahmadis recite the Shahada, accept Muhammad as messenger, and are nonetheless legislated out of Islam by the state. Bahá’ís in Iran are persecuted for the opposite reason. The Egyptian Supreme Administrative Court ruled in 2006, on the ID card question, that we are not Muslim. We had asked for that ruling and wholeheartedly agree. That is the point. The Ahmadi tragedy is to be exiled from a house they refuse to leave. The Bahá’í position is to be punished for the house we built next door.

A last thought, because the women’s question and the civilisational question turn out to be the same question. We walk in and out of the Islamicate at our choosing. We are now, demographically and aesthetically, a faith with a Persian spine living in Dharmic civilisational proximity. Theologically we remain Abrahamic monotheists. The proximity is civilisational, not metaphysical.

In abandoning Urdu we returned to Persian, the language in which Táhirih wrote her ghazals and Bahá’u’lláh wrote the Kitáb-i-Íqán. Urdu speakers like to claim their tongue is something apart from the Hindi-Hindu world around it. No Iranian or Levantine reading Mir or Ghalib mistakes the underlying tongue for theirs. Half the week is named for Hindu planets. The grammar is Khari Boli. The Persian and Arabic layer is real and architectural, but it is a layer, not the foundation. Urdu is an Indic language wearing Persian dress.

What we represent, having shed the hybrid, is the older and more autonomous branch of Indo-Islamic civilisation, the one that did not need to pretend it was not Indian in order to feel Persian. Táhirih dropping her veil at Badasht, and a Bahá’í family, of distant Shi’ite Sayyid origins (the Báb himself was a Sayyid and wore the black turban of descent from the Holy Imáms), eating ham at a wedding today, are the same act, a century and a hemisphere apart.

The veil was never only a veil.

One day, Naveed Bhai hadn’t returned from college by five o’clock. Usually, this wouldn’t have been cause for concern — a slight delay in returning home. But, over the past few days, Naveed Bhai had been behaving in a way that caused Abba to worry that he might be getting involved in something that would land him in trouble with the government of the cartoonish General Zia. Sitting at the dining table one day, Naveed Bhai had said angrily, through clenched teeth, that “we should teach these ignorant student union thugs a lesson.” On hearing this, Abba stared at him and said they had sent him there to study, not to get involved in useless things. Naveed Bhai should go straight to college and come right back. He shouldn’t even think about getting involved in union affairs and getting mixed up with dangerous people. Instead of being quiet after this reprimand, Naveed Bhai started speaking even more loudly:

“They are thugs! Their legs should be broken the way they broke Junaid’s. General Zia is behind them!”

Alarm bells had gone off in Abba’s head once before when Naveed Bhai had said he was going to join an underground group of progressive, pro-democracy students. Abba had only gently rebuked him, saying that future doctors shouldn’t get involved in such nonsense. Student unions were against the law. There was no need to get himself in trouble.

Who knows who he was, poor Junaid, whose legs had been broken. And I didn’t even know what a ‘union’ was but when Abba and Naveed Bhai started arguing loudly, I figured some dangerous people had become members of a student group sponsored by a political party, and now they were hovering around colleges and universities. The party they were affiliated with considered itself the last word on religion, and its sole champion. From Abba and Naveed Bhai’s conversation, I also gathered that these political workers used to beat students and coerce them into obeying strange orders. For example, boys and girls could not walk together on the street. If an emergency forced a boy to talk to a girl, neither of them was to be heard laughing — but such an emergency should never occur. Similar illogical things spewed from their strange minds, like the vomit from Faizan’s mouth. They had always done things like this, on behalf of that criminal general with the cartoon face and never did anything commendable just as that shameless general hadn’t either.

When Abba heard from Naveed Bhai about poor Junaid’s broken legs he became even more worried. Pointing his finger for emphasis, he warned, “Don’t you dare get involved in such things!”

So, on the day Naveed Bhai hadn’t returned by five, Abba initially feigned unconcern and said there wasn’t anything to worry about — he would come home soon. But after another half hour, he said we should go check at the college.

Naveed Bhai was not generally irresponsible. At most, he would sometimes go from college to a friend’s house but even then he would telephone us by dialing the number 50924 which caused our phone to ring. I would be very happy and curious to know who was on the other side striving to transmit his voice to us over the wires.

At 5:30, Ammi flipped open her address book and began calling all of Naveed Bhai’s friends. Only she could do that because she wrote numbers using her own system. The Habib Bank manager’s number, instead of being under ‘H’, was under ‘M’ for manager. And her tailor Ramzan’s number was under ‘T’ (for tailor) instead of ‘R.’ But there was no cause for complaint because she could find numbers at lightning speed. Sometimes when Abba had to find one, he would get frustrated and ask why she couldn’t write them in the right place.

Ammi would reply sharply that the right place was exactly where she had written the number. When Abba argued further, she would tell him to keep his own book and write everything correctly in it and give her back her flawed one. She said she would write in her way till her dying day and if, after death, there were some kind of life in which phones were available and address books were needed, she would still write the same way.

Ammi continued to dial numbers, all the time saying Allah have mercy, Allah have mercy. Abba asked her to stop being melodramatic and just make the call. Then he told me to accompany him to the college to see if we could find out anything. I asked if we should take the gun. Abba looked at me angrily and said:

“Get in the car” and muttered ‘idiot’ as well.

Old post – Reproduced;

My views and politics has changed in last 5 years and i would write a follow-up to this in a week or so. Just thought i would share this in light of recent traffic and comments on this blog.

This blog post was triggered by a Twitter exchange with Akshay Alladi where he questioned why I identify with the label liberal. A lot of people have – on this blog as well as on Twitter or in person have labeled me a Hindutva liberal or closet Sanghi (from the left) or a Hindutva rebel, yet I personally don’t feel comfortable with those labels. Maybe it is positive tribalism on the Saffron side or parochial wokism on the left.

Akshay also referred to me in his blogpost about Liberalism vs Conservatism and I promised I would also come up with an elucidation of my position. Before I go into attempts at formulating my position, a fair warning – I am not a particularly deep thinker on matters of philosophy and do not have an intellectual bent. I get bored with long essays and books about philosophy and religion, it’s the interactions of these abstract ideas with politics, people, and histories (as an art/science) that interests me than the ideas themselves.

It is fair to get some personal biases (which may appear contradictory) I hold out of the way

• I am a staunch Republican and Secularist. In my early twenties years, I was more partial towards the Laicite as I grow old I become more partial towards the British or American style of secularism. (Though the recent events in France have made me reconsider my position).
• I have had a very low opinion of Religions in the 21st century in general and Monotheisms in particular.
• I have some sympathies with Savarkarite Hindutva (not RSS) and I have often been accused of being a closet Sanghi by leftists.
• Though I think of myself as a patriot who is well aware of British exploitation of India, I am an Anglophile. I adore the Brits with their language, literature, culture, models of governance (Westminster model). I don’t have shame in saying “Anglo West is the best”.

I would like to explain my identification with liberalism in three progressive strains.

Roots and Personality:

The TED talk by Jonathan Heidt is also a good watch on this topic. The presentation points to a study about how liberals rate Harm/Fairness higher than Authority/In group loyalty/ Purity. In those 5 fields, I would firmly identify as a liberal. Yet I am partial to a moral relativistic framework for roots of human morality over morality which claims to be self-evident (Maybe with the exception of the Golden Rule).

I don’t hold purity and especially ritual purity as an important virtue. In general more accepting of things that make me uncomfortable. I am less certain and more flexible in my views and positions. Whether or not this is a liberal quality (or just an outcome of uncertainty and skepticism) is debatable, yet it makes me more open to the opinions I don’t hold or find unpalatable. Additionally Atheism, rejection of traditional wisdom when in the conflict in the Zeitgeist puts one on the liberal side in the liberal-conservative divide in many cases.

However, if it’s the uncertainty that makes me liberal, it’s the cynicism that pulls me slightly on the conservative side. I do not believe that the extremes to which liberal democracies have gone in Europe – wrt Capital punishment, Human rights are either pragmatic or even “humane”.

While the above argument is reasonable, I feel it misses the point that the context and the stage of society one find themselves in, as a determinant of one’s position on the Liberal v Conservative scale. Hence I would go supplement the above moorings with the following context.

Indian society:

Even before my engagement with Politics of Liberalism and Conservatism, I have always intuitively associated with liberalism than conservatism. Being a radical atheist, a guilt-ridden savarna and a wannabe feminist has meant that in my family and friend circle I was always the most “Progressive” voice – of course, this is in comparison to more conservative voices.

While there are many things in Indian society worth conserving, it’s the adverse effects of these very things that bother me. The idyllic Indian village is home to both the best and the worst that Indian culture has to offer. One of the good things being the social safety net offered by caste and kin connections and the worst being the rigid institution of caste and sexism which is rampant in such settings. For example – I would not wish to conserve the Indian Joint family – in my worldview that structure has more cons than pros in the 21st-century world we live in. And more importantly, these caste and kin networks are anathema to individual rights and freedoms. If the concepts of personal space and privacy are considered important, one of the ways to achieve this would be loosening the bonds of caste and kin networks.

As Indian society currently stands on balance I would want the society as a whole to progress even if it means sacrificing some things that are good on their own. The conservative position here would be to encourage focusing on conserving traditions while interacting with modernity. The debate between Tilak and Agarkar, Gandhi, and Ambedkar are wonderful examples of such strife in our history, and I would in both cases firmly identify with Agarkar/ Ambedkar’s position. (Though I admire Tilak and Gandhi).

As alluded to in my post on Brahmanical Patriarchy. I personally abhor the traditional treatment of women by religion. In the comment thread, Srikanta K noted the slippery slope that leads from critiques of Brahmanism from Women’s’ rights POV, could lead to the destruction of tradition or demonization of brahmins. My position is exactly the opposite, I focus on the same issue with a different slippery slope, the one which our societies have actually witnessed in history. I can jettison traditions when they conflict with my morality or worldview – even these very traditions may have a net positive impact on society.

However, this position depends vastly on the current state of Indian society I find myself in. From what I know of British and Western societies – I would be markedly less “liberal” if I were in those societies. In other words, I might want to conserve the society the west was a few years ago instead of wanting an identity-focused woke revolution.

Indian Politics and Personalities (Litmus tests):

Complimentary to this would be how one related to national politics, issues, and personalities. A year ago I read the Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India. It is not only a fascinating window into the extraordinary life of Hanuman Prasad Poddar but also a compilation of how Indian leaders responded to the writings, thoughts, and work of Gita Press and Poddar. Gandhi, Rajendra Prasad, Sardar Patel, and even Lal Bahadur Shashtri (along with numerous others) are referenced in the book as having a positive outlook towards the Gita press initiative and reciprocally the Gita press was positive towards these individuals. Conspicuous by their absence are Nehru and Savarkar, while Ambedkar is given somewhat harsh treatment by Gita Press – especially the magazine Kalyan. Incidentally, the three Indian thinkers whose thoughts I relate to most are Nehru, Ambedkar, and Savarkar. While this is a weird group to look up to, but the modernist and rationalist (may I say Liberal ?) zeal in all these individuals that most appeals to me today. The fusion of these thinkers might create a good ideological role model in my thoughts. Personally, I would be most at home with a political outfit that takes Nehru’s liberalism with a pinch of Savarkar’s reformist and nationalist zeal while sticking to the constitutional democracy based on a hotch-potch of western models that Ambedkar held dear and all the while being particularly skeptical of Islam as a religion.

While I don’t deny that India is an ancient civilization (Dharmic for a lack of a better term), in its current Avatar, India is a nation-state of the Westphalian model, and though there may be flaws in this model IMO this model is vastly superior to all previous models known to this land or any land for that matter. Not to go all Niall Ferguson here, but I am partial to the view that the rise of the Western civilization is not just correlated with Western models of governance and economy (classical liberalism) but a consequence of it.

On balance, based on the above issues, my position would be firmly liberal on the liberal vs conservative scale. This is not an accurate assessment in a broad sense, but a consolidation of the above thoughts in a much-needed context. Without context, these labels are mere abstractions, and hence not very useful and not necessarily transferable in a different context. In a state with a just and efficient rule of law, I would probably not identify with liberalism as much, for, in such a state, the tools and mechanisms for the needed change in society can be achieved more easily. But I am not living in such a state and hence would be firmly a Liberal.

Over the past year on this forum, I have seen many members of the “Saffroniate” who seem to have no agenda except to disparage Pakistan.  BB is chief among them but there are others who share essentially the same views but hide behind a tone of neutrality that allows them to claim the moral high ground.  BB is the most open about his views. No other member of the “Saffroniate” has threatened to “infiltrate” Pakistan and make a Pakistani Muslim say “Bharat Mata ki Jai” at gunpoint.  Such an egregious comment had obvious consequences–as it should have.  While others have not crossed this line, it doesn’t mean that their anti-Pakistan attitude and Islamophobia is not obvious.  The word “taqqiya” has been used in reference to me. Using this word for a Muslim is Islamophobic and completely unforgivable. I find it deeply ironic that those who are the first to complain about Hinduphobia have no problem resorting to obvious Islamophobic tropes.

While Indians have legitimate grievances with Pakistanis (as Pakistanis do with Indians), the way to generate a productive dialogue is not to use triggering language like “apartheid”, “kleptocracy” etc. This only causes the other side to double down on their own position and for people to talk past each other.

I also want to address the passive aggressive complaints that I have banned certain people from my threads.  It is a settled principle on BP that authors have the right to manage their threads the way they like. This is a principle that has been hard fought for.  I have made my red lines clear. I will not tolerate anti-Pakistan commentary or people taking a hostile and combative tone with me.  If you can express your POV in a civilized manner while staying within these guidelines, then I will allow your comment to stand–no matter how much I may disagree with it. If not, it will be summarily deleted.

What’s ironic is that some of those who complain the most about this actually have author status and are able to create their own threads on whatever topic they wish.  That they don’t use this status is their choice and not a reflection on me.  It’s of course much easier to complain than it is to actually write your own posts.  To his credit, BB actually uses his author status to make his own arguments.  When he returns from his “vanvaas”, I hope he will contribute posts about Indian movies and TV shows. This would add to the varied mix of topics on this forum.

Lastly, I want to welcome the members of the “Cresenciate”.  I hope, with time, one of them will graduate from commenter to author. It is important to have more Pakistani representation on this forum.   This doesn’t mean that I always agree with them but it is good that all the work of countering the “Saffroniate” doesn’t fall on me.

It would be remiss of me not to mention those Indians who are not really part of the “Saffroniate” such as Gaurav and girmit who always contribute thoughtful points–though again I may vehemently disagree at times.

P.S. I was speaking with a new friend of mine from Hyderabad Deccan recently. He noted that the toxic obsession with Pakistan is a North Indian thing and that South Indians really don’t care all that much.  This intuitively makes sense since of course the worst Partition atrocities occurred in Punjab and Bengal.