Archive for the 'Funda Brigade' Category
Tuesday, July 15th, 2008
well i never!
Friday, May 23rd, 2008
Hazrat Darymple on Pakistan
Darymple writes about the possibilies of Pakistan in the NY review of books:
As you travel around Pakistan today you can see the effects of the boom everywhere: in vast new shopping malls and smart roadside filling stations, in the cranes of the building sites and the smokestacks of factories, in the expensive new cars jamming the roads and in the ubiquitous cell-phone stores. In 2003 the country had fewer than three million cell phones; today apparently there are 50 million, while car ownership has been increasing at roughly 40 percent a year since 2001. At the same time foreign direct investment has risen from $322 million in 2002 to $3.5 billion in 2006.
Sunday, May 4th, 2008
“Without science, religion turns to radicalism, and without religion, science is blind and brings the world to danger.”
Monday, January 21st, 2008
PIA Ads - Charting the demise of Pakistani liberalism
I was looking for the ad below, as an example of something PIA just wouldnt be able to get past most people’s self-righteous morality, and I came across a discussion for another PIA ad that would be unpublishable for a completely different reason..
I suspect vs. the 60s when this ad was published, pakistani society has certainly regressed when it comes to pluralism / liberalness (no thanks to Zia, et al.), but there is probably a far greater gap in absolute perspectives on society than there ever was previously..
Source: http://commercial-archive.com/node/142249
Saturday, January 19th, 2008
three cheers for our side
you know, i’m not sure how to end this. a maulvi figurehead wouldn’t appease anyone, i think.
basically, this is an armed battle between the army - i.e., the state - and the tehreek-i-taliban. now, the army - even if it didn’t have taliban sympathisers within - can’t go after the taliban as strongly as they would some foreign attackers, because that would only alienate more people from the state. the taliban, on the other hand, don’t have this problem, i think, because their support is based mainly on ideological grounds. it seems like they think they’re fighting for a utopian ideal, and no cost is too great to achieve it.
in the middle ground, i guess, there are people who sympathise with political resistance against the state, but who are simultaneously in favour of a state that’s less committed to enforcing an ideology. i think they usually end up yielding in the face of force, whether from the taliban or the state. i don’t know, but it’s certainly possible that, if this does become a more widespread thing, we could see a third group - or maybe more - emerge - one that’s anti-taliban and anti-state. if any such groups ally themselves based on ethnicity, and not behind the idea of pakistan, then we could see the breakup of pakistan into more than just two or three parts.
in ideological terms, the strange thing about this situation is that both the pakistani state and the taliban have similar lineages - ones drawn from islam. despite the labels tossed around - infidel! extremist! - it’s very difficult to convince most muslims - like most pakistani citizens - to fight other muslims. in political terms, there’s the fact that most of the support for the taliban comes from places where people don’t consider themselves part of pakistan, and not accountable to the state.
in any sort of discussion or negotiation, i suspect the state and the taliban wouldn’t be able to reach a settlement because the taliban would ask for shariah law, and the state would ask them to lay down their arms. and, understandably, neither would be willing to make those concessions.
so, i think, there is definitely space for some sort of islamic project to reconcile the two, and there’s also space for a political project to reconcile them. martial law won’t do it, and neither will legions of suicide bombers. since they are both too busy fighting each other, someone else will have to start working on these issues.
Friday, January 18th, 2008
Et tu Malaysia?
In Ziauddin Sardar’s excellent book Desperately Seeking Paradise, he remarks that South East Asia’s more tolerant version of Islam is exemplified by the fact that they are incapable of growing full, thick, beards.
So it’s slightly disappointing that there are some, bizarro stories coming out of Malaysia, suggesting that they might be becoming more hardline.
http://indiauncut.com/iublog/article/topless-in-malaysia/ (This is actually quite funny, but still)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7163391.stm
Friday, January 18th, 2008
the taliban are coming!
the past few days have seen militants launch frontal attacks on forts in south waziristan agency. on late tuesday/early wednesday, a fort fell in sararogha. it’s since been regained by the pakistani army. there were also reports that a fort in siplatoi fell to militants on wednesday night. the army confirmed the attack, but denied that the fort fell.
various taliban factions in pakistan are now presenting a united front as the tehreek-i-taliban, under the leadership of baitullah mehsud, allegedly the mind behind benazir bhutto’s murder.
put this all together with this extremely saddening review of the situation in peshawar, and what we have is clearly no longer a case of creeping talibanisation.
this, ladies and gentlemen, is civil war.