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Loving Compassion in Islam and Buddhism: Rahma and Karunā

Loving Compassion in Islam and Buddhism: Rahma and Karunā

Compassion, even on the human plane, is not just a sentiment, it is an existential quality. This existential quality presupposes a concrete sense of participation in the suffering of others, as is expressed by the etymology of the word: com-passion means to ‘suffer with’ another. The metaphysics of tawhīd finds its most appropriate ethical expression […]

December 9, 2015 Reza Shah-Kazemi
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Lives suddenly in transit

Lives suddenly in transit

It’s Saturday. The sun is out. It has been out for a day or two now, but today’s sun feels different. It’s brighter, warmer. It feels like a promise. Some of the streets are dry — they’re dull and grey, the way we like it, and not black and shiny, the way they’ve been for […]

December 7, 2015 Baradwaj Rangan
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Is Equality Really a Bad Word?

Is Equality Really a Bad Word?

Gender equality has come to fore as a hot topic for debate. With the statement of Turkish President Recep Teyep Erdogan that motherhood is a precious value which feminism has discarded in a wholesale manner is the hotter piece of cake in the debating table. The obvious problem in his statement, if the cited words […]

December 4, 2015 Interactive Edit
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Anthropology of Compassion

Anthropology of Compassion

Ibn Arabi, as most of us know, has commonly been called  Shaikhul Akbar, the greatest teacher. The main reason for this is that he explained in unprecedented detail and at the highest level of discourse all implications of the Islamic world view. The result was the vast synthesis of learning covering all basic fields of […]

December 1, 2015 William Chittick
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Questions Mernissi Posed

Questions Mernissi Posed

While parsing the jibes and demurs in the social media motivated by a religious scholar’s latest misogynic comments, I read the sad news of Fatema Mernissi’s demise. In Kerala, Mernissi has, of all feminist-leaning Muslim authors, been read most avidly. That is because two works by her has been translated into the native Malayalam language. […]

December 1, 2015 Shameer KS
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Tipu Sultan and his ‘Indian Dream’

Tipu Sultan and his ‘Indian Dream’

A lot has been said of Tipu Sultan. Why does the so-called-debate pop up every third week of November? The newspapers in Karnataka and the rest of India have been filled with stories of the Mysorean ruler, trying to place him in an India that is increasingly gripped by frequent doses of ‘Ultra Nationalism’. The […]

November 27, 2015 Ali Ahsan
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Intolerance and Cultural Dissenters

Intolerance and Cultural Dissenters

Recently, a spate of artists, writers, filmmakers and scientists from different backgrounds came out and talked about rising intolerance in India. The Dadri incident where Muhammad Akhlaq was lynched after ‘rumours’ of him having stored beef in his refrigerator, the burning of Dalit children by upper caste men in Faridabad and the various sending offs […]

November 17, 2015 Ali Ahsan
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Sharjah Turns New Pages

Sharjah Turns New Pages

  Conveying somber mood over his non-participation this year, MUHAMMED NOUSHAD remembers the 30th Sharjah International Book Fair and the encounters he had with the people and books during the fair, as the event this year  has ended three days ago. In a November midnight in 2011, Ali Ahsan and I landed in Sharjah Airport, […]

November 17, 2015 Muhammed Noushad
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Selfies Can’t Capture Indian Streets

Selfies Can’t Capture Indian Streets

There are differences of opinion as to whether a photographer ought to click a picture of someone lying on the pavement. The question of whether they are being objectified solely on the basis of a few photographs is a raging debate. Ajeeb Komachi’s collection of photographs of the poor and the downtrodden have over the years […]

November 16, 2015
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Mughals: Perspectives and Prejudices

Mughals: Perspectives and Prejudices

Mughal history is often taken up in contemporary India, or larger South Asia, to absolve the present of its responsibility for some bitter, hard-to-digest political realities, by taking recourse to a past either glorious or disgraceful. Post Dadri lynching, it was debated all around how a bedridden Babur advised his son Humayun to respect Hindus […]

November 14, 2015 Shameer KS
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