Tag: featured
Sociality and the burqa question
France may have lost the football World Cup but it has won its case in the European Court of Human Rights to ensure that no one covers his or her face in public. This verdict stems from a challenge to France’s 2010 edict banning the public from wearing religious symbols, including crucifixes, yarmulkes and burqas. […]
Five reasons why Hawking is right to boycott Israel
As announced by the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine (BRICUP) and subsequently covered by The Guardian, Reuters and others, world-renowned theoretical physicist and cosmologist Professor Stephen Hawking has decided to heed the Palestinian call for boycott, and pull out of an Israeli conference hosted by President Shimon Peres in June. After initial confusion, this was confirmed – Hawking is staying away on political […]
Condemning Israel without Being Anti-Semitic
In the context of the Israeli offence in Gaza, there is a loud hue and cry all across the world, condemning the attack. That Israel chooses the holy month of Ramadan for this offence renders its act even more barbaric, which makes the indifferent ‘onlookers’ both in the east and in the west complicit in […]
The Art of Giving in to Nature
It is an enviable saga of a single man’s continuous hard work and dedication to bring about great changes in the lives of the villagers. He created a 32-acre forest in a barren rocky wasteland. It has bettered the climate of the place, improved the standard of living, and served and saved the lives […]
Algeria and the Politics of the Spectator
While I write this note, FIFA 2014 witnessed a fantastic jolt with Germany in the first semi-final dealing a humiliating drubbing to the host Brazil by 7-1. Before the first semi-final the equations had been evenly-poised: Argentina and Brazil, the two fossilized teams from Latin America along with Germany and Netherlands, two European giants. […]
Hijab and Stealthy Freedom: The Double Standard
Economist on the June 14th issue carried a story on “My Stealthy Freedom”, a social media campaign launched by an expat Iranian living in London. The campaign aims to ruffle the feather of religious orthodoxy by uploading in social media sites, including Facebook, images of women who don’t want to put on Hijab. According to […]
Islamic Fashion: A Rebellious Choice
The book Islamic Fashion and Anti-Fashion, focuses on trends, attires, personalities and discourses prevalent in Islamic fashion and proves that Islamic fashion developed as a rupture with the notions of fashion, understood both as an industry with its reckless celebration of female body as well as capitalization of human desires and as ‘pervasive cultural colonialism’ as […]
Islamic Fashion: Corruptive or Corrective?
“Islam is all about achieving the ideal of spiritual reform. So it offers an ethical vision beyond the immediate temptation of matter and materialism. What we call ‘Islamic fashion’ is oxymoron. Fashion is the sole by-product of capitalism, a political and economic reincarnation of materialism. How can Islam be in accord with the pettiness and […]
‘Fashion Is the Biggest Oxymoron in My Life’
Zinah Nur Sharif is a fashion blogger, designer and cover girl. An outspoken critic of the fashion industry as it was normally understood, Zinah uses the platform of blog to take to people her innovative and revolutionary ideas of clothing and fashion. In conversation with Emma Tarlo, she explains the crucial ideas prevalent in the […]
French Fiction Written in Urdu
Frenchman Julien Columeau came to Pakistan at the age of 30 as a humanitarian worker, but a knack for languages and love of books have made him one of the country’s most innovative Urdu novelists. Writing mainly historical fiction with a prose described as vivid and forceful, critics say that Columeau, now 41, has […]
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