From the Editors

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الآن . . . القسم العربي بحلة جديدة

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Pakistan

New Texts Out Now: Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora

1 Apr 11 2012 by Junaid Rana

Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Junaid Rana (JR): My book was borne out of ethnographic research I completed on the role of labor migration in the global economy. I started with some basic questions: why do people become labor migrants, how does labor migration become transnational and global, what are the conditions that lead to labor migration, and how are labor migrants treated abroad? Each of these questions led to complex answers driven by fieldwork I conducted with Pakistanis before and after 11 September 2001, in Lahore, Dubai, and New ...

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New Texts Out Now: The Back to School Edition

0 Aug 31 2011 by Anthony Alessandrini and Bassam Haddad

Just in time for the new semester, we are happy to present a series of eminently teachable texts in the latest edition of NEWTON: James Gelvin, The Modern Middle East: A History and The Arab Uprisings: What Everyone Needs to Know Stephen Sheehi, Islamophobia: The Ideological Campaign Against Muslims Saadia Toor, The State of Islam: Culture and Cold War Politics in Pakistan We hope that the author interviews and excerpts from these texts, together with the others we have featured thus far in New Texts Out Now, will be helpful for those busy assembling syllabi and reading lists, as well as readers searching for sources on a variety of topics. This is also the perfect ...

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On the Historical Study of South Asia and Sufism: An Interview with Nile Green

3 Jul 29 2011 by Ziad Abu-Rish

In the following conversation with Jadaliyya Co-Editor Ziad Abu-Rish, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Professor of History Nile Green discusses some of the issues arising from the study of “Muslims of South Asia and the wider Persianate world.” The bulk of the interview addresses issues related to the study of the history of South Asia, Sufism, and Islam. It concludes with some advice for graduate students struggling to define their research agendas. The interview was originally conducted in the spring of 2009. Ziad Abu-Rish (ZA): Your bio on the UCLA Department of History website lists your field as South Asia. How would you describe your academic ...

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Who Cares About Osama

6 May 07 2011 by Nir Rosen

A flight from Istanbul to New York the day after Usama Bin Ladin was assassinated is an inopportune time to write about what it all means, but I would be thinking about little else anyway between the security checks, the turbulence and the guy at customs asking me what I was just doing in Iraq. Last night thousands of Americans took to the street waving flags to revel in what was both righteous justice and jingoism. That same day hundreds of thousands of communists, leftists and workers took to the streets of Istanbul and Ankara to commemorate May Day and demand more rights. Some sang an old communist guerilla song about taking to the mountains to fight. Some saluted ...

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A Sense of Nervous Anticipation Looms in Pakistan

10 May 04 2011 by Sanaa Alimia

[Pakistani men reading papers about Osama bin Laden's killing. Image from T Mughal/EPA]

There is a nervous tension in the air in Peshawar after the killing of Osama bin Laden. Over the past couple of days, people are holding their breath. Waiting. Waiting to see what will happen next. Rumors are rampant. It almost feels as if death is right now looming above people’s heads. Death, people feel, is waiting to strike Peshawar, waiting to strike Pakistan, yet again. We hope not. We pray not. Yet everyone here feels that things are about to get worse, yet again. Questions are being raised in the United States over Pakistan’s role and responsibility in harboring Osama bin Laden. Although there have been some efforts to show that Pakistan did not know that Osama ...

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Essential Readings: Reading Pakistan

5 Apr 15 2011 by Madiha R. Tahir

[Protest in Karachi against drone strikes. Image from EPA/The Express Tribune]

Here are the stripped down facts: Pakistan is roughly 165 million people. Most of us are young: 69 percent of the population is under age 30. And we’re poor. Almost a quarter of the people here live below the poverty line. As I write, the quarter-finals for the cricket world cup are underway. Pakistan’s unpredictable and occasionally magnificent team is playing the West Indies. The sport, which was a kind of civilizing project to teach Victorian mores, has become a national obsession. Beyond that, you could go through this or this or this or this, but at the end of it, frankly, you’d know very little, or more accurately, you’d know just enough to be ...

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American Innocence and Its Victims (Part 1)

3 Oct 04 2010 by Anthony Alessandrini

[See Part 2 here] We should be somewhat grateful, I suppose, that the New York Times Book Review dedicated its back-page essay to a review of the current edition of the literary journal Granta, a special issue devoted to Pakistan. After all, literature from Pakistan deserves a wider audience in the U.S., and in addition to publishing work by Anglophone writers such as Mohsin Hamid and Fatima Bhutto, who have already gotten some attention, the Granta special issue also includes translations from the Urdu of poems by Yasmeen Hameed and Hasina Gul. In a larger sense, any consideration of Pakistan in any light other than that usually shone by the U.S. mainstream ...

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"Beirut: Ornament of Our World" Faiz's 1982 Poem on Beirut

0 Mar 19 2012 by Vijay Prashad

[For my comrades and poetry aficionados: Fawwaz Trabulsi and Mayssun Sukarieh, and for Raza Mir.] Reading Faiz in Beirut. Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911-1984) is one of the greatest Urdu poets of the 20th century. Born in Sialkot, Punjab, Faiz came of age under colonial rule and in the throes of nationalist anti-colonialism. He joined the British Indian Army; he was an integral part of the Progressive Writers Association. He wrote searing poetry about life, and revolution, taking older poetic forms and forging ...

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New Texts Out Now: Saadia Toor, "The State of Islam: Culture and Cold War Politics in Pakistan"

2 Aug 31 2011 by Saadia Toor

Saadia Toor, The State of Islam: Culture and Cold War Politics in Pakistan. London and New York: Pluto Press, 2011. Jadaliyya: What made you write this book? Saadia Toor: I felt compelled to write this book because of the increasingly disturbing discourse on Pakistan in the West, both within the media and within academia. There is a mixture of incomprehension and hawkishness in this discourse when it comes to Pakistan, which is extremely dangerous given the increasing extension of the US/NATO war in ...

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Bin Laden's TV

0 May 23 2011 by Rebecca Luna Stein

“An aging man crouched before a TV -- a junkie TV, I might add -- in a darkened room. Not exactly how most people picture the man who called for global jihad.” --CNN Over the course of the last week, there has been much discussion of the Bin Laden videos released by the Pentagon, footage seized during the Navy Seal raid in Abbottabad. The most damning video captured during the course of the raid — or, thus we have been assured by media pundits — is that of a seated and stooped Bin Laden, ...

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The Fateful Choice

2 May 06 2011 by MERIP Editors

When 19 al-Qaeda hijackers attacked New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, the United States faced a strategic dilemma that was unique in magnitude, but not in kind. Terrorists had killed numerous civilians before, in the US and elsewhere, with and without state sponsorship. Al-Qaeda was not the first non-state actor to present no coherent demands alongside its propaganda of the deed or to have no single fixed address. Nor were Americans the first victims of unprovoked terrorist assault to set ...

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Memoir and Mythology

2 Apr 25 2011 by Mimi Kirk

Facts aren’t the only thing that should be checked in Three Cups of Tea The recent uproar over Greg Mortenson’s immensely popular nonfiction book Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission To Promote Peace... One School at a Time has centered around the question of whether the account is factual, and whether Mortenson is siphoning money from his $20 million-a-year charity, the Central Asia Institute (CAI). Three Cups of Tea is the ostensibly nonfiction narrative of Mortenson’s efforts to build secular ...

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American Innocence and Its Victims (Part 2)

1 Oct 07 2010 by Anthony Alessandrini

[See Part 1 here] For a literary editor, Chotiner is quite selective in his application of interpretative skills. When the Granta contributors touch on what we are already programmed to understand as the ills of Pakistani society—misogyny, for example, or religious fundamentalism—he is fully prepared to accept this as a transparent rendering of “the crueler, more vicious aspects of Pakistani society.” When the same writers represent the widespread discontent with the role played by U.S. foreign ...

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