A worth reading article ( shared by Zafar Khizer) by Mubarik ALi on historical perspective of religious consciousness that lead to the partition of India and is further fragmenting the society in Pakistan. ( F. Sheikh ).

In medieval India, people were conscious of their social cast and ethnic identity but in the colonial period right up to 1813, new political and social changes significantly shaped religious identity and its consciousness.

In its earlier days the East India Company, being solely interested in economic expansion, but also aware of the religious sensitivities of the subcontinent, discouraged missionaries from coming to India. Later, as the government became more stable, their policies changed and they supported the missionaries who arrived in the subcontinent to convert people to Christianity. The government believed that if the people converted and became Christians, it would be relatively easier to govern them on the basis of sharing the same religious beliefs.

The missionaries condemned the religions of the subcontinent and persuaded people to embrace the Christian faith. They openly preached in public places like Lahore’s Anarkali bazaar. Their activity intensified when in 1837, a German missionary known as Karl Pfander arrived in the subcontinent at a time when the Muslim community had lost its political power, vitality and energy. He believed that the society was backward and degenerate, so it would be easy to convert people to Christianity, which was — in his view — an advanced and progressive religion. But his argument was refuted by Dr Nazir and Maulvi Rehmat Ali in public discussions and a disappointed Pfander left India in 1857.

The activities of the missionaries alarmed people who began to feel insecure about their religious beliefs. The Hindu and Muslim religious leaders came forward to defend their religion through munazra or public debates held in different cities, where people would gather to listen to religious scholars criticising each other’s faith while defending their own religion. These debates created a religious consciousness among the masses while elevating the social status of the religious scholars within the community.

Religious activity was further enhanced when religious organisations such as the Arya Samaj for the Hindu community; and the Tablighi Jamaat and Tanzim for the Muslim community, were founded in order to protect their respective religions. To reach out to the masses, newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets were published to highlight the truth of their avowed faith. Hostility and conflict increased between the communities and riots broke out that continued up to partition in 1947.

http://dawn.com/news/1058176/past-present-a-deadly-consciousness

On Capri they show you the sheer cliff from which those who displeased the Emperor Tiberius were reportedly flung (though the Capresi, who call him by the softer name of Timberio, insist that the death toll was much exaggerated by muck-rakers like Suetonius). The court of Freud was similarly absolutist in its punishments: if you displeased him – by bad timekeeping, unprofessionalism, or disobedience to his will – you were tossed over the cliff. In the painting which shows Wyndham flaubertising in the foreground, the background originally held the figure of the model Jerry Hall breastfeeding her baby. She sat thus for several months, until one day she called in sick. When, a couple of days later, she was still unfit to pose, the enraged Freud painted over her face and inserted that of his long-time assistant David Dawson. But the baby had not caused offence, so was not painted out, with the result that a naked and strangely breasted Dawson is now seen feeding the child. Freud’s American dealer assumed the picture would be unsellable; it was bought by the first American client he showed it to.

Penelope Fitzgerald thought the world divided into ‘exterminators’ and ‘exterminatees’. Certainly it divides into controllers and controllees. A typical controllee is someone who is love-dependent; Freud was that once, and swore never to be so again. He was always a controller, and sometimes an exterminator. Martin Gayford and Geordie Greig’s accounts of Freud’s behaviour reminded me at times of two unlikely novelists: Kingsley Amis and Georges Simenon. When Amis’s second wife and fellow novelist, Elizabeth Jane Howard, saw him, at eleven o’clock on the morning he was due to lunch at Buckingham Palace, standing in the garden punishing an enormous whisky, she said, ‘Bunny, do you have to have a drink?’ He replied (and it was a reply that would have fitted a vast number of other exchanges): ‘Look, I’m Kingsley Amis, you see, and I can drink whenever I want.’ As for Simenon, he practiced two things obsessively: his art and fucking (though his speed at writing contrasts with Freud’s slowness at painting). Simenon once winningly observed: ‘Maybe I am not completely crazy, but I am a psychopath.’ Freud confessed his ‘megalomania’ to Gayford, adding that there was a bit of his mind ‘that believes, just possibly, my things are the best by anyone, ever’. Amis, Simenon and Freud all had controlling, interfering mothers, which may or may not be relevant.

https://blu173.mail.live.com/default.aspx?id=64855&rru=inbox#n=460057914&rru=inbox&fid=1&mid=5a519074-582b-11e3-bc1e-00237de46206&fv=1

An honest account of the deadly travails of Pakistani Americans that receive scant notice.( Nasik)

“People think that in America, dollars grow on trees,” Asad once told us at the tavern. “And when you tell them how difficult America is for immigrants, they get offended.”He said he shared his troubles with a cousin in Pakistan, he said: “Yes, you enjoy all the luxuries of the first world in America and try to discourage us. Why? Did I ask you to get me a visa?”

The moon is fragrant. And this fragrance links us to the moon. Don’t you see these little boats, floating in the moonlight? Board them and they will take you to the moon.”

This was Asad, a 30-plus young man called lunatic by most of his friends because of his obsession with the moon. He had a vivid imagination, which became even more vivid in a moonlit night.

“You guys just see the outer surface. If you borrow my vision you can also see the dimensions I do. Touch this counter and you can still feel that warmth of the customer who just left. See, the idea is to feel. Touch. Embrace.”

Today, Asad is in a hospital, struggling for life. A bullet pierced his skull and came out from the other side. The doctors are still trying to determine the damage the bullet might have done to his brain.

He was doing the night shift in a relatively safe area of Northern Virginia when some people broke into the shop, shot him in the head and ran away with the cash.

Before he moved to that 24-hour shop, Asad used to work at another shop in our neighbourhood and often came to the tavern for “gup-shup (a little chat).”

As we gathered tonight to pray for his full and early recovery, we remembered another man known among his Pakistani and American friends as Khan Sahib or Mr Khan.

He was hacked to death outside his pizza shop in a rough Washington neighbourhood two years ago.

Then there was a cabdriver we did not know but attended his funeral prayer when we went to our neighbourhood mosque for the weekly prayers one Friday. He was also shot in the head and died on the spot.

And it was in December 2010, when I received a call from the late film and television actor Jamil Fakhari, asking me to help find his son, Ali Fakhari.

His son went missing in New York in early 2009 and the Pakistan Embassy in Washington had told him that his son was murdered, apparently by carjackers.

Jamil Fakhari refused to believe the embassy. “My son had no feud with any one. Why would someone kill him?” he said to me.

I wanted to explain to him that most immigrant workers are killed because they work in dangerous place and at odd hours. But I could not say this to him. I did not want to break his heart.

http://www.dawn.com/news/1058068/dollars-do-not-grow-on-trees-deaths-murders-and-suicides

“When it comes to criticizing ideas, nothing should be out of bounds. Nothing should be unsayable simply because someone finds it offensive. Particularly in a plural society, offending the sensibilities of others is both inevitable and important. Inevitable, because where different beliefs are deeply held, clashes are unavoidable. Important because any kind of social change or social progress means offending some deeply held sensibilities.”

When does criticism become bigotry? The line is crossed when criticism of Islam, of ideas or beliefs, become transposed into prejudice about people; or when critics demand that Muslims are denied rights, or be discriminated against, simply because they happen to be Muslims.

We should oppose all discrimination against Muslims in the public sphere, from discriminatory policing and immigration laws that might specifically target Muslims, to planning regulations that make it more difficult to build mosques than other similar buildings or restrictions on the ability of Muslims to assemble or worship that apply merely because they happen to be  Muslims.  Whatever one’s beliefs, there should be complete freedom to express them, short of inciting violence. Whatever one’s beliefs, there should be freedom to assemble to promote them. And whatever one’s beliefs, there should be freedom to act upon those beliefs, so long as in so doing one neither physically harms another individual nor transgresses that individual’s rights in the public sphere. A Muslim should have the same rights and obligations as any other citizen.

We should also oppose all attempts to use criticisms of Islam to demonise Muslims. But criticism of Islam, of whatever kind, even if it is offensive or bigoted, should not be a matter for the criminal law. Bigoted speech should not be a legal but a moral issue. Just as Muslims have the right to express their beliefs, short of inciting violence, so should everyone else, including the right to express the most pungent beliefs about Islam. A society that outlawed anti-Muslim arguments would, in my mind, be as reactionary as one that banned Muslim immigration or pursued discriminatory forms of policing. Click Link for full article;

http://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2013/11/14/when-does-criticism-of-islam-become-islamophobia/