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Sunday, August 10, 2008

[mukto-mona] Pseudo-Messianic Movements in Contemporary Muslim South Asia

New book: Pseudo-Messianic Movements in Contemporary Muslim South Asia

http://www.gmpublications.com/product_info.php?products_id=25680

By Yoginder Sikand

ISBN: 8188869287

Published by Global Media Publications

Book Format: Hard Bound

Physical Description: 137 pages

Year of Publication: 2008

About the Book:

Messianic hopes and expectations are common to almost all religions. Jews expect the Messiah to arrive to re-establish their temple in Jerusalem; Christians pray for Jesus to return to earth in his 'Second Coming'; Hindus believe that Kalki, the tenth and last avatar of Vishnu, would appear just before the end of times; and the advent of the Imam Mahdi, who will usher in the end of the world, is a cardinal tent of the faith of Shia and many Sunni Muslims.

The messianic figure that almost all religions expect to arrive some time towards the end of the world is generally portrayed as representing the forces of good, as an agent of God and as eventually vanquishing, in a war of global and cosmic proportions, the forces of evil.

Messianic expectations and beliefs are not present in the Qur'an, which, although it speaks of a final Day of Judgment, does not contain any references to a messianic human figure who would herald the end of the world. This figure, however, is referred to on numerous occasions in the form of the Imam Mahdi in the corpus of Hadith, traditions attributed to or claimed to be about the Prophet Muhammad. Almost the entire limited corpus of writings on pseudo-messianic movements in Muslim South Asia consists of historical surveys of such movements in the 'medieval' period. On contemporary or near-contemporary such movements almost nothing substantial has been written.

It is hoped that this book, by focusing on three such movements that emerged in twentieth century Muslim South Asia and which are still alive, will add to our understanding of pseudo-messianic movements in Muslim environments, in particular, and messianism in general. Given the fact that messianic expectations and claims have now assumed such importance in global politics (the clash between certain Jewish, Christian and Islamic forces in West Asia, each driven by their own messianic visions, being the best example), more intensive studies on the phenomenon and often frightening implications of contemporary messianic movements and trends in all religious environments are called for.

CONTENTS

Preface

Chapter One

The Deendar Anjuman

Siddiq Hussain: The Founder of the Deendar Anjuman

The Launching of the Mission

Missionary Work Among the Lingayats

Siddiq Hussain's Missionary Efforts Among the Hindus

Siddiq Hussain and the Muslims

Hijrah and Jihad

Changing Fortunes: 1947 And After

Chapter Two

The Atba-i Malak Bohra Jama'at

The Bohras: Origins and Messianic Beliefs

The Atba-i Malak Jama'at: Emergence and Messianic Claims

Split in the Community's Ranks

The Ongoing Badri-Vakili Controversy

Islam, the Shari'ah and the Vakili Faith

Chapter Three

The Mehdi Foundation International

Riyaz Ahmad Goharshahi: His Life, Teachings and Messianic Claims

Splits in the Goharshahi Cult and the Formation of the MFI

Yunous al-Gohar and the MFI: Beliefs and Claims

Goharshahi's Stature in MFI Propaganda

The MFI's Missionary Work Among Non-Muslims

Is the MFI 'Muslim' in Any Sense?

Violence in Pakistan and Accusations of MFI Involvement

The Politics of the MFI

The MFI and the Bush's 'War on Terror'

About the Author:

Yoginder Sikand is a seasoned author on Islam and Muslims in South Asia. He holds a doctorate in history from London Univeristy and has done post doctoral research at the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World, Leiden, the Netherlands. He has written several books on Islam and Muslims in contemporary India including Sacred Spaces: Exploring Traditions of Shared Faith in India (Penguin, 2003), Muslims in India Since 1947: Islamic Perspectives on Inter-Faith Relations (Routledge Curzon, 2004), Islam, Caste and Dalit Muslim relations in India (Global Media Publications) and Struggling to be Heard: South Asian Muslim Voices (Global Media Publications). He is currently a freelance researcher based in Bangalore. He was associated with India's leading university Jamia Millia Islamia as a professor and headed a center on Indian Muslims at another Delhi based university, Jamia Hamdard.

Order the book Now:

http://www.gmpublications.com/product_info.php?products_id=25680

Please contact
Global Media Publications
J-51-A, 1st Floor, AFE,
Jamia Nagar, Okhla,
New Delhi-110025
India
Tel: 91-11-55666830, 9818327757
E-mail: info@gmpublications.com
Or shop online at our secure online bookshop www.gmpublications.com

(For price in Indian rupees please write to us)

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[ALOCHONA] Re: Terrorism of Chhatra League Goons!!!!

Let's get the whole picture:


For more News: http://www.jugantor.com/web/content/2008/08/09/news0868.htm



Sources:  http://www.ittefaq.com/content/2008/08/07/news0726.htm
               http://www.jugantor.com/web/content/2008/08/07/print0675.htm

Latest News on Chhatra Dal Destroying Cars at DU:
            http://www.bdnews24.com/bangla/details.php?id=32380&cid=2


--- In alochona@yahoogroups.com, hasan md <hasan_eu@...> wrote:
>
> Angry BCL activists vandalised the Dhaka University
> Vice-Chancellor's office and set up a fire in protest
> against the re-arrest of BCL General Secretary Mahfuzul
> Haider Chowdhury Roton soon after his release from
> Mymensingh Central Jail yesterday. Bangla
>  
> Students burn furniture in front of the Dhaka University VC office yesterday, protesting the arrest of Chhatra League leader Mahfuzur Haider Chowdhury
>  
> Bangladesh Chhatra League activists damage vehicles on the Dhaka University campus on Tuesday, demanding release of the organisation's general secretary Mahfuzul Haider Chowdhury Roton. — New Age photo
>
> for details see,,,
> daily jaijaidin
> http://www.jaijaidin.com/details.php?nid=84618
> daily new age
> http://www.newagebd.com/2008/aug/06/front.html#4
> daily ittefaq
> http://www.ittefaq.com/content/2008/08/06/news0361.htm
> daily naya diganta
> http://www.dailynayadiganta.com/2008/08/06/fullnews.asp?News_ID=96749&sec=2

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[Disclaimer: ALOCHONA Management is not liable for information contained in this message. The author takes full responsibility.]
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Re: [mukto-mona] Re: CEMB Oct Conference: Political Islam, Sharia Law, and Civil Society

WRT: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mukto-mona/message/49337

If they follow Dr. Ahmad Sharif's example of foregoing religious funeral
rites, would they be subjected to Habiya dojakh for ever by the Almighty
Allah?


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[mukto-mona] The Big Breaking News! Abhinav Bindra wins first ever Individual Olympic Gold Medal for India

The Big Breaking News! India's ace shooter Abhinav Bindra created history by winning the first ever individual Olympic Gold Medal for the country. It's Abhinav Bindra, Abhinav Bindra all over the Beijing shooting range. Abhinav won the gold in 10m Air Rifle event. Abhinav Bindra scored 700.5 points in the final.

Although India had won 8 gold medals in Olympics hockey, it never won any individual gold medals. This is the first time any Indian won a gold medal in an individual event. The entire country erupted into joy and celebration when the reports of his great victory flashed across the television channels. It has been a great moment for all Indians that have been dreaming for this for decades. Emotions are high in India, as tearful people welcomed this great news. A proud nation salutes its great Hero. Hats off to Abhinav Bindra!


With Regards

Abi

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[mukto-mona] Conservation with Dr. Biplab Pal -On Science and Rationalism in South Asia

We had a lenthy discussion on Sricence and Rationalism etc., Biplab
recorded the conversation. Here is the link:

http://www.mukto-mona.com/Articles/biplab_pal/Biplab_interviews_avijit.htm

Avijit


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[mukto-mona] A good Read - Hanif Kureishi on My Beautiful London

Why the novelist and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi is still in love with Britain's pansexual, multicultural metropolis


August 10, 2008
My Beautiful London
By RACHEL DONADIO
The New York Times Magazine
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/10/magazine/10kureishi-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine&oref=slogin

One of the most revealing insights into Britain's recent social history comes early in "My Son the Fanatic," Hanif Kureishi's tender and darkly prescient 1997 film. It's morning in an unnamed city in northern England, and Parvez, a secular Pakistani immigrant taxi driver brilliantly portrayed by Om Puri, watches Farid, his increasingly devout college-age son, sell his electric guitar. "Where is that going?" Parvez asks Farid as the buyer drives off. "You used to love making a terrible noise with these instruments!" Farid, played by Akbar Kurtha, looks at his father with irritation. "You always said there were more important things than 'Stairway to Heaven,' " he says impatiently in his thick northern English accent. "You couldn't have been more right."

This seemingly casual exchange cuts to the heart of almost everything that has animated Kureishi in nearly three decades as a playwright, screenwriter, novelist and essayist. This is, after all, the man who co-edited "The Faber Book of Pop" and whose films and novels — including "My Beautiful Laundrette" and "The Buddha of Suburbia" — are filled with raucous sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. But this is also the man who had the presence of mind to poke around in English mosques in the late '80s and early '90s, sensing that something might be stirring there, as indeed it was. Kureishi's novel "The Black Album," set in 1989 and named after a Prince album, explored the growing discontent, disenfranchisement and radicalism of some young British Muslims. Not so many people were paying attention back in 1995, when it first appeared, but 10 years later, when bombings rocked central London on July 7, the collective consciousness had begun to catch up. Now even the monarchy has taken notice. This spring, Kureishi, who recently turned 53, paid a visit to Buckingham Palace, where the queen named him a Commander of the British Empire. (The same day, she also bestowed honors on the Australian pop singer Kylie Minogue and several dozen others.) Not bad for a boy who grew up watching sitcoms in Bromley, a middle-class London suburb, the son of a Pakistani father and an English mother at a time when mixed marriages were still rare. Kureishi was delighted by the honor; he and his three sons went to the palace dressed in morning suits, while his partner wore a splendid feathered hat. "Do you know what it says on the medal?" Kureishi asked in a phone conversation after the May 1 ceremony. " 'For God and the Empire.' You can't get better than that. The only causes are the lost causes — or the nonexistent ones."

To many, Kureishi's C.B.E. is a sign of needed change. His accolade, along with Salman Rushdie's being knighted in June, indicates that these writers "aren't voices from elsewhere, these are voices from here, these are our voices," says Hannah Rothschild, a friend of both writers and a documentary filmmaker. "There's no divide anymore. They are us, we are them."

When Kureishi burst onto the scene in 1985 with "My Beautiful Laundrette," his Oscar-nominated debut screenplay, few would have imagined that he would wind up with the initials C.B.E. after his name. The film, directed by Stephen Frears, detonated all kinds of cultural assumptions with its depictions of a gay skinhead (played by a wiry young Daniel Day-Lewis), various Thatcherite Pakistani businessmen and their wives and lovers. Today, Kureishi hasn't quite mellowed, but he does seem to be enjoying his evolution to honored eminence from angry young man — or from rebellious son to adoring father of three young boys, whom he talks about constantly.

KUREISHI DISCUSSED HIS LIFE and work with me not long ago as we sat in a cafe in Shepherd's Bush, the now-gentrifying corner of West London where he has lived for years. "It was Blair, really, who started giving awards to trash," he said, half-joking. "Rubbish entertainers, people from the arts. Before that writers didn't get anything, really." Then again, he added, "If it's good enough for Kylie Minogue, it's good enough for Hanif Kureishi, isn't it?" With intent, dark eyes and spiky gray hair, Kureishi tends to look perpetually taken aback, as if he had just been struck by a cold blast of air. More reserved than standoffish, he's often reluctant to discuss certain questions, preferring instead to deflect them with darkly comic self-deprecation. But when he seizes hold of an idea, the power of his insights is formidable.

Kureishi's latest novel, "Something to Tell You," which will be published in the United States later this month, is his most ambitious book since "The Black Album." A sprawling romp set in London, it centers on Jamal, an Anglo-Pakistani Freudian analyst confronting certain unresolved questions about his past. Along the way, his best friend, Henry, takes up with Jamal's sister, Miriam, a petty drug dealer and distributor of porn videos and other items that fell off the back of a truck. Everyone is swept up in a wave of late-onset kinkiness. As in so much of Kureishi's work, there's a lot of sex here. Little is left to the imagination. At one point, Jamal goes to a basement sex club, its walls covered in whips and costumes, and asks a prostitute to dress like a British Airways hostess. While he waits for the Viagra and the painkillers to kick in, the prostitute tells him she's working toward a master's degree. "She was 'doing' decadence and apocalypse, always a turn-of-the-century preoccupation, along with calls for a 'return to the family,' " Kureishi writes. "Unfortunately, this millennium, our fears had turned out to be realities. It had been worse than we imagined."

In our conversation, Kureishi described the novel as "a critique of the notion of limitless pleasure," a re-examination of the sexual revolution. "Is this what we thought we would be in the '60s when were dancing around with flowers in our hair wanting a more erotic and a more sexual life?" he said as he drank his peppermint tea. "If the society doesn't install the values anymore," he went on to say, "your happiness and your pleasure is entirely up to you; you have to work and earn it and install your own moral values." This, he pointed out, accounts for a common "complaint of the West against radical Islam: 'Why do they have to keep asking God? Why can't they, as it were, make up their own minds?' Well, it's much harder to install your own moral values than to have them imposed by other people or by the system." Things were "miserable" when he was growing up in the '60s before the sexual revolution, Kureishi said, but now, he added, "we've moved from repression to unrepression" — which comes with its own strictures.

As is clear from his new novel, Kureishi often uses a psychoanalytic lens. He himself has been in therapy since the '90s — "you start to feel better after about 10 years," he joked — and related that it has been "very stimulating in terms of ideas" and "ways of seeing the world." But for him, the return of the repressed transcends Freudian cliché. It's a crucial theme, a key to understanding recent history, not just family dynamics. In Kureishi's view, radical Islam and radical sexuality intersect. "They produce each other in some way," he said. Indeed, to Kureishi, the rise of radical Islam is nothing less than the return of the repressed writ large. "You can't help but laugh," he told me. "The project of the West, the Nietzschean project, has been to drive out religion and to produce a secular society in which men and women make their own values because morality is gone. Then suddenly radical religion returns from the Third World. How can you not laugh at that? How can you not find that a deep historical irony?"

Kureishi's work is filled with immigrant parents not entirely at home in England but far removed from the India and Pakistan of their youth. Their children — coming of age in a white England filled with lower-middle-class lowbrows; naïve, privileged hippies; and the occasional skinhead — find that England doesn't entirely accept them, either. In many ways, Kureishi's England is not so far from V. S. Naipaul's. But while the dean of postcolonial British letters operates on the Conradian model, marinating his characters in their own ironies while remaining removed from the racket on the telly and the music charts, Kureishi is more along the lines of a Nick Hornby — a voracious consumer of pop culture. "I'm a big fan of what's been often denigrated for not being high art," Kureishi declared at a public reading in London in March. He grew up reading Balzac, Beckett and Kafka, he said, but also watching classic British low comedy of the 1960s and '70s like the "Carry On" films, and admiring James Dean, Marlon Brando and the Beatles.

This embrace of pop culture came through loud and clear in "The Buddha of Suburbia," Kureishi's semi-autobiographical first novel, published in 1990. Set in the 1970s in the London suburbs, it centers on Karim Amir, the child of an English mother and an Indian father who simultaneously falls in love with his friend Charlie, a posh girl named Eleanor, acting and punk rock. Meanwhile, Karim's previously strait-laced father takes up with an English mistress and begins teaching vague Eastern platitudes to suburbanites hungry for spiritual learning — or at least looser-fitting clothing. (Karim's mother, the saddest character in the book, retreats into her own depression.) David Bowie, with his chameleonic sexual persona and glam-rock appeal, is the presiding spirit. (Kureishi, as it happens, graduated from the same secondary school as Bowie.) The novel also has vivid supporting characters, including the tragicomic Uncle Anwar, who goes on a hunger strike until his freewheeling, feminist, lesbian daughter, Jamila, agrees to an arranged marriage. Changez, her imported Indian husband, neglects his work at Anwar's corner shop, and soon takes up with a Japanese prostitute.

The novel and a subsequent BBC mini-series made Kureishi a hero to a generation of British Asians and other nonwhites, a kind of postcolonial Philip Roth who brought to the mainstream themes that were previously relegated as "ethnic" and added lots of sex and humor. "What, above all, made Kureishi a talismanic figure for young Asians was his voice," the critic Sukhdev Sandhu wrote in The London Review of Books in 2000. "We had previously been mocked for our deference and timidity. Kureishi's language was a revelation. It was neither meek nor subservient. It wasn't fake posh. Instead, it was playful and casually knowing." But that doesn't mean it went over well with parents. Sandhu recalls how his father — who left India for England in 1965 and worked in a Nestlé factory, and was taunted by local schoolchildren and punks as he walked home with sacks of chapati flour — beat him up after Sandhu insisted that the family watch "My Beautiful Laundrette" on TV. With nudity, gay sex, Pakistani businessmen cheating on their wives and a drug smuggler disguised as a mullah with heroin sewn into his fake beard, the film wasn't just a wake-up call to white Britain; it also flew in the face of the traditional immigrant narrative. "Why are you showing us such filth?" Sandhu's father asked him. "My father was right to be appalled," Sandhu wrote. "The film celebrated precisely those things — irony, youth, family instability, sexual desire — that he most feared." It taught his father, Sandhu added, "that he could not control the future. And control — over their wives, their children, their finances — was what Asian immigrants like him coveted."

When Kureishi's films and writing first appeared in the mid-'80s, the literary world was just waking up to London's ethnic variety. Back then, literary England was "a BBC, plummy-voiced, West London, educated thing that just wasn't getting the whole place," says Bill Buford, who published Kureishi when he was editor of Granta in the 1980s and is now a staff writer at The New Yorker. Buford went on to explain that the success of "Midnight's Children," Rushdie's Booker Prize-winning 1981 novel, helped show that cross-culturalism and the varieties of the English language "were exciting, urgent, entertaining, serious literary concerns" and were also "the stuff of books people wanted to buy."

Over the years, Kureishi has "pulled off a high-low thing," says Robert McCrum, a former literary editor of The Observer in London who edited Kureishi at Faber & Faber in the 1980s. "He both sells in supermarkets and is taken seriously as a proper writer." In this regard, Kureishi is very much a product of London, Britain's centralized cultural capital, where he is able to move fluidly between the literary and film worlds in ways that would be difficult in the United States. And because England's film scene has lower financial stakes (and better state subsidies) than America's, Kureishi has been able to make emotionally ambitious yet modest-budget films whose unresolved, ambivalent endings defy Hollywood convention. He contains multitudes, and London suits them all. If Kureishi "could somehow figure out how to express himself in a rock band or in a pop tune he'd be very happy," Buford said. "It would complete something very deep. He's too shy and too deferential, but if he could somehow do 'Hanif: the Rap Version,' it would somehow complete a circle."

KUREISHI HAS HAD A PROFOUND EFFECT on younger South Asian and black writers. Zadie Smith, at 32 one of the brightest lights in the next generation of British novelists, fondly recalls reading "The Buddha of Suburbia" at age 15. "There was one copy going round our school like contraband — when it was my turn I read it in one sitting in the playground and missed all my classes," Smith wrote to me recently in an e-mail exchange. "It's a very simple pleasure that white readers take absolutely for granted: I'd never read a book about anyone remotely like me before." Today, "The Buddha of Suburbia" is taught in some schools. (At the public reading in London in March, Kureishi acknowledged that "if I'd known my books might have got on the school curriculum, I would have made them less dirty.") Kureishi says that he's friendly with Smith, and with Monica Ali, the author of "Brick Lane," but that he has not read either's novels. He may not be in close contact with the younger generation he inspired, but he does teach a creative-writing workshop at Kingston University in London.

After the success of "The Buddha of Suburbia" and the intensity of "The Black Album," Kureishi's later fiction hasn't always been well received. Sandhu's essay, which begins with high praise, evolves into withering critique. "Kureishi is not a prose writer of any distinction," he wrote, referring to Kureishi's 1999 novella "Midnight All Day." In the end, Sandhu argued, Kureishi lacked Roth's literary brilliance. "Like his characters," Sandhu continued, "Kureishi seemed to have reached an impasse." But his new novel seeks to propel those characters forward into new and treacherous times.

Writing runs in the Kureishi family. Hanif's father, who worked for decades as a civil servant at the Pakistani Embassy in London, was an aspiring writer who remained unpublished. Kureishi wrote "My Ear at His Heart," his 2004 memoir about his father, after his agent, Deborah Rogers, gave him a manuscript his father once submitted to her. Fathers and sons remain a deep and abiding theme. Kureishi's own family life is not uncomplicated. His 1998 novella, "Intimacy," is a brutal account of a man on the eve of leaving his partner and two small sons for a beautiful younger woman — as Kureishi himself had done. (Over the years, Kureishi has been criticized for misogyny and emotional cruelty, not least for the number he does on the woman left behind in "Intimacy.") Today, Kureishi lives in a row house with his partner, Monique Proudlove, and their 10-year-old son, Kier, while Sachin and Carlo, his 14-year-old twin sons from his earlier relationship with Tracey Scoffield, a film-and-television producer, are often around.

After breakfast at the local cafe, I persuade Kureishi to let me see his house and study. Earlier, he told me he was reluctant to have me "round" since "the missus" doesn't like journalists, but it quickly becomes clear from Proudlove, a self-possessed woman with slate-gray eyes who greets us in the entrance hall, that it's Kureishi who's protective of his privacy. In the living room, which is dominated by a drum kit, I was struck by the juxtaposition of books on the shelf: some novels by Henry James, Caroline Moorehead's biography of Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre's "Situations" next to Naipaul's "Among the Believers" next to Roger Scruton's "Sexual Desire: A Moral Philosophy of the Erotic." Definitely guidebooks to Kureishiland. The writer works in a roomy study upstairs, its walls filled with images: a photo of the young John Lennon, a poster of a painting by William Blake, a Matisse-like painting of Monique. There are stacks of CDs on the desk — Prince, Jeff Buckley, the soundtrack to "Trainspotting" — and some photos of Kureishi's sons. Above the desk I also notice a small black-and-white image: a man on his knees, his face firmly planted between the legs of a naked woman.

This is not surprising. Kureishi's books are extremely raunchy. Nearly every page you turn, someone is being fellated, spanked, tugged on — or is thinking about it. Nipples are clamped. Wax is dripped. Things are inserted into places you would hardly have imagined possible. In the '70s, Kureishi even wrote literary pornography under the pen name Antonia French. I ask him about his interest in pornography, which seems to go beyond the strictly anthropological. "When I was a kid and you wanted to come into contact with something sexy or dirty, you'd read a book," Kureishi said. "Can you imagine?" Harold Robbins, Henry Miller, the Marquis de Sade. "D. H. Lawrence, can you imagine, as a sexual aid?" Today, literary pornography is a lost art, he says, but dirty pictures are available everywhere. "The much more interesting question might be, 'What else is it that people need to make a life?' It might be very easy to find sexual satisfaction, but getting someone to love you for a long time or loving someone might be more interesting." This is a thoughtful observation — but it doesn't entirely answer the question.

When you get down to it, there are two types of people in Kureishi's work: those running toward sex and those running away from it. The seekers of sex, or at least pleasure, are the suburban teenagers (and their parents) coming of age in "The Buddha of Suburbia" and the immigrant movers and shakers in "My Beautiful Laundrette." In Kureishi's most recent film, "Venus," an aged Peter O'Toole takes up with a potty-mouthed young woman (Jodie Whittaker), and in his film before that, "The Mother," a new widow (Anne Reid) takes up with her daughter's intense boyfriend (played by Daniel Craig, before he became James Bond).

Meanwhile, the sex-avoiders are the conflicted young Muslims of "The Black Album" and "My Son the Fanatic." In "My Son," directed by Udayan Prasad, Parvez, the immigrant taxi driver, cannot understand his son Farid's new interest in Islam. Farid explains what he's seeking. "Belief, purity, belonging to the past," he says insistently. "I won't bring up my children in this country." In another scene, a dissolute and despondent Parvez strikes his son over and over, until Farid finally shouts, "Who's the fanatic now?"

KUREISHI FIRST HAD THE IDEAS for "The Black Album" and "My Son the Fanatic" (a short story before it became a film) when the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini announced a fatwa against Rushdie in 1989, after Rushdie's "Satanic Verses" was published. In "The Black Album," he wrote about the appeal of British mosques, oases in an otherwise rigidly hierarchical country "where race and class barriers had been suspended." In the novel, some of the young Muslims burn copies of "The Satanic Verses." The Rushdie fatwa was a galvanizing moment, a coming-of-age experience for young Muslim radicals in Britain, a number of whom have become today's British Muslim leaders. It marked a turning point, an unsettling new chapter. And Kureishi was alert to the intergenerational drama. "It perplexed me that young people, brought up in secular Britain, would turn to a form of belief that denied them the pleasures of the society in which they lived," Kureishi wrote in "The Word and the Bomb," his excellent 2005 essay collection, which unfortunately has never appeared in the United States. "Why did they wish to maintain such a tantalizing relation to their own enjoyment, keeping it so fervently in mind, only to deny it? Or was this Puritanism a kind of rebellion, a brave refusal of the order of the age — an oversexualized but sterile society?"

Like Parvez in "My Son the Fanatic," Kureishi's Pakistani father "was educated by both mullahs and nuns, and developed an aversion to both," Kureishi wrote in the introduction to his collected screenplays. "He came to love Nat King Cole and Louis Armstrong, the music of black American former slaves. It is this kind of complexity that the fundamentalist has to reject." Kureishi first visited Pakistan in the early 1980s and wrote about it in Granta and elsewhere. One line about Pakistan from "My Beautiful Laundrette" still resonates: "That country is being sodomized by religion," Nasser, a successful entrepreneur played by Saeed Jaffrey, tells his brother. "It's beginning to interfere with the making of money."

Although Kureishi recognizes the sense of powerlessness and sting of racism that have helped push many young British Muslims toward radicalism, he is intolerant of such intolerance. "The antidote to Puritanism isn't licentiousness, but the recognition of what goes on inside human beings," Kureishi wrote in the title essay of "The Word and the Bomb." He added: "Fundamentalism is dictatorship of the mind, but a live culture is an exploration, and represents our endless curiosity about our own strangeness and impossible sexuality: wisdom is more important than doctrine; doubt more important than certainty. Fundamentalism implies the failure of our most significant attribute, our imagination."

BACK AT THE CAFE IN SHEPHERD'S BUSH, I asked Kureishi about some vexing recent developments that received a lot of attention in the British press: a state agency for assessing public religious schools had given a top rating to a Muslim school that was advocating a return to the Caliphate; the interior minister at the time, Jack Straw, came under fire for suggesting that it might be difficult for a community-relations functionary to meet with constituents who wear a full veil; an Indian woman living in England was lured back to India and murdered in an honor killing; the archbishop of Canterbury said he thought England might consider making some accommodation for Shariah, or Islamic law. What, I wondered, did Kureishi make of all this?

"There aren't any answers to these questions," he replied. "They're just questions that everybody has to engage in and think about. What is it like to make a multicultural society? How far do you go in multiculturalism? Do you have parts of the country under Shariah law, for instance? What would that mean? How does that work? You have to take this stuff seriously."

Kureishi told me that he and Stephen Frears, who remains a close friend, sometimes used to joke about what would happen if Shariah law were to come to the "godless" people of Dorset, where Frears has a country house. Then came the archbishop of Canterbury's widely criticized — and arguably misunderstood — remarks. Still, Kureishi said, the idea that the archbishop is pondering "the imposition of medieval law on parts of the English countryside" is "hilarious."

As if it weren't already clear, Kureishi isn't a moralist. In one conversation, he was adamant that he's "not advocating anything," just observing. (He did, however, say he was opposed to Muslim women in Britain wearing the veil, "because of what it symbolizes: a part of Islam that's deeply oppressive to women.") At the reading in London in March, Kureishi was dismissive of rhetoric about British national identity and the notion that immigrants should become more integrated into the society. "I don't think there's any obligation for anyone to integrate," Kureishi told his audience. "They are people entitled to live as they wish." Besides, he added, why are only immigrants or their children asked to integrate? "The royal family don't integrate," he said. "Prince Philip doesn't integrate." Kureishi mentioned Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1974 film "Ali: Fear Eats the Soul," in which a German woman is reviled by her neighbors after she marries a Muslim guest worker. "Everyone hates them," Kureishi told me. "He says: 'I'm trying to integrate here. If we don't integrate, they say we're isolated. If we do integrate by trying to marry your women, you hate us even more.' The guy can't win."

Kureishi is currently at work on two screenplays, one set in Poland and London, the other in Paris. France, as well as the rest of Europe, is "going through a huge crisis about identity, race, religion," Kureishi went on to say. "Their identities have been shattered by immigration. That's the price you pay. If you want a modern economy, you have hundreds of thousands of workers around your country, you give up . . . a certain part of your identity. That's the deal." Then, he pointed out, you have to remake the society, and "it's that remaking that Europe is experiencing at the moment. But it's really tricky to have your identity shattered and remade."

The effects of the transformation are still in progress. In London, Kureishi and I walked around Shepherd's Bush Market, where the old eel-and-pie shops of the white working class are giving way to African butchers selling pig tails, tripe and yams. At one booth, Kureishi ordered a falafel to take home for lunch, "with extra hot sauce, boss." He was particularly intrigued by a shop selling cheap electronic picture frames in which a plane flies across the Dubai skyline. As we strolled past vendors selling suitcases, plastic sandals and T-shirts that said "If you see da police, tell a brother," I asked him about the bombings on July 7, 2005, which killed 52 people and wounded more than 700 on the London transit system. "Everyone was waiting for it to happen," he said.

The bombings figure in "Something to Tell You," Kureishi's new novel, where they touch all the characters and kill a few of them. The novel, with its protagonists fitfully grappling with middle age, brings together everything in the Kureishi repertoire: fathers and sons, psychoanalysis, kinky sex, drugs, Muslim radicalism — leavened with biting wit and sardonic cultural observation. Omar, the young laundrette entrepreneur from "My Beautiful Laundrette," makes an appearance; he's made a fortune producing television "for, by and about minorities" and has been made a peer, Lord Ali of Lewisham — under Blair, of course. "Being gay, Omar Ali was smart enough to know how hip and fashionable minorities — or any outsiders — could become, with the right marketing, as they made their way up the social hierarchy." Charlie Hero, the punk rocker from "The Buddha of Suburbia," also makes a cameo, as does Mick Jagger. Old scores are settled, and there's a not-so-subtle parallel drawn between 1970s-era anticapitalist radicals who seek to harm a factory owner and today's Islamic radicals. But above all, "Something to Tell You" is a raucous love song to London and everything it stands for — everything the July 7 bombers were intent on destroying.

ON MY LAST DAY IN LONDON, I wandered around Bloomsbury, past the British Museum, with its crowds of tourists, past stately Russell Square, with its redbrick facades, toward my destination: Tavistock Square, an unassuming park lined on one side with Georgian row houses. It was here, on the adjacent road, that the July 7 bombers detonated a bus bomb. I'd always thought the location of the bus was arbitrary, and it might well have been. But the square is no ordinary landmark. As Kureishi writes in "Something to Tell You," "that beautiful London square" is "where Dickens wrote 'Bleak House' and Woolf 'Three Guineas'; where Lenin stayed and the Hogarth Press published James Stratchey's Freud translations." It has a statue of Gandhi and plaques commemorating conscientious objectors and victims of Hiroshima.

In the hollow marble underneath the Gandhi statue, visitors had placed flowers wrapped in colorful cellophane and a few candles. A pale sun shone through bare brown branches. The square was a living monument to liberal democracy and egalitarianism, a microcosm of cultural achievement, the full flowering of Modernism and modernity. The new British Library was a few blocks away, as was the School of Oriental and African Studies and University College London. On July 7, 2005, this corner of the city, for centuries home to intellectual debate, instead became a battleground. In the weeks after the bombings, Kureishi entered the fray. "You can't ask people to give up their religion; that would be absurd," he wrote in The Guardian. But hard-line views might modify "as they come into contact with other ideas." That was the essence of "effective multiculturalism": not a superficial exchange of festivals and foods driven by liberal guilt, but something else entirely — an encounter with human desires in all their complexity. Or, as he wrote, "a robust and committed exchange of ideas — a conflict, which is worth enduring, rather than a war."

Rachel Donadio, a former editor and writer at the Book Review, is the incoming Rome bureau chief of The Times.

------------------------------------

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Re: [ALOCHONA] Chatra League besiege DU Admin Building



Did you expected any different ? Where is our Awami League leaders ?
They are coming soon to run the country. May Allah bless our people.


--- On Wed, 8/6/08, Faruque Alamgir <faruquealamgir@gmail.com> wrote:
From: Faruque Alamgir <faruquealamgir@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [ALOCHONA] Chatra League besiege DU Admin Building
To: alochona@yahoogroups.com, "notun Bangladesh" <notun_bangladesh@yahoogroups.com>, "Amra Bangladesi" <amra-bangladesi@yahoogroups.com>, "dahuk dahuk" <dahuk@yahoogroups.com>, dhakamails@yahoogroups.com, diagnose@yahoogroups.com
Date: Wednesday, August 6, 2008, 1:10 PM

Friends,

To get the poor and beggers out of the reach of the rich in front of almost all the rich peoplee's house there is a sign BoaRd hangs "KUKUR  HOITEY  SHABSHAN".

Bangladeshis HUSHIAR SHABSHAN HUSHIAR from the sonar peace loving, democratic and patriot cheleys of Mujib.
Look look and look and amazed how the SONAR CHELEYS are  serving the Bangladesh created only by their leader Mujib(as claimed).

Faruque Alamgir

On Wed, Aug 6, 2008 at 1:09 PM, Ezajur Rahman <ezajur.rahman@q8.com> wrote:
BCL confines Dhaka Univ VC,
demands release of gen secy
Courtesy New Age 6/8/08
DU Correspondent
Bangladesh Chhatra League activists confined the Dhaka University vice-chancellor to the administrative building for three hours on Tuesday and damaged his office and several vehicles, demanding release of their detained general secretary.
   They later released the vice-chancellor, SMA Faiz, at around 7:00pm, but called a strike on the campus for Wednesday.
   Faiz, after freed from confinement, told reporters he would try to contact right persons to deal with the matter.
   He said an academic atmosphere was prevailing on the campus and all should work not to make it volatile.
   Although Faiz did not name any person, campus sources said he had a meeting with the education adviser, Hossain Zillur Rahman.
   The social sciences dean, Harun-or-Rashid, accompanied him, according to the sources.
   After freeing Faiz from confinement, the Chhatra League activists were out on demonstrations at the vice-chancellor's office till 10:00pm.
   The Chhatra League president, Mahmudul Hasan Ripon, said they had suspended their rally there at 10:30pm at the vice-chancellor's assurance of a positive result by Wednesday noon.
   About 150 leaders and supporters of Chhatra League, the student wing of the Awami League, brought out a procession on the campus and went to the administrative building and besieged it because their detained general secretary, Mahfuzul Haider Chowdhury Roton, was re-arrested after his release from Mymensingh Jail.
   The activists also damaged the teachers' cars parked outside the administrative building and on Fuller Road, broke the windowpanes of the building and locked the main gates with the vice-chancellor and other university officials inside the building.
   They also gathered some piles of garbage and set fire to them.
   The police positioned themselves on the campus after the BCL activists surrounded the building, but later withdrew. They then took up positions outside the campus, across the road near the Teacher-Student Centre and also at Nilkhet.
   The acting general secretary of the BCL, Abul Kalam, told New Age that Roton was freed from Mymensingh Jail at about 10:30am on Tuesday, but was confined in the visiting room. The police later re-arrested him from there at around 2:30pm, said Kalam.
   The news prompted the BCL activists to march to the vice-chancellor's office. They said they would continue their protest until Roton was released.
   Abul Kalam told New Age that Manobadhiker Shachetan Shiksharthy Brindo, a BCL-backed platform, has called for student strike for Wednesday in Dhaka University to press for release of Roton.
   The joint forces arrested Roton on Jan 18, 2007 on charge of violating the Emergency Powers Rules.
 

[mukto-mona] [Bangla video] Famous director Tanvir Mokammel interviewed on future of Bangla cinema

"Mukti-Yuddha Bangaldesher cinemar sab theke boro anuprerana howa  uchit"

   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwRXaLJILQY
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJJ7w-jf0cs

 It was a great pleasure to talk to a talent like him- -

Thanks
Biplab
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Sign the Petition : Release the Arrested University Teachers Immediately : An Appeal to the Caretaker Government of Bangladesh

http://www.mukto-mona.com/human_rights/university_teachers_arrest.htm

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Daily Star publishes an interview with Mukto-Mona
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MM site is blocked in Islamic countries such as UAE. Members of those theocratic states, kindly use any proxy (such as http://proxy.org/) to access mukto-mona.

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Mukto-Mona Celebrates 5th Anniversary
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Mukto-Mona Celebrates Earth Day:
http://www.mukto-mona.com/Special_Event_/Earth_day2006/index.htm

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Kansat Uprising : A Special Page from Mukto-Mona 
http://www.mukto-mona.com/human_rights/kansat2006/members/


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MM Project : Grand assembly of local freedom fighters at Raumari
http://www.mukto-mona.com/project/Roumari/freedom_fighters_union300306.htm

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German Bangla Radio Interviews Mukto-Mona Members:
http://www.mukto-mona.com/Special_Event_/Darwin_day/german_radio/


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[Nagorik_Shokti] Earn $5000 for reading emails , 8/12/2008, 12:00 am

Reminder from:   Nagorik_Shokti Yahoo! Group
 
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Date:   Tuesday August 12, 2008
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You can join us for free.
We will pay you to view websites, $10 for paid EMAILS and $5 for PTC.
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[ALOCHONA] A man and a network with a mission

Mobilising Muslims: A man and a network with a mission
By Yoginder Sikand
Shy but amiable and disarmingly down-to-earth, 55 year-old Muhammad Abdus Sabur is a man with a mission. He is the founder and general-secretary of a Bangkok-based network of Asian Muslim social activists struggling for social justice and inter-faith dialogue—the Asian Muslim Action Network, its acronym AMAN, meaning 'peace' in Arabic and several languages influenced by it.
I met him at his modest office in a Bangkok suburb on a recent visit to Thailand, the meeting being one of the highpoints of my three-week stay in the country.
I pester Sabur (as he is known to his friends) with a flood of questions, and he gently obliges. What made him set up AMAN? What exactly is AMAN all about? What are its goals and what has it done so far?
Sabur tells me how it all started. Born in a village in what was then East Pakistan and now Bangladesh, Sabur began working with a Bangladeshi NGO in the aftermath of the deadly war that resulted in the creation of the new state. 'I worked particularly with badly-affected Hindu families in Sylhet in northern Bangladesh, who had born the wrath of the Pakistan army, who had burned down their houses and had killed many of them', he says. This work brought him in contact with the Bangkok-based Asian Cultural Forum on Development (ACFD), a network of Asian scholar-activists from different religious traditions trying to work out uniquely Asian solutions for uniquely Asian problems, inspired by Asian religious values. In 1979, Sabur was elected as a council member of the ACFD, the youngest on the panel. He shifted to Bangkok to work with the ACFD, and has been based there since then.
'During the course of my many years with the ACFD', Sabur reminiscences, 'I was struck how Christian, Buddhist and Hindu activists, inspired by their religious beliefs, were working on numerous fronts in a very organized manner. They were struggling for inter-community solidarity and women's rights, and speaking out against imperialism and capitalism, world debt and so on, and forcefully debating social issues and problems'. 'At the same time', he goes on, 'I noted, with dismay, how very behind Muslims were in this regard. They had their charities, providing money to madrasas and mosques, which, though important, was obviously not enough to grapple with a whole load of contemporary social concerns, problems, conflicts and struggles'. 'I felt that our essentially charity-based approach was still stuck in a feudal groove—you give donations to the poor, but don't touch them, don't live with and learn from them, don't participate in their lives and in their struggles for justice. Obviously, our responses were wholly inadequate', he adds. 'I knew of many Muslim organizations who did talk of social justice, but this was only in the form of publishing books or delivering lectures. Working with socially-involved Christians, Buddhists and Hindus, I realized that we Muslims, too, need to do practical work, and not just talking and preaching, to translate these dreams of social justice into actual practice.'
In 1990, Sabur began contacting progressive Muslim scholar-activists in different Asian countries to do precisely that. A small group of them, from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Thailand met at Chiang Mai, in northern Thailand, in September that year, and AMAN was born. The noted Mumbai-based Islamic scholar Asghar Ali Engineer was chosen as the convenor of the network, and Sabur was elected as its general-secretary.
The aim of the network? 'Essentially, to transmit progressive Islamic ideas to Muslim youth', says Sabur. But it was not as simple as it sounds. This entailed working on several fronts at the same time: bringing progressive and socially-involved Asian Muslim scholars to share their ideas among themselves and with Asian Muslim youth; providing Muslim social organizations with a common platform to learn from each other, improve their methods, build their capacities and expand the scope of their work from mere charity to struggling for social justice and human rights; and interacting with secular as well as non-Muslim NGOs working on issues of common concern, both to join forces as well as to express what important contributions Islam and committed Muslims could make in this regard.
With limited funds at its disposal, it has not been an easy journey for AMAN. Involving the traditional ulema of the madrasas in its work, which Sabur sees as essential, given the influence that they enjoy among many Muslim communities, has yet to happen in a significant way. 'Madrasas are important, I agree, but their students need to have a broader social vision and a deeper insight into a host of social issues of contemporary concern, which many of them lack', he comments. He cites the instance of several Christian groups, each inspired by what they regard as the values of Christianity, that are actively engaged in struggles for social justice and inter-community solidarity. 'Islam, properly understood, teaches us all this as well. It stands for equality and fraternity, not just within the mosque, but in society outside too, but this is hardly how it is interpreted today. It stands for human rights, for all human beings, and not just for Muslims alone. It teaches us to respect diversity. The Quran states that God made people into different communities, so that they could understand one another, not so that they should fight and kill each other. We need to revise many of our traditional understandings, to recover what I believe to be the essential social message of Islam'. And that is where the need to reach out to and work with the traditional ulema comes into the picture, for many of them continue to miss the liberating message of the Quran, properly understood, particularly as it applies to women, the poor and the oppressed and to people of other faiths.
Today, AMAN organizes a number of activities, all geared to developing progressive responses to the myriad challenges affecting the Asian region, and not just Muslims alone. Its annual three-week peace-building course in Bangkok, conducted in association with a Christian university in Thailand, brings together men and women below the age of 40 from across Asia, mainly Muslims but people of other faiths too, to discuss burning social issues, from the rights of minorities and women, inter-faith dialogue and looming ecological disaster to questions of war and peace, religious and national chauvinism, terrorism and imperialism. It discusses possibilities of peace and social justice in a conflict-torn world and the theological resources that different religions, including Islam, can provide in this regard. AMAN also organizes two seven-day youth training courses for men and women below 25 every year, one in Nepal for South Asians, and the other in Bangkok for participants from South-East Asians, with broadly the same purpose.
'Research and action, scholarship and activism, must go together for them to be really effective', Sabur comments, and in order to do precisely that in 2003 AMAN launched a new project titled 'Views From Within: Muslim Communities in South-East Asia'. Under this project, annual fellowships are provided to young Muslim scholars from South-East Asia to engage in research projects on various crucial aspects of the lives and concerns of the myriad Muslim communities living in the region as well as the possibilities of progressive Islamic responses to pressing contemporary issues. So far, thirty-six fellowships have been awarded, and some of the theses that these have led to have been published as monographs.
Three years ago, this sort of socially-engaged research work was supplemented with the launching of a quarterly journal, AMANA, which now comes out in five languages: English, Bengali, Bahasa Malaysia, Thai and Urdu. Plans are afoot to start an Arabic edition soon. A glance through the contents of recent issues of the magazine illustrates its principal concerns: articles about inter-faith dialogue, women's rights, Islam, peace and justice, issues in common between Islam and Buddhism, and the fascinating variety of local Muslim cultures; stories about Asian Muslim groups and individuals tackling HIV/AIDS and working together with Christians in strife-torn parts of Indonesia to restore communal harmony; a report of an Hindu youth cycling across India to protest against nuclear bombs and another about Buddhist tribals in eastern Bangladeshis struggling against decades of discrimination.
Sabur also talks about other on-going work that AMAN is engaged in: helping out refugees from neighbouring South-East Asian countries who now live and eke out a living in Bangkok, galvanizing funds for mosques destroyed in the recent deadly quake in southern China and for families devastated by a killer cyclone in Myanmar and working with a Buddhist group in war-torn southern Thailand to promote understanding between Muslims and Buddhists. He excitedly tells me about AMAN's plans of shortly launching a Master's degree in peace studies in association with an Indonesian university.
Funding for AMAN's activities comes mainly from Western, mostly Christian, NGOs and a major Japanese Buddhist institution, and the AMANA magazine runs with a grant from Action Aid. Although Sabur has sought to diversify, to contact Muslim philanthropists and organizations who could possibly assist, he tells me that he has had little luck with them, and I am not surprised. 'Many of them will fund building mosques and madrasas or to promote their own particular sects and versions of Islam, but not this sort of activist work', he rues. 'Perhaps it is because they are not aware of this sort of thing', he muses. Perhaps, I think, but I am not sure. I cannot imagine hardened Wahhabi Arab sheikhs funneling petrodollars to sponsor initiatives activities that challenge Western imperialism, Muslim religious literalism and extremism or that champion women's rights and ecumenism and solidarity between Muslims and people of other faiths—which is precisely the sort of work that AMAN seems to be engaged in.
Sabur's sage advice in the matter is: 'We need to reach out to Muslim organizations, and to well-off Muslims, to make them aware of all these issues, to get them also involved in various ways in similar work. Perhaps some of them want to help out but don't know how. We need to speak out, against all forms of oppression, about poverty and illiteracy and discrimination in our own societies, and against imperialism, terror and war, at all Muslim forums, at the national and international levels. Only then can our views and concerns be heard.' But, coming back to the question of funding, he says in the same breath, 'We can't build relationships with money. What we need are simple, down-to-earth, simple and passionately dedicated people, inspired by the spirit of voluntarism and sacrifice, not doing work only if they are paid.'
'That', he tells me as I get up to depart, 'is precisely what genuine religiosity is all about.'
Sabur gives me a hearty hug on my way out, and, firmly holding my shoulders and looking at me in the eye, he recites from his fellow Bengali, the poet Rabindranath Tagore, a verse that I hurriedly noted:
Akla Chalo, Akla Chalo, Akla Chalo Rey
Jodi Tor Dak Shuney Kiew Na Ashey
Akla Chalo, Akla Chalo, Akla Chalo Rey
Walk Alone, Walk Alone, Walk Alone, Oh You!
Even if no one comes to you on hearing your call
Walk alone, Walk alone, Walk Alone, Oh You!
---
Muhammad Abdus Sabur can be contacted on sabur@arf-asia.org and on aman@arf-asia.org
AMAN's website can be accessed on http://www.arf-asia.org


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