The Muslim Vanishes

The great poet Ghalib, part of a long tradition of eclectic liberalism, found Benaras so compelling that he wrote his longest poem on the holy city, 'Chiragh-e-Dair' (Mandir Ka Diya or Lamp in the Temple): 'Ibadat khaana-e-naaqoosian ast, Hama na Kaaba-e-Hindostan ast. (Devotees make searing music with conch shells, This truly is the Kaaba of Hindustan.) Take Ghalib and his myriad followers out of the equation. Will Hindustan be left with a gaping hole or become something quite new? The Muslim Vanishes, a play by Saeed Naqvi, attempts to answer that question. Caste, the Hindu-Muslim divide, Pakistan-Kashmir-decibel levels on these subjects are too high, with each side fiercely defending their own narratives for a conversation to take place. What is the way out of this trap? Razor-sharp, gentle and funny, Saeed Naqvi falls back on a combination of grandma's bedside stories, Aesop's fables and Mullah Nasruddin's feigned foibles to spring an inspired surprise on us. Can it douse the flames?

The clouds are moving ecstatically from Kashi to Mathura and the sky will remain covered with dense clouds as long as there is Krishna in Braj. These lines were composed by Mohsin Kakorvi, a Muslim poet, to celebrate not Lord Krishna's birthday but that of the Prophet Muhammad. Awadh, the author's birthplace, was steeped in this sort of syncretism in which Islam and Hinduism complemented and celebrated each other and Urdu culture merged with Awadhi and Brajbhasha. Sadly, this glorious culture has been systematically destroyed over the past century. In many ways, Awadh stood for everything that independent India could have become, a land in which people of different faiths co-existed peacefully and created a culture that drew upon the best that each community had to offer. Instead, what we have today is a pale shadow of the harmony that once existed. Everywhere there are incidents of sectarian murder, communal propaganda and divisive politics. And there seems to be no stopping the forces that are destroying the country. In this remarkable book, which is partly a memoir and partly an exploration of the various deliberate and inadvertent acts that have contributed to the othering of the 180 million Muslims in India, Saeed Naqvi looks at how the divisions between Muslims and Hindus began in the modern era. The British were the first to exploit these divisions between the communities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the run-up to Independence, and its immediate aftermath, some of India's greatest leaders including Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel, and others only served to drive the communities further apart. Successive governments

The Shade of Swords is the first cohesive history of Jihad, written by one of India's leading journalists and writers. In this paperback edition, updated to show how and why Saddam Hussein repositioned himself as a Jihadi against America, M.J. Akbar explains the struggle between Islam and Christianity. Placing recent events in a historical context, he tackles the tricky question of what now for Jihad following the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime. With British and American troops in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and once again in Iraq, the potential for Jihadi recruitment is ever increasing. Explaining how Jihad thrives on complex and shifting notions of persecution, victory and sacrifice, and illustrating how Muslims themselves have historically tried both to direct and control the phenomenon of Jihad, Akbar shows how Jihad pervades the mind and soul of Islam, revealing its strength and significance. To know the future, one needs to understand the past. M.J. Akbar's The Shade of Swords holds the key.

Islam's Intellectual Suicide—and the Threat to Us All People are shocked and frightened by the behavior coming out the Islamic world—not only because it is violent, but also because it is seemingly inexplicable. While there are many answers to the question of “what went wrong” in the Muslim world, no one has decisively answered why it went wrong. Until now. In this eye-opening new book, foreign policy expert Robert R. Reilly uncovers the root of our contemporary crisis: a pivotal struggle waged within the Muslim world nearly a millennium ago. In a heated battle over the role of reason, the side of irrationality won. The deformed theology that resulted, Reilly reveals, produced the spiritual pathology of Islamism, and a deeply dysfunctional culture. Terrorism—from 9/11, to London, Madrid, and Mumbai, to the Christmas 2009 attempted airline bombing—is the most obvious manifestation of this crisis. But Reilly shows that the pathology extends much further. The Closing of the Muslim Mind solves such puzzles as: · why peace is so elusive in the Middle East · why the Arab world stands near the bottom of every measure of human development · why scientific inquiry is nearly dead in the Islamic world · why Spain translates more books in a single year than the entire Arab world has in the past thousand years · why some people in Saudi Arabia still refuse to believe man has been to the moon · why Muslim media frequently present natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina as God’s direct retribution Delving deeper than previous polemics and simplistic analyses, The Closing of the Muslim Mind provides the answers the West has so desperately needed in confronting the Islamist crisis.

A Muslim punk house in Buffalo, New York, inhabited by burqa-wearing riot girls, mohawked Sufis, straightedge Sunnis, Shi’a skinheads, Indonesian skaters, Sudanese rude boys, gay Muslims, drunk Muslims, and feminists. Their living room hosts parties and prayers, with a hole smashed in the wall to indicate the direction of Mecca. Their life together mixes sex, dope, and religion in roughly equal amounts, expressed in devotion to an Islamo-punk subculture, “taqwacore,” named for taqwa, an Arabic term for consciousness of the divine. Originally self-published on photocopiers and spiralbound by hand, The Taqwacores has now come to be read as a manifesto for Muslim punk rockers and a “Catcher in the Rye for young Muslims.” There are three different cover colors; red, white, and blue.

The Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) completed a hundred years in December 2020. In December 1920, the Mohammedan Anglo Oriental (MAO) College founded by Sir Syed Ahmed Khan in 1877, was transformed into AMU. Sir Syed also established the All India Mohammedan Educational Conference to infuse the subcontinent's Muslims with a spirit of modernism. This helped prepare the community, devastated in the aftermath of the Revolt of 1857, for new challenges. This book examines the critical role that the Aligarh Muslim University played in the making of the modern Indian Muslim. As Zakir Hussain, AMU alumnus, its former Vice-Chancellor and a former President of India, said over fifty years ago, 'The way Aligarh participates in various walks of national life will determine the place of Muslims in India's national life. The way India conducts itself towards Aligarh will determine largely, the form which our national life will acquire in the future.'

The BJP enjoys the predominant position in Indian politics today. In its journey from coalition politics to single-power hegemony, it has emerged as a very different entity from the one that came to power in 1998. Naqvi tells the story from the party's founding in n1980 to its two stints in power.

"An intimate, autobiographical novel of an alleged Harki Algerian family's exile from home and unwelcoming reception in France. A timely and moving tale of uprooting and resettlement, imprisonment and escape, persecution and loss, narrated by the daughter of an alleged Harki, an Algerian soldier who fought for the French during the Algerian War of Independence. It was the fate of such men to be twice exiled, first in their homeland after the war, and later in France, where fleeing Harki families sought refuge but instead faced contempt, discrimination, and exclusion. Zahia Rahmani blends reality and imagination in her writing, offering a fictionalized version of her own family's struggle. With ingenuity that defies categories and genre, the author delves deeply into her past with the immediacy of memoir, the reflection of essay, the artistry of fiction, and the relevance of reportage. From the unique perspective of the daughter of an accused Harki, she examines France's complex and controversial history with its former colony and offers new insight into the French civil riots of 2005. She makes a stirring plea for understanding between generations and cultures, and especially for an end to the destructive practice of condemning children for their fathers' actions and beliefs."--Page 2 of cover (flap).