Shared by Dr. Nasik Elahi
Malala Gives me Hope!
Song: Composed and sung by Pakistani Artists.
Melodious music, beautiful song.
Worth listening, cherishing and celebrating. Duration about 4 minutes.
Looking for hope under shockingly disturbing conditions.
Please click underneath to listen the song.
https://vimeo.com/70403225
Expression through song in Pakistan.
Nasik
Reza Aslan’s Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth has taken off as a cultural phenomenon. Just two weeks after Aslan’s interview on NPR’s “Fresh Air,” his interpretation of Jesus’ life and intentions has attained number one status on bestseller lists. A ridiculously hostile FOXNews interview has certainly helped. But it’s been two weeks — and as yet I cannot find a serious review by a practicing biblical scholar. This brief review amounts to my attempt to respond to the questions I’m receiving about the book from every corner.
Aslan gained wide popularity for his introduction to Islam, No god but God. I very much enjoyed my copy and still consult it. Aslan holds a PhD in sociology, but his primary scholarly emphasis involves contemporary religion. Aslan has also worked in New Testament studies, and Zealot contains references to a vast amount of literature, yet the book also betrays that he is not immersed in the literature of that field. Aslan is a spectacular writer, and his portrait of Jesus is spiritually if not intellectually compelling.
Allow me to address the common complaint that as a Muslim Aslan has no business writing a Jesus book. Aslan clearly respects and admires Jesus. That some Christians might find his claims unsettling is, well, tough, because Aslan is doing serious intellectual work. The complaints have no place in responsible public discourse.
First, Zealot has formidable strengths. Aslan has done a great deal of homework, offering material that will instruct many specialists from time to time. The most important thing Aslan accomplishes involves setting Jesus in a plausible historical and cultural context. Indeed, more of the book may involve Jesus’ contexts than direct discussion of the man himself. Someone very like Jesus could easily have existed in Roman Galilee. Aslan’s Jesus is thoroughly Jewish, passionately committed to Israel’s welfare and restoration. Aslan appreciates how Jesus’ activities amounted to resistance against Roman domination — as well as against collaboration on the part of Jewish elites. Many scholars would agree.
Any respectable portrait of Jesus must take serious account of how Jesus died, as Aslan’s does. Jesus dies as a convicted seditionist, a would-be king who finally got caught. This is a serious interpretation of Jesus’ crucifixion. Perhaps Aslan most deserves credit for his openness to the possibility that Jesus really did see himself as Israel’s messiah, or king. Far too many historians dismiss this possibility out of hand.
Many traditionalist Christians will struggle with Aslan’s handling of the Gospel stories. Maybe they don’t teach this in some churches, but Christian thought developed a great deal in the decades following Jesus’ death, a fact Aslan recognizes. I do wish he were more careful in spelling out why he finds certain Gospel traditions more historically plausible than others, but again any credible account of Jesus’ life must recognize that the Gospels do not provide direct windows into Jesus’ activities.
I would add that Aslan provides some of the most helpful discussions I have yet encountered regarding the accounts of Jesus’ healing ministry and of his resurrection. These stories represent minefields for any historical investigator. Aslan handles them with sympathy, imagination, and critical judgment.
At the same time, I have some serious reservations about Aslan’s portrait of Jesus, and I suspect that most professional biblical scholars will share some of them. First, the book contains some outright glitches, things a professional scholar would be unlikely to say. Aslan suggests there were “countless” revolutionary prophets and would-be messiahs in Jesus’ day. Several did appear, but “countless” is a bit much. Aslan assumes near-universal illiteracy in Jesus’ society, an issue that remains unsettled and hotly contested among specialists. At one point Aslan says it would seem “unthinkable” for an adult Jewish man not to marry. He does mention celibate Jews like the Essenes, but he seems unaware that women were simply scarce in the ancient world. Lots of low-status men lacked the opportunity to marry. Aslan assumes Jesus lived and worked in Sepphoris, a significant city near Nazareth. This is possible, but we lack evidence to confirm it. Click link for full article;
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-carey/reza-aslan-on-jesus_b_3679466.html
Posted By F. Sheikh
Interview with the Book Author, Kavita S. Datla . The Author refers to creation of a separate state of Telangana, recently approved by Congress Party, in India. Can someone familiar with Indian politics comment on it-How it will affect Muslim population and local politics? ( F.Sheikh)
Q; What is your book arguing?
My book tells the story of a set of vernacular projects in the Urdu language in the early twentieth century. It argues that the people involved in these projects were self-consciously trying to ‘modernize’ the Urdu language and make it fit for new national, and secular, purposes. Given Urdu’s associations with Muslims, these projects were simultaneously about finding a place for Muslims in the nation.
The book begins by considering the general character of education in the Hyderabad state, and the different projects of reform that were proposed by late nineteenth/early twentieth century administrators and thinkers – from a plan to create an Islamic university that would usher in a theological reformation in the larger Muslim world, to a proposal to found India’s first vernacular university. Ultimately, it was the latter that was taken up and the new university became a site for a massive project of translation, and for the unfolding of new research agendas. Many of these projects sent intellectuals sifting through the Indian past and non-Western (and especially Islamic) scholarly traditions to identify vocabularies and experiences that might be retrieved and used for a newly defined common good. Ultimately, the book tries to recover some of the tensions and debates involved in this process (as people argued about which vocabularies or traditions to draw from) and also the political impasses that they led to; the latter most dramatically in discussions with figures like Gandhi over India’s national language (Hindi, Urdu, or Hindustani). In that sense, it is as much about language as it is about the political questions opened up by Indian nationalism.
Q; My favorite chapter, if I may be so bold, is your chapter on “Muslim Pasts: Writing the History of India and the History of Islam”. In your discussion of Abdul Halim Sharar (1860-1926) and Sayyid Hashmi Faridabadi (/), you argue, convincingly, that these scholars were articulating an alternative space both in history and in historiography for Muslims (alternative to the Oriental scholarship). Could you speak to why the earliest history of Islam was so pivotal a period for these scholars and their projects?
I am both delighted and surprised to hear you say that! When I finished my dissertation, that chapter was lying on the chopping room floor. I knew that there was something there but had done an awful job developing it. That chapter was especially difficult for me to write as it took me into the (then unfamiliar) terrain of Arabic historiography.
Clearly, the time of early Islam has always been important to practicing Muslims and to Muslim scholarship. But, it is also true that in late nineteenth-century South Asia there was a heightened interest in writing about it. So, we see a proliferation of historical biographies of the Prophet, for example. In fact, Shibli’s monumental Sirat-ul nabi is produced in this period with the financial assistance of the Hyderabad government. I think there is a lot more that we could do to think about why this happened at this particular moment. This was, of course, a time when scholars in other parts of the Muslim world, like Egypt, were composing modern Prophetic siras as well. My small contribution was to look at how one series of texts on the History of Islam was constructed, to think about the choices that were available to the author as he wrote and to understand his particular narrative decisions. Clearly, Sharar was responding to western scholarship on Islam. But, he was also interested, I think, in trying to understand historical “decline”. In this, he shared a context with many other thinkers in the colonial world. It was a question that especially preoccupied Indian Muslims in the wake of the permanent displacement of the Mughal emperor and one that led them to think in terms of a model of civilizations, to which Gibbon was central. It is also striking that the Hyderabad state made the determination that there were no fitting books on the History of India or Islam that they could use in their classrooms. Clearly, history was a uniquely politicized academic subject in this period and those writing in Hyderabad had their eye on the evolving state of the field, keeping track of archaeological excavations of the Indus Valley civilization, or writings about Dravidian civilization, as well as those works being produced by European authors on the early history of Islam and the history of India.
Q; In a sense your work traces a network of British and Indian intellectuals at the early 20th century moment in Hyderabad. Simultaneously, you are also tracing the history of an institution – that is the Osmania University? Is there a tension between these two foci? What theoretical framework helps you move from the individual to the institution?
You might be surprised by how many different individuals are hailed as ‘the founder’ of Osmania University. Obviously, that is not the relationship between individual and institution to which you refer.
I think there is a tension here, but I hope that it is a productive one. On the one hand, the archives themselves seemed to suggest a project on Osmania University, as it was so important to education in the state and had effects that rippled out into the countryside. But I also wanted to get more involved in the challenges that the institution was trying to address, and one way to do this was to work through the many publications of the individuals associated with it. So there was an element of intellectual history here, an attempt to understand why certain concepts, like that of the vernacular, became particularly and peculiarly loaded at the turn of the twentieth century. The focus on the trajectories of scholars associated with the institution also allowed me to write about the larger political debates that characterized this period, and to do so in a way that the dilemmas resonated to readers today. But ultimately, I was also interested in finding out as much as I could about how these intellectual debates came to shape the system of education in the state and therefore also affected a larger public. So, in the last chapter, I look at some of the statements made by students during the course of a protest movement, trying to take their ideas about language and religion seriously. Osmania University continues to be a nerve center for political movements, today for a separate state of Telangana, and it is important to think seriously about the (not identical) political motivations that have inspired these movements in different periods. Click link for full article;
This article in Dawn was shared by Wequar Azeem with a question: Do you agree ?
Our political discourse is dominated by two competing narratives of the recent history of Pakistan. Each claims to be ideologically rooted. The dominant one describes Islam as the main driving force behind the country’s creation and argues that the same shall define its present course.
The other narrative, however, tells us that Pakistan was founded by a liberal lot. The Quaid spoke English, wore western dresses and posed with his pet dog. Liaqat Ali’s wife Ra’ana shook hands with foreign dignitaries. Ayub Khan gave the US president a pat on the cheek and so forth.
These ‘liberal’ founders had set the country, continues the narrative, on the path to become a liberal, secular and yet, Muslim country – something similar to, but better than Ataturk’s Turkey. The country stayed on this ‘original’ liberal course till 1970s.
Interesting evidence presented to support the assertion is a gallery of photographs. The romantic black and white shots from the 1950s, 60s and 70s are shared on the social media a thousand times a day and framed in articles along with nostalgic captions. They show us women in sleeveless dresses playing cards and sipping wine in a Lahore hotel, European hippies smoking pot while waiting to be served chapal kebabs in Qisa Khani Bazaar in Peshawar and a goree madam struggling with a mouthful of paan as onlookers at Burns Road, Karachi chuckle.
Those were the days, my dear! The mullahs were all either in jail or strictly confined to their mosque duties and everyone was free to do whatever he or she wanted to. But then, the machinations of the political right derailed it and that’s how the country ended up in the present extremist abyss.
I have many problems with this so-called liberal-secular narrative but would focus on just one point here.
Has there ever been a liberal and secular Pakistan?
I sincerely believe that such a country has never existed. In its 66 years, Pakistan has never really changed its hue. It has stayed green all the way, one shade darker or one shade lighter.
The country was born to a confused Muslim ideology that was interpreted differently by various interest groups. The elite wanted to use Islam as a camouflage to its rule; there was no other way they could hold on to power. The clergy owned the Islamic franchise and wasn’t willing to lend it without getting a share in power. Click link for full article;