Monthly Archives: April 2014

The Other Side Of Karachi-Indie Musical Capital

Posted on by
Reply

(One Of The World’s Most Dangerous Cities Is Emerging As An Indie Music Capital) By Mallika Rao.

Karachi, Pakistan is one of the world’s most violent cities. And yet some of the music coming out of it would fit right in at a garden party on Cape Cod.

The disconnect is emblematic of a new cultural era for the world’s seventh largest city, characterized by variety. Outsiders are noticing, from Rolling Stone to Pakistan’s neighbors in India. A writer for the Delhi-based magazine Caravan recently dove into the city’s secret clubs and concluded that a “shift” aided by the internet is producing an unprecedented range of sounds, “reflecting [Karachi’s] frenzied character.”

Even the band names seem designed to stir things up, with an almost overwrought indie sensibility: Mole, //orangenoise, Dynoman, Basheer & the Pied Pipers, Alien Panda Jury, and DALT WISNEY are a few of the current hottest indie acts. Because Pakistani hits historically come from the classical world or the movies — meaning Bollywood, or the Lahore analog, Lollywood — these independent artists are forming collectives that act as labels, helping bands put out albums and promoting each other.

The best-known collective is Forever South (FXS), inspired in name by one of the first albums put out by the Karachi-based band Mole. FXS members — most of them young men — tend to self-identify with Electronic Dance Music, which generally emanates from a single deejay’s computer. The bare-bones production of EDM is a natural fit in a country where independent studios are a rarity.

But the sounds embraced by Karachi’s young musicians also recall two traditional Sufi forms that reign in the Muslim country. The ghazal, which translates to “the mortal cry of the gazelle,” tends to be slow and dreamy, while the quick beats ofqawwali are intended to score the spins of whirling dervishes, as they twirl their way to enlightenment.

As in any good music scene, there are turf wars. In an interview last fall with Vice Magazine’s electronic music spinoff THUMP, the rising Islamabad-based producer Talal Qureshi distanced himself from “that word ‘trippy.’” According to Qureshi, his peers in Karachi are limiting themselves by sticking to “music which is good to dance and be on drugs to.

”The comments rippled through the Pakistani music scene. In a counter interview with THUMP, FXS hit back at Qureshi, using their respective cities as ammunition. “Karachi,” said one member, “is a living city.” Meanwhile, “after 8pm Islamabad shuts down. All the house lights are switched off. It’s a town full of retired army uncles.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/25/pakistan-indie-music-karachi_n_5020947.html?utm_hp_ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=false

Posted By F. Sheikh

 

 

If I had only a few weeks to live, where would I go?

Posted on by
3

( On Not Going Home)

A wonderfully written and enjoyable article by Richard Cohen. It is always in our subconscious but never much thought about the question and subject. It is worth expressing your thoughts on the subject in comments section. (F. Sheikh) Some excerpts;

” In a fascinating recent essay in The London Review of Books, called “On Not Going Home,” James Wood relates how he “asked Christopher Hitchens, long before he was terminally ill, where he would go if he had only a few weeks to live. Would he stay in America? ‘No, I’d go to Dartmoor, without a doubt,’ he told me. It was the landscape of his childhood.”

It was the landscape, in other words, of unfiltered experience, of things felt rather than thought through, of the world in its beauty absorbed before it is understood, of patterns and sounds that lodge themselves in some indelible place in the psyche and call out across the years.

That question is worth repeating: If I had only a few weeks to live, where would I go? It is a good way of getting rid of the clutter that distracts or blinds. I will get to that in a moment.

In the essay, Wood, who grew up in England but has lived in the United States for 18 years, explores a certain form of contemporary homelessness — lives lived without the finality of exile, but also without the familiarity of home.

He speaks of existences “marked by a certain provisionality, a structure of departure and return that may not end.”

This is a widespread modern condition; perhaps it is the modern condition. Out of it, often, comes anxiety. Wood does not focus on the psychological effects of what he calls “a certain outsider-dom,” but if you dig into people who are depressed you often find that their distress at some level is linked to a sense of not fitting in, an anxiety about belonging: displacement anguish.

Wood describes looking at the familiar life of his Boston street, “the heavy maple trees, the unkempt willow down at the end, an old white Cadillac with the bumper sticker ‘Ted Kennedy has killed more people than my gun,’ and I feel … nothing: some recognition, but no comprehension, no real connection, no past, despite all the years I have lived there — just a tugging distance from it all. A panic suddenly overtakes me, and I wonder: How did I get here?”

“Wood writes: “Freud has a wonderful word, ‘afterwardness,’ which I need to borrow, even at the cost of kidnapping it from its very different context. To think about home and the departure from home, about not going home and no longer feeling able to go home, is to be filled with a remarkable sense of ‘afterwardness’: It is too late to do anything about it now, and too late to know what should have been done. And that may be all right.”

Yes, being not quite home, acceptance, which may be bountiful, is what is left to us.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/04/opinion/cohen-in-search-of-home.html?hp&rref=opinion

Mardin Fatwa & New Mardin Declaration

Posted on by
3

(Written by S Iftikhar Murshed and shared by Wequar Azeem)

A very interesting article.Does this mean that both Western Media and Muslim Media are wrongly blaming Wahabbism as the root cause of terrorism? Who is the real culprit? Taliban, JUI and majority of NWF is Deobandi. Although Deobandi and Wahabbi are considered cousins, but they hate each other and has differences in ideology. Are Deobandi happy that Wahabbis are getting all the blame and they are getting a free pass?  ( F. Sheikh).

Article

Friday,28th March 2014 marked the fourth anniversary of the adoption of the New Mardin Declaration by globally renowned Muslim theologians and academics from across the world including Saudi Arabia, Turkey, India, Senegal, Kuwait, Yemen, Bosnia, Mauritania, Iran, Morocco and Indonesia. They convened at the picturesque south-eastern Turkish city of Mardin on March 27-28, 2010 and accomplished more in a few hours than what that grotesquely inept outfit known as the Organisation of the Islamic Conference has been able to achieve in the four decades of its futile existence.


The meeting, which was jointly organised by the Artuklu University and the Global Centre for Renewal and Guidance, was chaired by the famed scholar and former vice president of Mauritania, Sheikh Abdullah bin Mahfudh ibn Bayyih. In the two days that the conference lasted, it critically examined and then exposed the deliberate textual distortions of the Mardin fatwa of Taqi ad-Din Ahmad ibn Taymiyyah (1263-1328). It is from the corrupted version of this decree that Al-Qaeda and its affiliated networks have derived their ideology which justifies mass murder and destruction in the name of Islam.

Though the fatwa was issued more than 700 years ago, its relevance to the terrorism-plagued contemporary world is undiminished. This was recognised by the Mardin scholars who accordingly decided “to take the fatwa from the specific geographical focus for which it was intended to a broader global focus and from the contingencies of Ibn Taymiyyah’s time to a timeless understanding.”

Ibn Taymiyyah was born in Haran, an obscure little town in the Mardin region, and was only seven at the time of the Mongol invasion of the area. His family, which consisted of some of the most well-known theologians of the times, was forced to flee to Damascus which was then ruled by the Mamluks of Egypt. But the damage insofar as Ibn Taymiyyah was concerned had already been done. At that tender age he had witnessed the atrocities perpetrated by the Mongols and was traumatised. Hideous memories of Mardin haunted him for the rest of his life. 

In Damascus he was taught Islamic jurisprudence by his father and steeped himself in the teachings of the Hanbali school of thought. Although Ibn Taymiyyah was soon acknowledged as the foremost religious authority of his times, he also became controversial. As early as 1293, he came into conflict with the local authorities for protesting the sentencing of a Christian on charges of blasphemy. Five years later he was accused of anthropomorphism (ascribing human characteristics to God) as well as for contemptuously criticising the legitimacy of dogmatic theology. 

Around that time Ibn Taymiyyah accompanied a delegation of the ulema to Mahmud Ghazan, the ruler of Mongol Empire’s Ilkhanate branch in Iran in order to persuade him to stop attacking Muslims. But suddenly ghastly scenes and images from his early childhood in Mardin came back to Ibn Taymiyyah, and, unable to restrain himself, he told the ruler bluntly: “You claim that you are a Muslim and you have with you muftis, imams and sheikhs but you have invaded us and reached our country for what? While your father and your grandfather, Hulagu, were non-believers, they did not attack and kept their promise. But you promised and broke your promise.”

This impassioned outburst brought Ibn Taymiyyah to the adverse notice of the authorities. He was subsequently jailed on several occasions for contradicting the opinions of the jurists and theologians of his day. On the orders of the Mamluk rulers of Cairo he was imprisoned in Damascus from August 1319 to February 1321 for propounding a doctrine that curtailed the ease with which a Muslim male could divorce his wife. He was incarcerated again in 1326 until his death two years later for issuing edicts that conflicted with the thinking of those in authority. 

But his fame had spread far and wide and his bier was followed by 20,000 mourners, many of them women who considered him a saint. It is ironic that Ibn Taymiyyah’s grave became a place of pilgrimage even though he was an exponent of the fundamentalist strand of Islam and is considered one of the principal forerunners of the Wahhabis.

It is against this background that the scholars at the Mardin conference moved on to a textual examination of Ibn Taymiyyah’s actual decree. He was pointedly asked whether his beloved land, Mardin, was an abode of war (dar al-kufr) or the home of peace (dar al-Islam). His answer was that an unprecedented composite situation had emerged. Mardin was neither an abode of peace where the Shariah prevailed nor was it a land of war because the inhabitants of the region were believers. Therefore, he decreed that “the Muslims living therein should be treated in accordance to their rights as Muslims, while the non-Muslims living there outside the authority of Islamic law should be treated according to their rights.”

This superbly nuanced ruling, which came to be known as the Mardin fatwa, was unmistakably peaceful in intent and was in accord with the teachings of Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal (d. 855) who prohibited rebellion even against unjust authority in order to stave off anarchy and indiscriminate bloodshed. But the text was subsequently changed to read: “…while the non-Muslims living there outside the authority of Islamic law should be fought as is their due.”

This was done through the substitution of two letters in a single word. In the second version the word ‘yuamal’ (should be treated) had been rendered as ‘yuqatal’ (should be fought) as a result of which the purport of the decree was drastically altered. According to Sheikh Abd al-Wahab al-Turayri, an internationally acknowledged authority on Islamic jurisprudence and a former of professor at Riyadh’s al-Imam University, the only known copy of the original fatwa was the Zahiriyyah Library manuscript which had been archived at the Asad Library in Damascus. But unfortunately this was either not widely known or had been deliberately ignored. 

The corrupted version made its first appearance more than a hundred years ago in the 1909 edition of Ibn Taymiyyah’s ‘Fatawa’ that was printed and published by Faraj Allah al-Kirdi. This did incalculable damage because the error was never rectified and was not only republished time and again but also rendered into English, French and several other languages. 

It was used by the Egyptian ideologue Muhammad abd al-Salam Faraj (1954-1982) for his book ‘Al-Faridah ahl-Gaibah’ which posits that jihad is the sixth pillar of Islam and, in the words of Sheikh Abd al-Wahab al-Turayri, “has become a manifesto for militant groups” including Al-Qaeda and its affiliates. Faraj established the Jamaat al-Jihad in 1981 which assassinated President Anwar Sadat on October 6 of that year. He was executed six months later.

For the first time ever the distortions in the text of Ibn Taymiyyah’s fatwa were exposed and corrected by the Mardin conference. This was a remarkable achievement and was acclaimed worldwide as a crippling blow to the ideology of terrorism. The New Mardin Declaration which was adopted on the conclusion of the conference affirms unambiguously: “Anyone who seeks support from this fatwa for killing Muslims or non-Muslims has erred in his interpretation…It is not for a Muslim individual or a Muslim group to announce and declare war or engage in combative jihad…on their own.”

This is a sobering thought for the Pakistan government which has committed the supreme folly of initiating direct talks with the TTP, the first round of which was held on Wednesday. The outcome of the Mardin conference was summed up by its spokesman who said that the meeting had brought together “scholars and theologians from different persuasions within Islam. But united they stood: Islam condemns terrorism and indiscriminate murder.” This is the message that the government’s panel of negotiators should convey to the TTP shura as the futile talks with the outlawed group gathers momentum.