By Anwaar Hussain This one will be as painful to read as it was to write. There is this old method of hunting practiced in some parts of the world. It is called a fire-hunt. Two people are required. One goes ahead carrying a blazing torch (or a high powered flash light these days), while [...]

By Anwaar Hussain Meerwala is a small, dusty village in the mostly rural Muzaffargarh District in the south of Punjab province of Pakistan. This small, nondescript village has produced a personality whose name has been reverberating across the globe for some years now. The name of this person is Mukhtaran Bibi (also known as Mukhtar [...]

By Anwaar Hussain The religion that once rewrote the parameters of human civilization in three continents, whose mighty empire once spanned the globe from the Central Asian Steppes to the shores of Atlantic, today feels threatened by a peasant woman. Its adherents want to kill this woman, a Christian mother of five, for having supposedly [...]

By Irfan Husain ALTHOUGH I get my share of spam in my inbox, I often receive very interesting and useful links as well. One took me to a recent debate at New York University. Organised by Intelligence Squared, the topic was ‘Islam is a religion of peace’. IQ2 has become an increasingly important forum for [...]

By Anwaar Hussain Someone needed to say this, so there. We huff and puff, in a self-righteous rage, over the refusal of a few in the US of A to allow the building of a mosque near ground zero. For the bigots on either side especially, the issue has become so consuming that its is [...]

By Nadeem F. Paracha It was horrifying: the beating to death and then the upside down hanging of the two young brothers in Sialkot. Accused of theft, the teenagers were brutally beaten with sticks and kicks by at least four men — an event that was watched in silence by a couple of cops and [...]

By Irfan Husain The ongoing furore over the so-called Ground Zero Mosque shows no sign of abating after weeks of noisy controversy. In a sense, it has become a litmus test of America’s cherished freedom of worship, as well as its tolerance of other people and other faiths. But to put things in perspective, I [...]