Review – Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran

Review: Jasmine and Stars: Reading More than Lolita in Tehran (UNC Press, 2007)
By Ali A., Islamic Insights, Feb 9-15, 2009
While reading a text assigned for your class on a topic related to Islam and Muslims, ever had that feeling of frustration, “That’s NOT how it is!”? You know the reading is full of holes, yet [...]

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Umrao Jan Ada’s Pakistan

If you know Urdu and are in touch with Pakistani culture and media, you must know how popular the serialized TV plays are in Pakistan. You might have heard about a recent serialized television play called Umrao Jan Ada, which was aired on Geo TV in 2003. The serial was based on Mirza Hadi Ruswa’s [...]

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Missing in Pakistan – Documentary

“Missing in Pakistan”, a documentary by Ziad Zafar, presents a heartbreaking account of the plight of hundreds of disappeared people and their families in Pakistan. These people are in illegal detention by the intelligence agencies. The documentary is informally circulating in Pakistan and could be downloaded from the net (24 min long, see here)
My quick [...]

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We All Need Heroes

I recently came across with Howard Zinn and Rebecca Stefoff’s “A Young People’s History of the United States.” This is a condensed and simplified version of Zinn’s classic work with almost the same title and does not miss the insights and dissenting spirit of the original work. This condensed version is aimed at reaching the [...]

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On Global Disparities

Watch a segment from the documentary “We” here. In this segment Arundhati Roy, the writer and activist, talks about the ever-widening disparities between the rich and the poor in the world today.
Roy’s comments in this segment end at a very insightful point where she says that both socialism and market capitalism are inherently flawed and [...]

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