New scholarship on religion and reform: Part – II
'The latest contribution by Ali Usman Qasmi to the existing scholarship on the history of Pakistan and how religion has influenced citizenship and other issues in the country is Qaum,…
New scholarship on religion and reform: Part – I
Despite a general apathy – or even despondency – about falling academic standards in Pakistan, some relatively young researchers and writers have made their mark in academic circles in the…
Climate and the religious lens
The condition of Pakistani cities shows that we are suffering from an intellectual, professional and moral crisis. There is a sense that the existing government institutions and people cannot be…
A critique of three scholars
Some of my readers have asked me to write more on historiography in Pakistan other than the writers such as Ali Abbas Jalalpuri, Dr Mubarak Ali, and Sibte Hasan. In…
Hope for a religious corridor
The Sikh community the world over is getting ready to commemorate the 550th birth anniversary in November 2019 of the First Guru of the Sikhs, Guru Nanak Dev. Many would-be…
Mapping religious groups
Extremism and terrorism pose an existential threat to the peace, progress and prosperity of the country. Unfortunately, we have failed to eradicate terrorism despite the fact that we have spent…
The deepening crisis of scholarship
Last week, I ended the first part of this series by sharing my feeling of shock and dismay at the decline we have observed in religious studies and theological development…
The deepening crisis of scholarship
One’s view is primarily that of a creative writer. But since one’s interests straddle history, politics, culture and society, there is an inherent compulsion to comment on issues that surround…
Female scholarship
What would the world have been like if women had played a role in interpreting the Quran and development of Islamic jurisprudence? Most certainly, there would have been direct impacts…
Religious unity
The main objective of militants such as the Taliban is to expand. They were initially a small group of people with an extremist interpretation of their own, but as time…
