Philosofi

History has treated women cruelly and with ill-disguised condescension. Condemned as outcasts in the Judaic and Christian scriptures, they were placed on a relatively equal footing with men in Islam. Yet it is in Islamic countries that they live on the periphery of society and are too often victims of violence.

In Pakistan the birth of a girl is seldom a cause for celebration because the infant is considered a liability. It is this attitude that is sternly condemned by the Quran: “For, whenever any of them is given the glad tiding of (the birth of) a girl, his face darkens, and he is filled with suppressed anger, avoiding people because of the (alleged) evil of the glad tiding which he has received, (and debating within himself:) Shall he keep this (child) despite the contempt (which he feels for it)-or shall he bury it in the dust? Oh, evil indeed is whatever they decide!”

An average woman in Pakistan lives in fear and in her heart peace has no dwelling. Her imagination is made grotesque by terror as brilliantly portrayed in Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy’s Oscar-winning documentary Saving Face.

But Saving Face is much more than a documentary; it is a work of art. This is because every form of art, as one of the greatest writers of the 19th century believed, is ultimately the conversion of an idea into an image. The substance of art is derived from the truth, and this is what Chinoy has so skilfully used in her film.

Truth, indeed, is a thing most painful to listen to and most painful to utter, and this is precisely what Saving Face does as it chronicles the lives of women whose faces are disfigured by acid attacks.

contd

umalik:

Pakistan must end its policy of killings and kidnappings of Baloch people and recognise the importance of the region.

by Akbar Ahmed (Ambassador Akbar Ahmed is currently the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies at American University in Washington).

(Complete article)

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My comments to…

Art of Gandhara

The first textual mention of historical Gandhara, the region that lies in the northwest of Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan, was in the ninth century BCE. Over the next nine hundred years the region was conquered by Alexander the Great, the Indian Mauryan dynasty, the Parthians, the Indo-Greeks, and finally the Central Asian Kushan Empire. This complex history, with its many cultural influences, formed the foundation for a region where Buddhism and Buddhist art would flourish and develop unique characteristics.

This exhibition explores the primary characteristics that make works from Gandhara of such profound cultural significance, featuring stone sculptures and reliefs, bronzes, and works in gold dating from the first century BCE to the fifth century CE—from the Indo-Greek through Kushan periods, and closing with the beginnings of Sasanian rule there. The Buddhist Heritage of Pakistan is the first exhibition to bring works of Gandharan art from Pakistan to the United States in more than fifty years.

The Summer School of Linguistics (SIL), which is a language-research institute, publishes a book called the Ethnologue. This is a record of languages all over the world and is available both in the printed form as well as the internet version. The SIL team estimates that Pakistan has 72 languages. The important point is that except for Sindhi and Pashto (but that too up to class-5 in some areas) none of these languages are media of instruction in the state sector or the expensive, elitist private schools, colleges and universities. When the last speaker of a language dies, a world view, a culture, an identity, a repository of collective knowledge and literature dies. This by itself is a great loss and there is great concern in the world that the languages of the world are vanishing at a very fast rate.