Continuing from where I left off with Al-Muhajabah’s “A field guide to Islamic activists”: Second, we can look at recent developments in Islamic thought in Pakistan as a whole. Pakistan was created in 1948 as a state for the Muslims of India after India won its independence from Britain. The Muslims had been an active… Continue reading Activist Islam in Pakistan: Post 2
Blogroll
Recently, I have added some weblogs to my blogroll. So I should probably mention them: Path of the Paddle is Ikram Saeed’s blog who can been present in the comments section here and on a lot of other blogs. Now he has his own blog to pontificate on everything from Islam, War on Terror, Iraq… Continue reading Blogroll
Activist Islam in Pakistan: Post 1
I promised this series quite some time ago, but didn’t get around to doing it. I’ll use Al-Muhajabah’s “A field guide to Islamic activists” as a jumping-off point (Yes, I remember mentioning it earlier and promising a critique of its Pakistan-related items.) Taliban also need to be understood as a product of the situation in… Continue reading Activist Islam in Pakistan: Post 1
Keep Your Tinfoil Hat On
An interesting area of research: Just by pointing his supermagnets at the right spots on your head, Dr. Alvaro Pascual-Leone can make you go momentarily mute or blind. He can disrupt your working memory or your ability to recognize faces. He can even make it harder for you to say verbs while nouns remain as… Continue reading Keep Your Tinfoil Hat On
Denial of Service Attack
It seems that some virus/worm is making its way through the net. Access to anything on the internet has been sporadic for the last few hours. My firewall log contains lots of blocked UDP accesses on port 1434. Looking at Matrix NetSystems graphs, it seems that packet loss increased a lot and reachability was reduced… Continue reading Denial of Service Attack
Special Registration Questionnaire
AILA (American Immigration Lawyers Association) has the list of standard questions being asked of all special registrants. Seems fairly innocuous.
Email me from Mt. Everest
A very interesting endeavor: If the 25-below-zero temperature, howling wind and grim effects of altitude sickness do not make most of those trying to scale Mount Everest feel a world away from home, the near-complete lack of communications on and around Everest surely does. This year, just in time for the 50th anniversary of Sir… Continue reading Email me from Mt. Everest
Condemnation of Terrorism: The End
A few days ago, in a surly and defiant mood, I decided to post a condemnation of terrorism from Muslims daily. My readers thought I didn’t have any obligation to condemn terrorism. As it turned out, that was a decision I made in haste. I kept it up only for three posts (1, 2, 3)… Continue reading Condemnation of Terrorism: The End
The Pianist
We watched The Pianist on sunday. It’s a good movie about the holocaust. It tells the story of a Jewish pianist, Mr. Szpilman, in Warsaw during World War II. It shows the restrictions imposed by the Nazis on the Jewish population and their internment in the Warsaw ghetto. Szpilman’s family was sent to a concentration… Continue reading The Pianist
Comments and Visitors
Thanks to Ikram Saeed for the 100th comment on this blog. He has been the most prolific commenter here. According to my counters, I have had about 3257-3306 “unique visitors” since around Nov 21 last year. More than a third of these were in a two-day burst due to an InstaPundit link. Usually, I get… Continue reading Comments and Visitors