scholarly journals UNDERSTANDING PAKISTAN THROUGH LITERATURE: AN APPRAISAL OF SOME RECENT WORKS

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (01) ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Tauseef Ahmad Parray
Keyword(s):  
South Asian ◽  
Review Essay ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Muslim Country ◽  
Asian Countries ◽  
Religious Ideology ◽  
Political Idea ◽  
History Of ◽  
Military Politics ◽  
Major Argument

Pakistan, the second most populous Muslim country after Indonesia, came into existence on 14th August, 1947, after the division of ‘British ruled’ India (into India and Pakistan). From its inception to present, Pakistan covers a tumultuous history of over seven decades (1947-2019). Among the South Asian countries, no quantum of scholarship has been produced on any country—its history, religion (and religious ideology), politics, society, economy, and other inter-related issue—than Pakistan. This has continued in the last as well as present century. From 2010 onwards, numerous works have been published on religion, politics, military, and other aspects of Pakistan. This review essay, in this framework, presents an assessment of three (3) important works, published in between 2012 and 2014, so that to get clues of the various aspects of Pakistan. Following a descriptive-cum-comparative methodological approach, the books assessed and examined are: Ian Talbot, Pakistan: A New History (2012); Faisal Devji, Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea (2013); and Aqil Shah, The Army and Democracy: Military Politics in Pakistan (2014). This assessment helps us in understanding the diverse scholarly approaches adopted (by different scholars) in studying Pakistan. The major argument put forth is that such an appraisal helps us not only in understanding the history of Pakistan, but in analyzing the issues and challenges Pakistan has faced, and is facing—be they religious, political, or related to military and security, etc.

In a Pure Muslim Land

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Wolfgang Fuchs
Keyword(s):  
South Asian ◽  
Alternative Conceptions ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
Religious Ideology ◽  
Crucial Component ◽  
Islamic Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
Intellectual Production ◽  
Ethnographic History ◽  
Religious Landscape

Centering Pakistan in a story of transnational Islam stretching from South Asia to the Middle East, Simon Wolfgang Fuchs offers the first in-depth ethnographic history of the intellectual production of Shi‘is and their religious competitors in this “Land of the Pure.” The notion of Pakistan as the pinnacle of modern global Muslim aspiration forms a crucial component of this story. It has empowered Shi'is, who form about twenty percent of the country's population, to advance alternative conceptions of their religious hierarchy while claiming the support of towering grand ayatollahs in Iran and Iraq. Fuchs shows how popular Pakistani preachers and scholars have boldly tapped into the esoteric potential of Shi'ism, occupying a creative and at times disruptive role as brokers, translators, and self-confident pioneers of contemporary Islamic thought. They have indigenized the Iranian Revolution and formulated their own ideas for fulfilling the original promise of Pakistan. Challenging typical views of Pakistan as a mere Shi'i backwater, Fuchs argues that its complex religious landscape represents how a local, South Asian Islam may open up space for new intellectual contributions to global Islam. Yet religious ideology has also turned Pakistan into a deadly battlefield: sectarian groups since the 1980s have been bent on excluding Shi'is as harmful to their own vision of an exemplary Islamic state.

scholarly journals Understanding the Trade-offs in Drug Development: Retrospect on Lessons from the Early Phase of the COVID-19 Pandemic

2021 ◽  
pp. 0169796X2199683
Author(s):  
Debdatta Saha ◽  
T. M. Vasuprada
Keyword(s):  
Clinical Trials ◽  
Drug Development ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
Asian Countries ◽  
Research Papers ◽  
Alternative Medicines ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
History Of ◽  
Rich History

Using COVID-19 as the backdrop, this article investigates different trade-offs in terms of pecuniary and time costs in drug development across different branches of medicine. South Asian countries as well as China have a rich history of practicing traditional and alternative medicine. However, modern biomedicine as well as traditional medicine comes with certain procedural requirements, which make immediate responses to a pandemic difficult. Clinical trials in biomedicine are costly, mostly in terms of time. On the other hand, a lack of these standards, as in the case of many alternative medicines, does not come with the promise of low-cost cures for the viral pandemic. Any modification of the standards in pharmaceutical testing has resulted in avoidable controversies at all stages of drug discovery, be it in research papers, or in clinical trials, or in the sale of actual medicine itself. Non-pharmaceutical intervention, with different economic impacts, becomes imperative.

Roshdi Rashed

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 279-295
Author(s):  
Mohammed Aref
Keyword(s):  
Review Essay ◽  
Great Book ◽  
Mathematical Language ◽  
Single Word ◽  
Major Work ◽  
Galileo Galilei ◽  
Elementary Knowledge ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Universe

This review essay introduces the work of the Egyptian scientific historian and philosopher Roshdi Rashed, a pioneer in the field of the history of Arab sciences. The article is based on the five volumes he originally wrote in French and later translated into Arabic, which were published by the Centre for Arab Unity Studies and which are now widely acclaimed as a unique effort to unveil the achievements of Arab scientists. The essay reviews this major work, which seems, like Plato’s Republic to have “No Entry for Those Who Have No Knowledge of Mathematics” written on its gate. If you force your way in, even with elementary knowledge of computation, a philosophy will unfold before your eyes, described by the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei as “written in that great book which ever lies before our eyes—I mean the universe—but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols, in which it is written. This book is written in the mathematical language, and the symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it; without which one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth.” The essay is a journey through this labyrinth where the history of world mathematics got lost and was chronicled by Rashed in five volumes translated from the French into Arabic. It took him fifteen years to complete.

The Question of Authority: Deracinating Race, Repositioning Religion, and Regenerating Gender in the History of African American Islam

2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 213-227
Author(s):  
Rosemary Hicks
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Review Essay ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Islam ◽  
African American Islam ◽  
Oxford University Press

A review essay devoted to Islam and the Blackamerican: Looking Toward the Third Resurrection by Sherman A. Jackson. Oxford University Press, 2005. 256 pages. Hb. $29.95/£22.50, ISBN-13: 9780195180817.

Wadhwa, Charan D. and MukulG. Asher (eds.). ASEAN-SOUTH ASIA Economic Relations. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. 1985. ix+384pp.

1988 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 336-338
Author(s):  
Muhammad Hussain Malik
Keyword(s):  
Developing Countries ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Southeast Asian ◽  
Asian Countries ◽  
Asian Studies ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
Rigorous Research ◽  
Southeast Asian Studies ◽  
The Right ◽  
Policy Proposals

The need to enhance their economic relations with each other has long been felt by developing countries. However, their efforts in this regard have met with limited success. One of the reasons for this could be that not much serious work has been done to understand the complexities and possibilities of economic relations of developing countries. The complementarities which exist among the economies of these countries remain relatively unexplored. There is a lack of concrete policy proposals which developing countries may follow to achieve their often proclaimed objective of collective self-reliance. All this needs serious and rigorous research efforts. In this perspective, the present study can be considered as a step in the right direction. It examines trade and other economic relations of developing countries of two regions of Asia-South Asian countries and member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). The study also explores ways and means to improve economic relations among these countries

Religion and Female-Male Ratios in India

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Swati Narayan
Keyword(s):  
South Asian ◽  
Asian Countries

The data is largely based on Census records from 1881 to 2011 of South Asian countries especially India, disaggregated by sex, age and religion.

Dancing Women

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Usha Iyer
Keyword(s):  
South Asian ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
The Body ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
History Of ◽  
Material History ◽  
Cultural Forms ◽  
Hindi Cinema

Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema, an ambitious study of two of South Asia’s most popular cultural forms—cinema and dance—historicizes and theorizes the material and cultural production of film dance, a staple attraction of popular Hindi cinema. It explores how the dynamic figurations of the body wrought by cinematic dance forms from the 1930s to the 1990s produce unique constructions of gender, stardom, and spectacle. By charting discursive shifts through figurations of dancer-actresses, their publicly performed movements, private training, and the cinematic and extra-diegetic narratives woven around their dancing bodies, the book considers the “women’s question” via new mobilities corpo-realized by dancing women. Some of the central figures animating this corporeal history are Azurie, Sadhona Bose, Vyjayanthimala, Helen, Waheeda Rehman, Madhuri Dixit, and Saroj Khan, whose performance histories fold and intersect with those of other dancing women, including devadasis and tawaifs, Eurasian actresses, oriental dancers, vamps, choreographers, and backup dancers. Through a material history of the labor of producing on-screen dance, theoretical frameworks that emphasize collaboration, such as the “choreomusicking body” and “dance musicalization,” aesthetic approaches to embodiment drawing on treatises like the Natya Sastra and the Abhinaya Darpana, and formal analyses of cine-choreographic “techno-spectacles,” Dancing Women offers a variegated, textured history of cinema, dance, and music. Tracing the gestural genealogies of film dance produces a very different narrative of Bombay cinema, and indeed of South Asian cultural modernities, by way of a corporeal history co-choreographed by a network of remarkable dancing women.

Australianama

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samia Khatun
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
South Asian ◽  
South Asian Diaspora ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Asian Diaspora ◽  
Broken Hill ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Anglophone World ◽  
Indian Ocean World

Australian deserts remain dotted with the ruins of old mosques. Beginning with a Bengali poetry collection discovered in a nineteenth-century mosque in the town of Broken Hill, Samia Khatun weaves together the stories of various peoples colonized by the British Empire to chart a history of South Asian diaspora. Australia has long been an outpost of Anglo empires in the Indian Ocean world, today the site of military infrastructure central to the surveillance of 'Muslim-majority' countries across the region. Imperial knowledges from Australian territories contribute significantly to the Islamic-Western binary of the post- Cold War era. In narrating a history of Indian Ocean connections from the perspectives of those colonized by the British, Khatun highlights alternative contexts against which to consider accounts of non-white people. Australianama challenges a central idea that powerfully shapes history books across the Anglophone world: the colonial myth that European knowledge traditions are superior to the epistemologies of the colonized. Arguing that Aboriginal and South Asian language sources are keys to the vast, complex libraries that belie colonized geographies, Khatun shows that stories in colonized tongues can transform the very ground from which we view past, present and future.

History of Universities

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Reference Material ◽  
Review Essay ◽  
Original Research ◽  
University Reform ◽  
History Of Higher Education ◽  
History Of ◽  
Queens College ◽  
History Of Universities

This issue of the history of universities contains, as usual, an interesting mix of learned articles and book reviews covering topics related to the history of higher education. The volume combines original research and reference material. This issue includes articles on the topics of Alard Palenc; Joseph Belcher and Latin at Harvard; Queens College in Massachusetts; and university reform in Europe. The text includes a review essay as well as the usual book reviews.

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