Dilip Simeon's blog

Dawn, September 23, 2017 Last week’s exposure of a terrorist hive inside Karachi University (KU) prompted a remediation proposal by the chairman of the Higher Education Commission. His solution: if parents "switch off TV and internet early at night and send children off to bed", university students could be shunted away from terrorism. (The reference to adult students as bachas [children] is not unusual-university-going adults are generally considered kids incapable of independent thought.) If flippant, this proposal trivialises terrorism. But if meant seriously, one fears for the future. HEC’s current counterterrorism strategy is to establish a "directorate of students" within universities so that challenges faced by "students and staff would be registered, analysed and resolved". Extracurricular activities-football and cricket chiefly-will supposedly keep students away from guns and bombs. Should one laugh or cry? Down the chain of command i...

It is disturbing but hardly surprising to learn that LUMS administration has refused to renew the employment contract of Pakistan’s eminent scholar Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy. Apparently the decision to fire him has to do with the content of his course Science and Religion.  In the last few years, LUMS has established reputation of a pro-establishment academic institution dominated by Punjabi-Muhajir Islamists and pseudo-liberal elites. Financed by Punjab’s mercantile class, LUMS administration and faculty members have continued to serve the wider interests of Pakistan’s ruling classes, particularly those of military establishment. For example, while we witnessed big demonstrations organized by LUMS students and faculty members in support of a corrupt PCO judge Iftikhar Chaudhry and a pro-Taliban politician Imran Khan, there has been complete silence over genocide of Shia Muslims, Balochs, Pashtuns etc at the hands of Punjabi-establishment dominated army and its Takfiri Deobandi proxies...

Sohail:   When I read your book “Islam and Science’, I was quite impressed by your depth of knowledge and your critical mind; and when I heard you were coming to Canada I was looking forward to seeing you and interviewing you.You seem to have an optimistic attitude towards life and a humanistic philosophy. I am curious how you developed such an attitude and philosophy. Can you share with me what kind of family and social environment you grew up in? Pervez:  I was born in an Ismaili family. My maternal grandfather was from a place near Hyderabad, which is now called Sultanabad. He was very dedicated to Agha Khan. He had a lot of land in the village. He gave that land as a donation to Agha Khan and became a waris. My paternal grandfather was also a very religious man; in fact he built the first Jamaat Khana in Karachi with his own money, as a consequence of which Sultan Mohammad Shah named him mukhi. The name Hoodbhoy comes from Hood (brother of Hood). Hood was one of the min...

History Society Ramjas College The Society invites you to a discussion on The Political Situation in Pakistan, with Pervez Hoodbhoy, a leading public intellectual, campaigner for peace, and Professor of Physics and Mathematics, Forman Christian College Lahore Time:  12 noon Date: Friday January 15, 2016 Venue: Conference Room (above the canteen) Ramjas College University of Delhi, North Campus See also:  How difficult it is to help people change their thinking - Interview with Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy (2000)

PAKISTAN: WHY THEY KILLED ARIF SHAHID by Pervez Hoodbhoy -  May 30, 2013 < http://sacw.net/article4632.html > On the evening of May 13, an assassin stepped out of a car that had just driven to the doorstep of Sardar Arif Shahid’s residence in Rawalpindi.  He waited for the 62-year-old Kashmiri leader to arrive. After pumping four bullets into him, the killer calmly got back into the car and was whisked away.  A major Kashmiri nationalist leader, chairman of the All Parties National Alliance (APNA) and president of the Jammu Kashmir National Liberation Conference (JKNLC), had just been silenced. Mysteriously, a press that thrives on crime reporting was mum the next day. The murder still remains unreported. My first meeting with Arif Shahid was just a few days after the October 8, 2005 earthquake. It had nothing to do with the politics of Kashmir. A team of teachers and students from  Quaid-e-Azam University, using money raised by the Eqbal Ahmad Foundatio...

Professor Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy, who teaches physics and math at Lahore’s Forman Christian University, has been told that his contract will not be renewed in 2021. In the  same week, the Punjab governor announced that all universities of the province would be required to teach the Holy Quran as a compulsory subject. Hoodbhoy holds a PhD in nuclear physics and he objects to acts of state and society against reason. His book, Islam and Science: Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for Rationality, explains the source of his trouble with the ideological state of Pakistan. It is not that he  hates religion — he objects to acts of irrationality in the name of religion. The two scientists he most admires, S Ramanujan and Abdus Salam, were deeply religious. He protested, however, when the Governor of Punjab Salmaan Taseer was murdered by his police guard when he defended a Christian woman accused of insulting the Holy Prophet under Pakistan’s Anti-Blasphemy law. Living un...

NB: This article was written for an edited volume on contemporary terrorism, more specifically, terror in the name of Hindutva. I disagree with the habit of approaching terrorism with a prefix, but nevertheless wrote it, in order precisely to make my point more explicitly. It was completed more than a year ago and the book (to which it was a contribution) is more than overdue. I understand that the current political atmosphere has motivated the publishers to re-think the project, and have no idea if they will ever publish it.   After consulting with the editor of the proposed volume, therefore, I have decided to post it on SACW and my blog. It is posted here in commemoration of Hiroshima Day, 2014:  Dilip A matter of time  The state of war suspends morality; it divests the eternal institutions and obligations of their eternity and rescinds ad interim the unconditional imperatives. In advance its shadow falls over the actions of men. War is not only one of the ordeal...

For those interested in critical commentary in the region - South Asia Citizens Wire (SACW) has been the leading free source of news and information since 1996; and helped build links across borders. You can subscribe to it through this link sacw.net   South Asia Citizens Wire - 30 April 2017 - No. 2935 [via South Asia Citizens Web] Contents: 1. Why they lynched Mashal Khan and Pehlu Khan | Pervez Hoodbhoy 2. 2017 US report on religious freedom says minorties & secular intelligentsia under attack 3. Sri Lanka: Memoirs of a Christian and a Socialist 4. The patriotism of paranoia | Ramachandra Guha 5. Video: ’Emphasize citizenship over narrow identities’ - Dipankar Gupta interview 6. India’s Growing Consensus | Achin Vanaik 7. India’s New Face | Hartosh Singh Bal 8. India: Press Statement by Visthapan Virodhi Jan Vikas Andolan (VVJVA) [A social movement opposed to displacement] 9. Video: Nationalism In Digital India - Who Defines and Who Dec...

BORDER PARANOIA: DEEPENING THE PAK-INDIA DIVIDE   Six years ago while on a speaking tour of nearly 25 schools, colleges and universities across India, I discovered that only a handful of students had ever seen a living, breathing Pakistani. None had heard an academic from across the border speak. A 12-year-old school student, who obviously did not know Hindi and Urdu were similar, wondered aloud how a real Pakistani could be speaking their language. For these puzzled students, Pakistanis are alien people belonging to an adversary country, not next-door neighbours. The numerous misconceptions and misunderstandings I encountered must be still greater today. With pre-1947 family links slowly withering away, the two countries are travelling on separate economic and cultural trajectories. As travel barriers become ever higher, their respective populations are becoming progressively more unfamiliar and estranged from the other. This is by deliberate design. Not long ago, Indian sci...

What happens when the state gives moral sanction to violence? When through its silence, it validates target killings? When through its actions, it penalizes the victim and pardons the accused? When instead of outright action against those who lynch, torture and brutally kill in broad daylight and among dozens of eyewitnesses, it starts a police or judicial inquiry to question the innocence of the dead? A couple of months ago, when Mashal Khan was lynched on alleged blasphemy charges in Pakistan’s Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, chief minister Pervez Khattak confidentially issued a statement saying that a judicial inquiry should be held as there was no evidence that Khan had committed blasphemy. Perhaps if the deceased had been found guilty by the inquiry, the actions of the mob that killed him would have been deemed appropriate. Just like Mumtaz Qadri, the man who shot Punjab governor Salman Taseer 28 times in 2011, in an upscale neighbourhood of Islamabad. He was hailed as a ghazi, a Muslim figh...

A joke popular on social media these days goes like this. ‘Dear Pakistanis we as a nation have become immune to the martyrdom of our soldiers because they are paid to die, you just try and kill one of our cows then we will show you the fun.’ I begin with this joke to make the point that India is in danger of becoming a laughing stock in the rest of the world because of our new, violent obsession with cows. So enough is enough, Hindu fanatics. Stop! Stop right now if you really love Bharat Mata. It is hard to understand why a Prime Minister so passionate about making India a modern, digital, prosperous country has seemingly not noticed that hunting and killing Muslims on the pretext of cows and love jihad does not sit well with modernity. The PM talks about a ‘new India’ built with the energy of the largest population of young people on the planet. Has he noticed that hunting Muslims is serving mostly to distract these same young Indians from far more important tasks? Vipin Tri...

NB - Indian citizens who feel somehow complacent because of the criminalisation of the Islamic Republic, should pay attention to the Indian politicians affiliated to the so-called 'parivar', who speak the language of exclusion on a daily basis. Their theory of Hindu Rashtra is the mirror image of the 'Muslim Nation'. It is the doctrinal source of the same ghetto-fication and terrorisation of religious minorities that has taken place in Pakistan and Bangladesh. A state that allows religious dogma or religious definitions of nation-hood any space in its constitution is stepping out on a path that leads straight to hell. DS Julio Ribeiro - Why we must listen to Rohini Salian "The masterminds of the 26/11 attacks are treated like heroes in Pakistan. We are not there yet, but if hidden hands nudge the judicial system to free murderers of the saffron variety, we will be soon" Ipsita Chakravarty: The BJP is afraid of saffron terror probes because they point to...

This essay is adapted from the introduction to   Confronting the Bomb: Pakistani and Indian Scientists Speak Out . The book is edited by Pervez Hoodbhoy; contributors include Hoodbhoy, Zia Mian, Abdul Hameed Nayyar, M.V. Ramana, R. Rajaraman, Suvrat Raju, and Matthew McKinzie. The authors are scientists who believe in a moral universe, where human life is to be valued and its destruction en masse to be abhorred. Nevertheless, while taking a position against nuclear weapons, it is not our intent to needlessly moralize. Facts are stated exactly as they happen to be. This is a responsibility that we owe both to our profession as scientists, and to our own selves, as well, for the facts of the nuclear situation in Pakistan and India are, without exaggeration, frightening, in and beyond the subcontinent. "My single encounter with Sunderji was at a conference in Washington in 1993. He had just finished speaking on the absolute security that nuclear weapons would bestow upon the wor...

The edge of oblivion  -  by Dilip Simeon (The Tribune Sept 6, 2013) The primitive mind is, in the fullest meaning of the word, imperishable : Sigmund Freud, 1915 The choice today is no longer between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence :  Martin Luther King, 1958 Do the tense thoughts of these influential men have a bearing on the contemporary world? Their lives were linked with the most cataclysmic forces of the century, Nazism and racism. In 1938 at the age of 82, Freud had to flee his native Vienna after the Nazi occupation. The preacher-activist King confronted racialist bigotry in a non-violent struggle that cost him his life, but changed America . Of what relevance are their ideas on war and violence? Is terror a fringe phenomena or has it long been part of what we call the mainstream? We would be foolish to ignore these questions. The twentieth century witnessed 175 to 250 million deaths on account of war and geno...