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Sixth March in Chitral

A Pakistani-Canadian reminisces about the importance of the Sixth of March for Chitral. Technorati Tags: Chitral, Ismailis, Pakistan

Friedman on Sistani and the Nobel

See here. Friedman, like most commentators, acknowledges Sistani’s Shi’ism, but fails to understand what that means. “People power” as he describes is what the Ithna’shari conception of the state was/is prior to Khomeinism taking center stage. The idea of jurists leading the state, vilayat-e faqih, is a relatively new concept, but it’s already become normative for even op-ed writers who supposedly have the time to be able to think.

Hindu followers of Imam Husayn

Yoginder Sikand, a scholar whose transnational work on Islamist movements is what I’m most familiar with, has an interesting article on Hindu followers of Imam Husayn. The piece is mostly historical, but the last paragraph is interesting: The Hussaini Brahmins, along with other Hindu devotees of the Muslim Imam, are today a rapidly vanishing community. The younger generation abandoning their ancestral heritage, often now seen as embarrassingly deviant. No longer, it seems, can a comfortable liminality be sustained, and ambiguous identities seem crushed under the relentless pressure to conform to the logic of neatly demarcated ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ communities. And…

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