Sorry I have been MIA for a bit. A couple or three things jump out from the New York Times, NPR and the ‘Net this morning.

Firstly, there’s an op-ed in the NYT this morning by the country director for the Institute of War and Peace Reporting providing his personal perspective about the bombing of the Serena Hotel in Kabul, a watering hole (and just a place to hole up) for expats, particularly. And there have been other stories about Afghanistan in The Times, on NPR, other places in the last few days. It seemed to hit me; is it a coincidence that the Western Media and Zeitgeist is sitting up and noticing—or should I say acknowledging, since some information has always been around—that Afghanistan is down the tubes because the Taliban, as Mr. McKenzie tells us, have now started a policy of targeting westerners?
The other thing that jumped out at me was from a series that NPR is doing on Muslim Women in Britain.

... lives.

That’s the first reaction I had to a piece a young friend of mine who lives and works in Hyderabad sent me. I have been wondering what I can say about recent events in that city, and just as when "my city" was burning, or when a sister city burnt across the sea, I was in pain, this young writer has had to deal with what he has always described as a stab to the heart of the place he loves dearly. And now, he has captured his feelings in a way that is too beautiful not to reproduce in full here; it is the same spirit that has led to great and noble things in that region of the world—from the Taj Mahal, to the deepest, most profound sufi poetry in the world. And it is uplifting to see it alive in those younger than oneself. Here is Manzoor‘s piece:

The Sultan’s Prayer
Hyderabad is a multi-religious and multi-cultural abode for millions of people, and this is not any recent phenomenon. Multiculturalism is the very foundation of this great city. It is said that some 400+ years back, Prince Quli Qutub Shah of the Qutub Shahi dynasty fell for the beautiful Bhagyamati and rebelled against his father, the King, to marry her. On becoming King himself, he bestowed upon his beloved Bhagyamati the title of ‘Hyder Mahal’. It was this romantic and chivalrous king who—like the emperor who created the more famous monument to love in Agra—built a whole city on the banks of river Musi, and named it after his beloved wife.

That is how Hyderabad happened.
...

The following is courtesy of my other half. I’m biased, to be sure, but I found this to be quite touching.
-Fashion Mujahid

City between two rivers Ibrahim’s Iraq war

by Bashir al-Hamim

I am drowning in my own pain the world is different my hand is called. In the sea of blood I am lost afloat on a Qur’an that is dead, and a faith that has gone mad.

Foreign Policy magazine has a new report out in conjunction with the Center for American Progress about the War on Terror. Here’s what FP had to say:

Six months ago, we launched a groundbreaking new index that asked more than 100 of America’s top foreign-policy hands if the United States was winning the war on terror. Their answer? No. Now, surveyed again today, this bipartisan group sees a world that continues to grow more dangerous and a U.S. national security strategy that is failing on several fronts. In the second FOREIGN POLICY/Center for American Progress Terrorism Index, these experts warn that not only is another attack imminent, but that the United States may be distracted from the threats that matter most.

Link to the report.
Link to printer-friendly version.
Link to the report in PDF format.
Link to the survey results in PDF format.

Just in case people are still in a state of euphoria over Rumsfeld being booted out and possibly prosecuted, here's some very worrying news. MI5, the UK's equivalent to the FBI, is apparently monitoring around 1600 British Muslims who are suspected of plotting around 30 terrorist attacks. Using wikipedia's figure of 1.5 million for Britain's Muslim population, that means roughly 1 in 1000 Muslims is being monitored as a suspected terrorist. That seems like such a high number that I've been thinking about it.

My fascination with this guy is both his background, his recent decision to become a Muslim, his naivete in getting himself involved this mess, and he's cute.

Everyone remembers the foiled plot that unfolded last month, but what most people may not know is that Don Stewart-Whyte (Abdul Waheed), age 21, is the brother of British model Heather Stewart-Whyte, both of them the children of a former Tory party agent.

There was a report being circulated via email in some circles titled "Reports from Muslim Women attacked by Hindu Terrorists".

The phrases "Hindu Terrorists" and "Hindu Terrorism" should not be any more acceptable to us than "Islamic Terrorist" or "Islamic Terrorism". These people are, very like our own right wing extremists, the product of a neo-conservative movement within Hinduism that, also like our own, has been formed and has grown in the last century or more. This is not all Hindus. One of the most interesting statistics, if you want to talk about Gujarat--and I have worked in and with organizations active on the issue of the Gujarat massacares, and that's what they were: massacares, not riots--is how many districts (counties we call them in this country) in Gujarat had genocide happen in them, and how many did not.

In Pakistan, a move by reformist parliament members and activists to repeal the Hudood Ordinance—under which rape victims can be condemned for adultery and sentenced to death if they fail to provide 4 male witnesses to the act—has met with extremist violence. Manzoor ul-Hassan, who figures largely at Pakistan's reformist Renaissance School (which supported the repeal of Hudood), was the victim of a drive-by shooting yesterday and is in the hospital in critical condition. Ali Eteraz has the full story.

This post is satire. This post is satire. This post is satire.

(Please read with the voice of Jeremy Irons in Die Hard 2)
————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

"This is a communique from the Western Turncoats Front for Converts (aka , WTF-Converts). Many Muslim immigrants worship insurgents and make excuses for terrorists who target our nation. It is high time we turn the tables, is it not? For too long, Western converts to the great Islamic religion have been shunned for not adapting themselves as clients of the Master Race of Islam, or whatever ethnicity of the person who showed them how to be Muslim. Because of this, and the ignoring of our communal and familial interest, indeed the denial of our familes as kafirs and our communities as  the immigrants' enemy, we are the oppressed minority of the American Ummah."