Perspective: Pakistan | Past and Prejudice

Perspective: Pakistan | Past and Prejudice | Khaled Ahmad

Our national poet and philosopher Allama Muhammad Iqbal — who was knighted by the Raj and didn’t give up his knighthood like Rabindranath Tagore after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre — was supposed to be our guide on ideology.

Times of Ahmad | News Watch | Int'l Desk
Source/Credit: The India Express
By Khaled Ahmed | August 19, 2017

What stares us in the face now is what Pakistan rejected of Iqbal.

I must confess my admiration for the Indian politician Shashi Tharoor. It has a lot to do with my “inebriation with the spoken word”. The occasion was the May 2015 Oxford Union debate, “Britain owes Reparations to Her Former Colonies” which I saw on video. After Tharoor was done with his speech, there was no doubt who had won the day. He has followed up with a book, An Era of Darkness, which I find convincing and informative in equal measure. It is a clever dig at Nobel Laureate V.S. Naipaul who wrote not so glowingly about India in An Area of Darkness (the book was initially banned in India). But Naipaul went on to even the scales by writing Among the Believers, which caused much consternation in Pakistan. This writer, who had given the book a positive review, was sent messages that barely concealed their threats.
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