Just finished Franz Kafka's unfinished novel 'The Castle.' In fact, the novel ends mid-sentence. It is a story about bureaucracy or the ideosyncracies of the bureaucratic systems. Fun and disturbing at the same time.
By Kashif-ul-Huda, TwoCircles.net, Engineering is his profession but community activism is Faizur Rahman’s passion. Urdu-speaking native of Chennai, he writes on religio-political issues in mainstream newspapers of India. Faizur Rahman is an executive committee member of Harmony India, an organisation to promote secularism and communal harmony which is headed by Mr. N. Ram, the Editor-in-Chief of The Hindu. He is also the founding secretary of Forum for the Promotion of Moderate Thought in Islam. He talked to TwoCircles.net on ways Muslims in India can improve their economic conditions only if we check some wasteful and unnecessary expenditures. TCN : Recently in a workshop attended by Muslim community leaders, you created quite a ruckus by saying that Muslims should not go for umra every year. Why are you against umra? FR : Please allow me to clarify. First of all, I am not against Umra. I only pointed out that Umra not being an obligatory ritual in Islam one need not perform it every...
We Live in Cairo, a production at @americanrep beautifully captures the Egyptian revolution of 2011. The confusion, idealism, and optimism during the start of revolution to struggle, comradery, and jubilation of success, and then disagreements, sacrifice, and despair as post- revolutionary reality turns out to be a negative image of the dream. Writers Daniel Lazour and Patrick Lazour have done an excellent job in capturing the nuances of the Tahrir Uprising through this musical. No stereotypical representation of Egypt or Egyptian. No whitewashing of complexities of this revolution. The cast brings a high energy performance that spills over to the audience and the audience joins in clapping when the revolution succeeds and sinks in their seats deeper during the second act. The creative team has done a wonderful job of capturing the emotion and confusion as the revolution began to unravel and hijacked. People were so busy fighting Mubarak regime that there was no consensus de...
In India whether triple talaq or word "talaq" said in one sitting results in a divorce or not has been a matter of debate for too long. To find out the truth about triple talaq and a statement by Taslima Nasrin that quran says that earth revolves around the sun encouraged me to read quran with translation. On and off, I have been doing that and I have consumed lot of translations and tafseer in Urdu and English. I have been reading Ma'ariful Quran for many years now. Ma'ariful Qur'an is an eight volume tafseer of Quran written by Late Mufti-e-Azam of Pakistan Mufti Muhammad Shafi. He is the father of Mufti Taqi Usmani. I like this tafseer because it is very comprehensive and brings opinions of other ulema as well. Today, I finally finished volume 5 and started the sixth volume which started with Surah Mariam. The translation of quran in this tafseer is the one done by Shaikhul Hind Maulana Mahmoodul Hasan.
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