Originally published in the Good Men Project Sharia, like many Arabic words in a post-9/11 world, is a touchy subject. Enraged thoughts are common from the mere utterance of these words. This leads to unsubstantiated opinions mixing in with facts. This is evident in Dom’s piece “If Liberals knew these 5 Sharia laws, they’d be ‘Islamophobic’ too”. A writer can, with a few strokes of her pen...
Originally published in Foreign Policy On May 13, 2014, police in the province of Punjab announced that they had registered a complaint of blasphemy against sixty-eight lawyers who had been involved in a protest against a police officer. The protest started after a senior officer allegedly detained and beat one of the lawyer’s colleagues. During the protests, the lawyers had called out the...
Billa was his nickname. A poor, uneducated Christian boy who cleaned sewer lines, removed garbage and, on a good day, played cricket with us on the streets of Lahore. I fondly remember how he could hit the ball out of the park and make the team proud. But life in Pakistan was rife with contradictions. In the afternoon, the team heard sermons narrating Muslim stories of equal treatment of non...