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Archive for July 4th, 2008
Sultana Begum - a surviving heir of Bahadur Shah Zafar
Neena Jha and Shivnath Jha have launched a nationed wide movement to protect musicians, artists, academicians and others who have brought laurels and pride to India through book - Andolan Ek Pustak Se.
Sultana Begum
The story of middle-aged Sultana Begum brings tears to one’s eyes. She runs a tea-stall in Howrah to earn a living for her family. Bahadur Shah Zafar’s heirs are struggling to take out a bare survival. Due to the poverty, daughters in the family were deprived of higher education.
Tags: Andolan Ek Pustak Se, Bahadur Shah Zafar, books, Campaign, Howrah, India, Mughal, Sultana Begum
Nahaj ul Balagha - Looking back to Get Ahead
Fahmida Riaz is Pakistan’s premier female poet. She became a sensation in the early 1970s when her bold, feminist poetry created a stir in the convention ridden world of Urdu poetry. Riaz was expressive, sometimes explicit, and politically charged. She created a completely new genre in Urdu poetry with a post-modern sensibility. Later, she remained prominent with her defiance of General Zia’s martial law, her exile to India and the continuous evolution of her fiction and poetry.
Since the late 1990s, Fahmida Riaz has discovered Jalaluddin Rumi, the 12th century Turkish poet and jurist, and now an international celebrity. Her recent publication – Yeh Khana-e aab-o-gil – is a unique translation of Rumi’s ghazals in the same rhyme and meter. Since her navigation of the Rumi universe, she has explored another dimension of her individual and cultural consciousness, where the influence of Islamic scholars and Sufis is paramount.
Last winter, she read a letter by Hazrat Ali bin Abi Talib (AS), the fourth Caliph and son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed (PBUH), while browsing a translation of Nahaj ul Balagha (a collection of sermons, letters and sayings of the Caliph). Later, in an email, she related to her friends across the globe how angry she felt for not knowing about this letter all her life, and how the real jewels of Muslim history were concealed “generation after generation.” Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: ALi, Fahmida RIaz, governance, Hazrat Ali bin Abi Talib, Islam, Muhammad, Nahaj ul Balagha - Looking back to Get Ahead, Nahajul Balagha, Rumi