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Showing posts with label Calcutta. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Calcutta. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Muslim Press: Stop playing with fire!, Radical Islamism and Jihad, NewAgeIslam.com

Radical Islamism and Jihad
Muslim Press: Stop playing with fire!
Our Constitution gives us the right to complain, air our grievances, criticise the government or any one else and, I suppose, perhaps even weave conspiracy theories. But there is a time and place for everything and then sober newspapers are supposed to do things within limits imposed by propriety. A case in point is a column, indeed a cover story for the Sunday supplement Guldasta of the Akhbar-e-Mashriq, published from New Delhi and Calcutta, 14 September 2008. The columnist Azmat Jameel Siddiqui does not support terrorism and extremism, but his sympathy for SIMI is tangible. One doesn’t find a word of condemnation or criticism for even the SIMI’s and indeed its parent Jamaat-e-Islam’s stupid ideology of establishing the rule of Islamic Caliphate in India and the entire world. It’s time Muslim Press stopped playing with fire and publishing inflammatory articles that amount to putting more oil in the already burning blaze, says Sultan Shahin, Editor, NewAgeIslam.com.

Thursday, May 31, 2012

The definitive 1971 novel, Books and Documents, NewAgeIslam.com

Books and Documents
The definitive 1971 novel
Book Review
By Khademul Islam
There is a second point to be noted about the book. The very subject matter of her novel sets Tahmima Anam apart from other English-language writers of Bangladeshi origin such Adib Khan or Monica Ali. While the latter's works tend to be about the Bangladeshi diaspora (to use that ungainly term) and its attendant immigrant life and/or sensibilities, Tahmima's novel, in contrast, by being set in Dhaka, and to some extent in Calcutta, peopled entirely with a local set of characters, by closely spanning the war-torn months of 1971, with each chapter corresponding to a month or several months of that year in the lives of its characters, lays claim to be fully a Bangladeshi novel, to be about life here. It is a book which tells the story of Bangladesh, its people and the terrible year of its birth from the inside. That, combined with the high quality of its writing, makes the novel a milestone in the field of English-language fiction by Bangladeshis. The novel has been favourably reviewed in British newspapers, which have hailed the author as a 'voice of real eloquence' and 'major new talent.'