Hamid Gul, Uzma Gul, Varan Bus Service and the Transport Jihad, Islamic Society, NewAgeIslam.com

Islamic Society

Hamid Gul, Uzma Gul, Varan Bus Service and the Transport Jihad

Varan Bus Service was established with millions of rupees loaned to the daughter and son-in-law of a former ISI chief, General Hameed Gul, now the most right wing spokesman of Islamic fundamentalists of Pakistan. His politics of course started after he had secured the financial and economic interests and for his family, using his General’s uniform as the password.

Here is the story which tells numerous tales of how the Generals would not let any business opportunity slip by. Despite the ideological rhetoric and slogan mongering, facts in this story will shake up readers:

"Situated in and around the federal capital, the Rawalpindi/Islamabad district is politically critical because of its proximity to the heart of all government operations. Last summer the CMKP began to reorganize its wing in the area, placing special emphasis on attracting working class youth to the party ranks.

Among other issues, cadres began efforts to develop political consciousness in workers in the Varan city bus service. These efforts have resulted in increased police surveillance and repression of the party and its supporters. This is how the struggle of CMKP started in the district of Rawalpindi and Islamabad.

Varan city bus service is a private company that provides urban bus transport in the twin cities of Rawalpindi and Islamabad. The company is headed by politically powerful shareholders who enjoy very strong connections with the establishment. Its owner, Uzma Gul, is the daughter of the former Director General of the ISI (Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence Agency), Hameed Gul, who some people might remember as the man who headed the anti-communist campaign in Afghanistan, and as a major patron of all right-wing groups in Pakistan.

http://newageislam.com/hamid-gul,-uzma-gul,-varan-bus-service-and-the-transport-jihad/islamic-society/d/2781

A tricky question: Who is the custodian of a religion?, Islamic Ideology, NewAgeIslam.com

Islamic Ideology

A tricky question: Who is the custodian of a religion?

Oct 10, 2008

What passes off as religious language has little to do with the traditional functions of religious ideas: as a medium of self-knowledge, a way of endowing the world with meaning as an unbroken totality, as a way of responding to the dissonances of existence, and unravelling the mysteries of value. Rather, there is a complex process by which religion has become ethnicised. It has become a code by which tribalistic boundaries are being drawn around groups to determine who is in and who is out. This question more than anything else, begins to colonise religious consciousness. The fervour of identity displaces the question of meaning, and increasingly religion appears simultaneously assertive and spiritually redundant. What forms of religiosity can rescue us from the pathologies of collective narcissism, will be an important question for our times?

http://newageislam.com/a-tricky-question--who-is-the-custodian-of-a-religion?/islamic-ideology/d/869

Allama Iqbal’s enduring appeal unparalleled, Islamic Culture, NewAgeIslam.com

Islamic Culture

Allama Iqbal’s enduring appeal unparalleled

By J.S. Ifthekhar

What’s more, it is not curtains yet. Five hundred and going strong. Yes. Even after so many sessions the programme’s popularity has not waned. It was on October 8, 1997, that the first of “Mehfil-e-Iqbal Shinasi” was organised at the conference hall of Jama Masjid, Gunfoundry. Over the years the programme has gone from strength to strength with the circle of Iqbal aficionados increasing by the day.Interestingly, no other Urdu poet has bagged this honour. Even Pakistan can’t boast of such marathon poetic sittings. But why Iqbal? He is perhaps the best articulated Muslim response to modernity and represents the collective consciousness of the community. But the provocation for the programme was the failure of a well known Hyderabadi to recollect a famous Iqbal couplet during a meeting. As he struggled to recall the verse, a senior advocate, Ghulam Yazdani, present there wondered how posterity would remember the great poet when an elderly person was forgetting him.

http://newageislam.com/allama-iqbal%E2%80%99s-enduring-appeal-unparalleled/islamic-culture/d/768

Lecture 5: The Spirit of Muslim Culture, Books and Documents, NewAgeIslam.com

Books and Documents

Lecture 5: The Spirit of Muslim Culture

‘Muhammad of Arabia ascended the highest Heaven and returned. I swear by God that if I had reached that point, I should never have returned.’1 These are the words of a great Muslim saint, ‘AbdulQuddës of Gangoh. In the whole range of Sufi literature it will be probably difficult to find words which, in a single sentence, disclose such an acute perception of the psychological difference between the prophetic and the mystic types of consciousness. The mystic does not wish to return from the repose of ‘unitary experience’; and even when he does return, as he must, his return does not mean much for mankind at large. The prophet’s return is creative. He returns to insert himself into the sweep of time with a view to control the forces of history, and thereby to create a fresh world of ideals. For the mystic the repose of ‘unitary experience’ is something final; for the prophet it is the awakening, within him, of world-shaking psychological forces, calculated to completely transform the human world. The desire to see his religious experience transformed into a living world-force is supreme in the prophet. Thus his return amounts to a kind of pragmatic test of the value of his religious experience.

http://newageislam.com/lecture-5--the-spirit-of-muslim-culture/books-and-documents/d/216