Pashtuns and modernity as a subject offers immediate pitfalls. It is profuse with cultural distinctiveness and idiosyncrasies, and may prove quite difficult at times for any learned foreign observer to grasp. On the other hand, from a Pashtun point of view, the outer world sometimes seems needlessly complex and tangled, irrationally busy, and while abundant in riches, psychologically as horrible ...

The century old British occupation of the Pashtun region greatly affected the secular national culture and society of the Pashtuns. The British Indian rulers created a space for the loyal maliks and Mullahs in order to perpetuate their own rule. After their departure from the Indian sub continent in 1947, the rulers of the Pakistani state did not try to ...

Last month, I had the opportunity to visit Bacha Khan Markaz in Peshawar and meet a number of key Awami National Party (ANP) leaders. ANP is the political legacy of the larger-than-life Bacha Khan Baba—a Pashtun nationalist leader in British India, who rose to prominence for his nonviolence movement—Khudai Khidmatgar. I visited the markaz as a part of an 11-member ...

United States Congressman Charles Wilson wistfully exclaims at the end of the movie version of his biography, Charlie Wilson’s War (2007): ‘These things happened, they were great and glorious, But we F–d up the end game’, These words rang in memories of those who know the region and Afghanistan; and the devastation inflicted on this unfortunate corner of the earth ...

Cooperation between New Delhi and Beijing could be a game changer for the stability of the region There is a certain – surprising amount of unease ahead of the visit of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani in New Delhi.  India has been consistently among the largest donor nations in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001 and is ...

A well-known fact in the educational discourse of Pakistan has been devising a curriculum for public schools that constructed an isolationist mindset over the years. A mindset that glorified war, considered everything different as ‘the other’ and hence an enemy, reinforced patriarchal nature of gender and distorted history to make it compatible with the needs of hyper nationalism. An Education ...

I am the substandard of the academic branch of social activities in Pakistan. I have the student-position in university. Pedagogy, however, fills the middle chambers of the academic order; and a politically highly backward establishment of Pakistan orders universities. Countries where universities are ordered by politically backward establishments, unfortunately, do not feel the need for thought and science in society. ...

Ghani Khan (1914-1996) was born in Hashtnagar (Charsadda), Pakhtunkhwa. Ghani was the eldest son of the great Pashtun political and spiritual leader Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (aka: Bacha Khan) (1890-1988), who dedicated his life for the freedom, education, empowerment and cause of Pashtun people. Renowned and revered for his peaceful campaign of social and political reform, Bacha Khan was nonetheless ...

Last Saturday a big counter demonstration took place at Oberhausen, a former industrial town in the “Ruhrgebiet” of North Rhine Westphalia, NRW, the western part of Germany, which now have less than 215,000 inhabitants. The town was founded in 1850 when industrialization formed the landscape between the rivers Lippe and Ruhr. All citizens were practically migrants from other parts of ...

The geo-strategic considerations and the Russo-phobia put constraints on the British imperial rule to introduce reforms in what came to be known their North West Frontier. The fearful British policy makers equated the reforms in such a ‘dangerously explosive’ land with holding match to a “gunpowder magazine”. More than a century has passed since then, but still the same fear ...