From Jinnah to Jihad
From Jinnah to Jihad

Author: Arvin Bahl

Publisher: Atlantic Publishers & Dist

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 164

ISBN-13: 9788126907212

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Former American President Bill Clinton Referred To Kashmir As The Most Dangerous Place On Earth. In 1999 Nuclear-Armed Powers India And Pakistan Fought A War Over Kashmir, And Again In 2002 They Came Close To Another. The Kashmir Dispute Represents One Of The World S Oldest And Most Intractable Conflicts, Having Befuddled Policymakers Since The Partition Of The Subcontinent In 1947. Author Arvin Bahl Attempts To Analyze This Conflict In The Context Of International Relations Theory, Drawing On A Variety Of Sources, Including Interviews With Leading Figures Of The Indian And Pakistani Establishments.Bahl Argues That The Question Of The Kashmir Dispute Is Really The Question Of Why The Liberation Of The Kashmir Valley From Indian Rule Has Been A Foremost Pakistani National Interest Since The Partition. Realism, The Dominant Theory Of International Relations, Argues That Regardless Of Era, Region, Ideology Or Domestic Politics, States Will Behave In The Same Ways When Faced With Similar Situations In The International System, Namely They Will Try To Maximize The State S Interests. Yet, Pakistan S Quest For Control Of The Kashmir Valley Represents A Case In Which A Country S Foreign Policy Cannot Be Explained By Realism, And Realism S Main Assumption Of The State As A Rational Actor Appears To Be Violated. The Kashmir Valley Has Little Strategic Importance To Pakistan, Pakistan Has Almost No Chance Of Obtaining It Against A Much Stronger Power That Dismembered It In A Previous War And Its Economy Is Being Destroyed By Military Confrontation With India, Which Also Threatens Its Security.This Study Attempts To Explain The Puzzle Of Pakistan S Seemingly Irrational Policy Behavior On Kashmir By Developing A Framework Combining Liberal And Constructivist Approaches. Constructivists Emphasize The Importance Of Ideas, Ideologies And Identities When Observing How States Behave. The Ideology That Pakistan Was Founded On, The Two-Nation Theory, Makes Ending Indian Rule Over The Kashmir Valley Of Utmost National Interest. For Pakistan To Concede That A Muslim Majority Region That Is Contiguous With It Can Be A Part Of India Would Be For Pakistan To Accept That There Was No Need For The Partition Of The Subcontinent Along Religious Lines And The Creation Of Pakistan In The First Place.Liberals Focus On Understanding Domestic Politics In Order To Understand A Country S Actions In The International System. The Pakistani Military, The Country S Most Powerful Institution Since Its Formation, Has Used The Conflict With India To Bring About And Legitimize Its Dominance Of The Country.South Asia Gained Prominence In American Foreign Policy After The 9/11 Attacks And The Standoff That Ensued Between India And Pakistan In Early 2002. Thus, This Study Concludes With Policy Recommendations, Primarily To American Policymakers, For Dealing With Pakistan And Kashmir Based On The Analysis Developed In The Preceding Chapters.This Book, We Hope, Is An Eye-Opener For All General Readers. It Will Be Found Immensely Useful And Informative By Students, Researchers And Teachers Of History, Political Science, International Relations And South Asian Studies.

Rock & Roll Jihad
Rock & Roll Jihad

Author: Salman Ahmad

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2010-01-12

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 1416597697

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"The story you are about to read is the story of a light-bringer....Salman Ahmad inspires me to reach always for the greatest heights and never to fear....Know that his story is a part of our history." -- Melissa Etheridge, from the Introduction With 30 million record sales under his belt, and with fans including Bono and Al Gore, Pakistanborn Salman Ahmad is renowned for being the first rock & roll star to destroy the wall that divides the West and the Muslim world. Rock & Roll Jihad is the story of his incredible journey. Facing down angry mullahs and oppressive dictators who wanted all music to be banned from the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, Salman Ahmad rocketed to the top of the music charts, bringing Westernstyle rock and pop to Pakistani teenagers for the first time. His band Junoon became the U2 of Asia, a sufi - rock group that broke boundaries and sold a record number of albums. But Salman's story began in New York, where he spent his teen years learning to play guitar, listening to Led Zeppelin, hanging out at rock clubs and Beatles Fests, making American friends, and dreaming of rock-star fame. That dream seemed destined to die when his family returned to Pakistan and Salman was forced to follow the strictures of a newly religious -- and stratified -- society. He finished medical school, met his soul mate, and watched his beloved funkytown of Lahore transform with the rest of Pakistan under the rule of Zia into a fundamentalist dictatorship: morality police arrested couples holding hands in public, Little House on the Prairie and Live Aid were banned from television broadcasts, and Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers proliferated on college campuses via the Afghani resistance to Soviet occupation in the north. Undeterred, the teenage Salman created his own underground jihad: his mission was to bring his beloved rock music to an enthusiastic new audience in South Asia and beyond. He started a traveling guitar club that met in private Lahore spaces, mixing Urdu love poems with Casio synthesizers, tablas with Fender Stratocasters, and ragas with power chords, eventually joining his first pop band, Vital Signs. Later, he founded Junoon, South Asia's biggest rock band, which was followed to every corner of the world by a loyal legion of fans called Junoonis. As his music climbed the charts, Salman found himself the target of religious fanatics and power-mad politicians desperate to take him and his band down. But in the center of a new generation of young Pakistanis who go to mosques as well as McDonald's, whose religion gives them compassion for and not fear of the West, and who see modern music as a "rainbow bridge" that links their lives to the rest of the world, nothing could stop Salman's star from rising. Today, Salman continues to play music and is also a UNAIDS Goodwill Ambassador, traveling the world as a spokesperson and using the lessons he learned as a musical pioneer to help heal the wounds between East and West -- lessons he shares in this illuminating memoir.

The Unraveling
The Unraveling

Author: John R. Schmidt

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2011-09-13

Total Pages: 355

ISBN-13: 1429969075

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How did a nation founded as a homeland for South Asian Muslims, most of whom follow a tolerant nonthreatening form of Islam, become a haven for Al Qaeda and a rogue's gallery of domestic jihadist and sectarian groups? In this groundbreaking history of Pakistan's involvement with radical Islam, John R. Schmidt, the senior U.S political analyst in Pakistan in the years before 9/11, places the blame squarely on the rulers of the country, who thought they could use Islamic radicals to advance their foreign policy goals without having to pay a steep price. This strategy worked well at first--in Afghanistan during the anti-Soviet jihad, in Kashmir in support of a local uprising against Indian rule, and again in Afghanistan in backing the Taliban in the Afghan civil war. But the government's plans would begin to unravel in the wake of 9/11, when the rulers' support for the U.S. war on terror caused many of their jihadist allies to turn against them. Today the army generals and feudal politicians who run Pakistan are by turns fearful of the consequences of going after these groups and hopeful that they can still be used to advance the state's interests. The Unraveling is the clearest account yet of the complex, dangerous relationship between the leaders of Pakistan and jihadist groups—and how the rulers' decisions have led their nation to the brink of disaster and put other nations at great risk. Can they save their country or will we one day find ourselves confronting the first nuclear-armed jihadist state?

Muslim Zion
Muslim Zion

Author: Faisal Devji

Publisher: Hurst Publishers

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 1849042764

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Originally published: London: C.Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd., 2013.

Deadly Embrace
Deadly Embrace

Author: Bruce Riedel

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2012-02-24

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 0815722834

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Pakistan and America have been gripped together in a deadly embrace for decades. For half a century American presidents from both parties pursued narrow short-term interests in Pakistan. This myopia actually backfired in the long term, helping to destabilize the political landscape and radicalizing the population, setting the stage for the global jihad we face today. Bruce Riedel, one of America's foremost authorities on U.S. security and South Asia, sketches the history of U.S.-Pakistani relations from partitioning of the subcontinent in 1947 up through the present day. It is muddled story, meandering through periods of friendship and enmity. Riedel deftly interprets the tortuous path of relations between two very different nations that remain, in many ways, stuck with each other. The Preface to the paperback provides an inside account of the discovery of Osama bin Laden's Abbottabad hideout that led to the al Qaeda leader's demise. Accusations of Pakistani complicity in harboring bin Laden once again dramatized the ambivalence and distrust existing between two nations that purport to be allies. Riedel discusses what it all means for the war on terror and the future of U.S.- Pakistani relations. Praise for the hardcover edition of Deadly Embrace "Mr. Riedel, who has advised no fewer than four American presidents, knows power from the inside—something he is keen to share with the reader.... His book provides a useful account of the dysfunctional relationship between Pakistan and America." — The Economist "Bruce Riedel has produced an excellent volume that is both analytically sharp and cogently written. It will engage both specialists and the interested public. Essential reading."—Peter Bergen, author of Holy War, Inc. and The Osama bin Laden I Know "Riedel lucidly provides an overview of the last thirty years of Pakistan's internal politics, its relationship with the United States, as well as the various i

The Struggle for Pakistan
The Struggle for Pakistan

Author: Ayesha Jalal

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2014-09-16

Total Pages: 448

ISBN-13: 0674744993

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Established as a homeland for India’s Muslims in 1947, Pakistan has had a tumultuous history. Beset by assassinations, coups, ethnic strife, and the breakaway of Bangladesh in 1971, the country has found itself too often contending with religious extremism and military authoritarianism. Now, in a probing biography of her native land amid the throes of global change, Ayesha Jalal provides an insider’s assessment of how this nuclear-armed Muslim nation evolved as it did and explains why its dilemmas weigh so heavily on prospects for peace in the region. “[An] important book...Ayesha Jalal has been one of the first and most reliable [Pakistani] political historians [on Pakistan]...The Struggle for Pakistan [is] her most accessible work to date...She is especially telling when she points to the lack of serious academic or political debate in Pakistan about the role of the military.” —Ahmed Rashid, New York Review of Books “[Jalal] shows that Pakistan never went off the rails; it was, moreover, never a democracy in any meaningful sense. For its entire history, a military caste and its supporters in the ruling class have formed an ‘establishment’ that defined their narrow interests as the nation’s.” —Isaac Chotiner, Wall Street Journal

Pakistan: From the Rhetoric of Democracy to the Rise of Militancy
Pakistan: From the Rhetoric of Democracy to the Rise of Militancy

Author: Ravi Kalia

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-08-21

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 1136516409

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The essays in this volume address the central theme of Pakistan’s enduring, yet elusive, quest for democracy. The book charts Pakistan’s struggle from its very inception, at least in the political rhetoric provided by both civilian and military leaders, for democracy, liberalism, freedom of expression, inclusiveness of minorities and even secularism. At the same time, it demonstrates how in practice, the country has continued to drift towards increasingly brittle authoritarianism, religious extremism and intolerance of minorities — both Muslim and non-Muslim. This chasm between animated political rhetoric and grim political reality has baffled the world as much as Pakistanis themselves. In this volume, scholars and practitioners of statecraft from around the world have sought to explain the dichotomy that exists between the rhetoric and the reality. Crucial areas such as Pakistan’s troubled status as a theocracy; its relationship with the US; the position of women and their quest for empowerment; the Mujahir Qaumi movement; the sharp class divide that has led to an elitist political culture; and finally, an erudite discussion of the popular topic — Jinnah’s vision of Pakistan — are the focus of this book. This volume will be of interest to scholars of history, political science, international relations, sociology, anthropology and urban planning, policy-makers and think-tanks, as well as the wider reading public curious about South Asia.

Pax Gandhiana
Pax Gandhiana

Author: Anthony J Parel

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-01-02

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 0190867477

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Notwithstanding his contributions to religion, nonviolence, civil rights, and civil disobedience, among other areas, Gandhi's most significant contribution is that as a political philosopher. While he is not often treated as such, Gandhi was, as Anthony J. Parel argues, a political philosopher sui generis, both in his philosophical method of constant self-criticism and his framework of philosophical analysis. Gandhi wrote daily on politics, but he did so as an activist; political philosophy was to him not just a way of understanding truths of political phenomena but was directly related to understanding those truths in action. If realized in action these truths would give rise to new political institutions, which in turn would create a corresponding peaceful political and social order. Parel dubs this order Pax Gandhiana. The main contention of Pax Gandhiana is that peace cannot be achieved by politics alone. Peace requires the confluence of the canonical ends of life: politics and economics (artha), ethics (dharma), forms of pleasure (kama), and the pursuit of spiritual transcendence (moksha). Modern political philosophy isolates politics from the other three ends, but Gandhi's originality, according to Parel, lies in the way that he brings all four together. In fact Gandhi's political philosophy is relevant not only to India but also to the rest of the world: it is a new type of sovereignty that harmonizes the interest of individual states with the community of states. Arguing against scholars who dispute a theoretical unity in Gandhi's writings, Parel suggests that Gandhi is the preeminent non-western political philosopher, and in this book he seeks to identify the conceptual framework of Gandhi's political philosophy, the Pax Gandhiana.

The Making of Terrorism in Pakistan
The Making of Terrorism in Pakistan

Author: Eamon Murphy

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 041556526X

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This book explains the origins and nature of terrorism in Pakistan and examines the social, political and economic factors that have contributed to the rise of political violence there. Since 9/11, the state of Pakistan has come to be regarded as the epicentre of terrorist activity committed in the name of Islam. The central argument of this volume suggests that terrorism in Pakistan has, in essence, been manufactured to suit the interests of mundane political and class interests and effectively debunks the myth of 'Islamic terrorism'. A logical consequence of this argument is that the most effective way of combating terrorism in Pakistan lies in addressing the underlying political, social and economic problems facing the country. After exploring the root causes of terrorism in Pakistan, the author goes on to relate the historical narrative of the development of the Pakistani state to the theories and questions raised by Critical Terrorism Studies (CTS) scholars. The book will therefore make an important contribution to CTS scholarship as well as presenting an analysis of the many complex factors that have shaped the rise of Pakistani terrorism. This book will be of great interest to students of Critical Terrorism Studies, Asian history and politics, Security Studies and IR in general.

The History of Jihad
The History of Jihad

Author: Robert Spencer

Publisher: Bombardier Books

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 1682616606

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It is taken for granted, even among many Washington policymakers, that Islam is a fundamentally peaceful religion and that Islamic jihad terrorism is something relatively new, a product of the economic and political ferment of the twentieth century. But in The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS, Islamic scholar Robert Spencer proves definitively that Islamic terror is as old as Islam itself, as old as Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, who said “I have been made victorious through terror.” Spencer briskly traces the 1,400-year war of Islamic jihadis against the rest of the world, detailing the jihad against Europe, including the 700-year struggle to conquer Constantinople; the jihad in Spain, where non-Muslims fought for another 700 years to get the jihadi invaders out of the country; and the jihad against India, where Muslim warriors and conquerors wrought unparalleled and unfathomable devastation in the name of their religion. Told in great part in the words of contemporary chroniclers themselves, both Muslim and non-Muslim, The History of Jihad shows that jihad warfare has been a constant of Islam from its very beginnings, and present-day jihad terrorism proceeds along exactly the same ideological and theological foundations as did the great Islamic warrior states and jihad commanders of the past. The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS is the first one-volume history of jihad in the English language, and the first book to tell the whole truth about Islam’s bloody history in an age when Islamic jihadis are more assertive in Western countries than they have been for centuries. This book is indispensable to understanding the geopolitical situation of the twenty-first century, and ultimately to formulating strategies to reform Islam and defeat radical terror.