Mariam Mahmud

2010 was a watershed year for me. I had lived in the US since 1989, in New York since 1999 and was almost worried that I would never find another place that I would call home again. Those were the days when Lahore was out of the running entirely. Then I went to Syria. For […]

In comparing prostitution laws in the west, the model that has garnered the most favour by women’s rights activists, at least relatively, is what has come to be known as the Swedish or Nordic model. Sweden, Norway, Iceland, France and other countries have adopted an approach whereby the selling of sex is not illegal but […]

In the 1990s when I was in my 20s I used to hear certain brilliant elders in Lahore, my hometown, speak about many a subject while I rolled my eyes without letting them see me do it. I had just graduated from Oberlin, the utopic womb of all things progressive and liberal, and the vigour […]

According to Mohammad Mahdi Heidarian, head of the private Nourtaban Film Industry Company, his company spent about $ 30 million in total to make the movie, an astronomical sum for an Irani film. “He and others declined to elaborate on who provided financial backing for it, though there are wealthy investors and religious institutions in […]

When I heard that the director who made Children of Heaven and The Colour of Paradise was making a movie on Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), I felt elated. Both movies are so beautiful and tender that I wondered if non-Muslims would consider converting to Islam after watching his new one. My mind recalled the movie The […]

Let us assume, to please the secularists, that everyone deserves an opinion as a rule of democracy. The elite will harp on and on quoting events in history that favour their diatribe against the Pakistan army and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). A single question exposes them in a second: “If you want to berate the army, […]

As months go, last April was auspicious for Pakistan like no other month in recent history. The visit of the Chinese president brought forth editorials across the globe, ranking it high in terms of events that might be deemed ‘game-changers’ in the realm of world politics for decades to come. A few days later, tragedy […]

New York University (NYU), this fall, started offering sex therapy to its freshman class because of an overwhelming need expressed by the male student body. The programme itself was 35-years-old but there was no active outreach until this year. The programme’s co-director, Amy Rosenburg, attributed the need to treating sexual performance and, related to that, […]

This summer, one of the most thought-provoking opinion pieces in the ‘Talk of the Town’ section of The New Yorker highlighted an issue that will be groundbreaking in how literature will be studied in colleges in the US going forward. Since one of the areas where the US still leads the world and probably will […]

The elite in Pakistan think Pakistanis as a nation do not care about Kashmir or the Kashmiris and nor does the army. They turn a blind eye to it much like the Muslim ummah (community) turns on the inescapable plight of the Palestinians, in favour of courtship around business pursuits with our giant neighbour as […]