Razi Azmi

About two hours’ drive south of Denver, near Colorado Springs, is the Garden of the Gods, so called because of the unusual and steep rock formations, ancient sedimentary beds of red, blue and purple, now tilted vertically. It is a very unusual sight and popular with hikers and rock climbers. On a previous trip, we […]

En route to Grand Canyon, we stopped in the small ‘transit’ town of Flagstaff, chock-a-block with hotels, motels and restaurants. I noted the following food outlets on a short stretch of the main road. Jack in the Box, Hinday’s Grill, Thai Kitchen, Tacos, China Garden, Starbucks, Choba Hut (toasted subs), McDonalds, Strombolis (Italian), Dominoes, Subway, […]

Shortly after we drove out of San Francisco, we encountered a traffic jam caused by a major accident. A large trailer truck had completely crushed a car. Fortunately, we arrived after the casualties had been removed, though police was still on the scene. Whatever the cause — it could have been an error of judgement, […]

A conference or meeting of Muslims where “Sunni, Shia, Wahabi, Barelvi, Deobandi…everyone is welcome” has to be as rare as a snow leopard in the Karakorams. But precisely such an invitation did the rounds via email in Sydney and beyond with the above welcoming words in the subject line. The four-hour long conference, held in […]

An 80-year-old man, Iqbal Butt, who had been accused of blasphemy but released from jail after being found ‘not guilty’, has been shot dead, allegedly by the very mosque imam who had falsely accused him of blasphemy. In Iran, Yusuf Naderkhani was recently sentenced to death for converting from Islam to Christianity. A few years […]

From Calgary we headed west again on the Trans Canada-1, which cuts through the Rocky Mountains. Our next stop was Kamloops, at the confluence of the two branches of the Thompson River. Leaving the main highway that runs south-southwest from here towards Vancouver, we kept to the westerly, less-travelled road to Whistler. And we are […]

Our next stop was Regina, the capital of Canada’s Saskatchewan province. I was absolutely thrilled to be in a place in the middle of the prairie, far from everywhere, with an exotic name to boot. We found Regina cool even in summer. Telltale power outlets on the sidewalks next to parking spaces and extendable power […]

I had looked forward to being in Fargo in North Dakota, for the name itself (far-go) sounded attractive to the wanderer in me. North Dakota in America’s mid-north and Manitoba and Saskatchewan across the border on the Canadian side have always caught my fancy, perhaps for their remoteness. But my excitement after reaching Fargo was […]

Another military coup has come to grief — the one in Mali, led by Captain Amadou Sanogo. It will be remembered for its short life and the magnitude of the damage it has inflicted on the country. Pakistan still holds the distinction of suffering a military coup that inflicted the most damage to a country […]

At a recent fundraiser in Sydney organised by the Islamic Forum for Australian Muslims, banners, slides and speeches were focused on selling to Australia’s Muslims “a house in jannah (paradise)” through a donation towards the building of a new mosque. And speaking of jannah, my generation grew up calling it jannat, as did our forefathers, […]