Syed Ishrat Husain

It was Salman Taseer in 1967 who welcomed Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto when he left the government of General Ayub and came to Lahore to form the Pakistan People’s Party. Salman Taseer, who was himself a student at the time, was there to sing the taglines for “Jeye Bhutto”. This was the beginning of Salman Taseer’s […]

I passed from childhood into the world of the adult. But what a disappointing world it turned out to be. The colours of the sky, the grass, and the flowers were gone, muted and greyish. Everything was blurred by the pattern over my eyes. My father always would say my daughter will go into politics. […]

June is the middle of the year that belongs to Benazir Bhutto, while December leaves the year with Benazir Bhutto. Although the people of Pakistan have spent a great deal of their time in martial law regimes, be it 1958, 1969, 1977 or 1999. But there is one school of thought in Pakistan that still […]

In 657 AD, on the banks of the Euphrates River in Siffin, the current Syrian town of Raqqa, two Muslim armies confronted each other. One was led by Caliph Ali ibn Abi Talib and the other by Mu'awiyah ibn Abu Sufyan, the governor of Syria, appointed under the reign of Caliph Usman bin Affan. The […]

The existence of the means to sin, within your reach, ought to be the means of trial, not force. Coercion breeds hypocrisy, not godliness, and the Qur'an regards hypocrisy as worse than unbelief   Had your Lord willed, all the people on earth would have believed. So can you [Prophet] compel people to believe? Al […]

“The government of Pakistan has signalled its commitment to complete the rest of its action plan. But it is clear even though Pakistan has made progress; it needs to do more, Pakistan cannot stop now. It needs to continue to carry out reforms, in particular to implement targeted financial sanctions and prosecute and sanction those […]

Ik kafira key waste Islam ko chhora yeh Quaid e Azam, hai keh hai kafir-i-azam Above lines are attributed to Maulana Mazhar Ali Azhar, a leading personality in the Majlis e Ahrar ul Islam organisation. The demand for declaring the Ahmadis as a non-Muslim minority was first publicly made at an Ahrar meeting held at […]

“The French state does not favour any one religion and guarantees their peaceful co-existence in respect of the laws and principles of the Republic,” the government’s website reads. France has the largest population of Muslims in Western Europe, with more than 5 million estimated Muslims in a nation of 67 million. In recent years, a […]

The operation Zarb e Azabwas launched on 15 June 2014 in North Waziristan along the Durand Line against militancy after theattack on Jinnah International Airport in Karachi, for which the Tehreek-e-TalibanPakistan claimed responsibility.Operation Zarb e Azab was followed by Operation Radd ul Fasaad which began in February 2017, following resurgence in terrorist incidents. In November […]

On March 24, 2019, the then Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry said: “The minorities in Pakistan make up the white of our flag and all of our flag’s colours are precious to us. Protection of our flag is our duty.” Addressing a function to celebrate Holi with Hindus in 2017, the then prime minister Nawaz Sharif […]