JULY 2019I Concur With Quaid-e-azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah That Ahmadis Are Muslims German Court Orders Fines For ‘sharia Police’ Group Worst Exploitation Of Islam In Pakistan UK:

Monthly LAHORE International1www.lahoreinternational.com

BI-LINGUAL MONTHLY PUBLISHING FROM LONDON

I N T E R N A T I O N A L

JULY2019

I Concur With Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah That Ahmadis Are Muslims

www.lahoreinternational.comA Magazine for Scholarly, Literary, Political, Economic and Religious Activities

Page13

Monthly LAHORE International 2 www.lahoreinternational.com


EDITOR IN CHIEFMohiuddin Abbasi

EDITORZakaria Virk

ASSISTANT EDITORMunazza Khan

ASSOCIATE EDITORAmina Nuzhat

SUBSCRIPTION MANAGERSyed Mubarak A. ShahPh: 0047-91698367

ADVERTISING MANAGERM. Sultan QureshiPh: +1(461)433-0112

Issue : JUNE, 2019Price : UK Pound 2, per copyAnnual Subscription : 24 UK PoundEmail : [email protected]

Send Your writeups [email protected] to:Monthly Lahore InternationalPhone : +44 794 007 7825

DisclaimerThe views and opinions expressed in this magazine are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy of magazine.

C O N T E N T SEditorial : My Unforgettable Journey to the Holy Land

The Man Who Designed Pakistan’s A Bomb

Fleeing Persecution, Ahmadi Muslims Find Safe Haven In Nepal

The Runaways By Fatima Bhutto — Burns With Indignation

Nestle Is Sucking The World’s Aquifers Dry

I Concur With Quaid-e-azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah That Ahmadis Are Muslims

German Court Orders Fines For ‘sharia Police’ Group

Worst Exploitation Of Islam In Pakistan

UK: Victorians Who Became Muslims

UK: A British Gp Hounded Out Of Medicine By Muslim Claims

Forgotten Muslim Soldiers Of World War I ‘silence’ Far Right

Bad math-big blunders

Norway Island wants to be time free zone

Sikh Elders Won’t Let Anyone Demolish Mosque Despite Zero Muslim Population

Canada: Quebec’s New Secularism Law Bans Religious Symbols

USA: Qasim Rashid & Ghazala Hashmi Win Virginia Senate Primaries

Saudi Arabians Mona Shabab And Saud Al-eidi Praised After Reaching Everest Summit

USA: Paterson NJ Police Welcome First Hijabi Officer

USA: Louisville KY Airport Named After Muhammad Ali, The Greatest

UN Demographic Report

USA: A Rare Tour Of The Tunnel That Is Ground Zero For A Nuclear Waste Controversy

4

5

10

11

1213

14

15

1620

21

23

24

25

26

28

29

3031

3233

Monthly LAHORE International www.lahoreinternational.com4

I had the privilege and once in a lifetime opportunity to visit the Holy Land in May of this year. For all my life I had seen the iconic symbol golden roofed

Dome of the Rock in the pictures, on TV and read about the Haram al-Sharif in the books. This was the place which I had the burning desire to visit and pray there. I was awestruck at first sight just as I was when I saw the Holy Kaaba for the first time. I was ecstatic when I entered the compound and saw the holy places with my own eyes. This piece of land is sacred due to its significance of Jerusalem (the holiest city to Judaism), as the historical region of Jesus’ ministry, and as the site of the Isra and Mi’raj event that took place in c. 621 CE. This was also the first Qibla of Islam. During my visit I was blessed to offer nawafil at all three holy places – dome of the rock, masjid al-Aqsa and masjid Marwan – all located in 35 acre compound of Haram al-Sharif (Temple Mount). In Qubba al-sakhra there is huge rock surrounded by fence and in one corner is the rock from where miraj took place. It is covered with a wooden case but there is a hole at the bottom I put my hand in and touched the rock. The golden dome of this magnificent structure is phenomenal. Masjid Aqsa is located not too far from the octagonal shape glittering Dome of the Rock (completed in 692), take the stairs down to the compound, there is a huge round water fountain for wudu. One enters the building; it is unbelievably serene and peaceful. I walked around the entire building, there were believers reading Quran, some offering salat, and there was one group offering salat in congregation. There are Quranic verses written all over the walls and windows, some stained glass. When you come out of the Masjid on the right is the Marwan-e--Masjid – without any sign. It is built on hundreds of rock columns – each rock must be one tonne. Around 7,000 believers can offer salat here. It is all underground, so it is naturally air-conditioned

with cool air flowing. There were families with children offering salat and some kids running around. Hundreds of columns with white stripes reminded me of Cordoba mosque, which must have been modeled after this mosque. I sat down near the water fountain and soaked in as much serenity from this holy place as I could. I looked around at the hundreds of trees there was so much peace. It was time for Asr I saw people coming out from the streets going to the al-Aqsa Mosque, built in 8th century. I saw a trench on which it was written in Arabic that it was dug up by Maulana Salah al-dunya wa-aldin sultan al-Islam wal Muslimeen. The entrance to the trench was closed with rocks. We left the complex with a heavy heart, not knowing if ever I will come back. Walking through an army checkpoint we walked few hundred feet in a narrow

street of a long souq - market, turned left and there was the Wailing Wall, a place of prayer and pilgrimage sacred to the Jewish people, built in 19 BC as part of Second Jewish temple. At the end of the souq is Church of the Resurrection. Next day we went by train to Haifa to visit Mahmud mosque in Kababir and the fabulous Baha’i gardens. The imposing mosque is standing on a hill which I had spotted sitting in the train. We were warmly received by Murabbi Shamsuddin Chaliyan. … Next month my visit to Haifa/Kababir.

Zakaria Virk, Editor

My Unforgettable Journey to the Holy Land

Editorial

www.lahoreinternational.com 5 Monthly LAHORE International

THE MAN WHO DESIGNED PAKISTAN’S A BOMB

By Pervez Hoodbhoy

THEORETICAL PHYSICIST RIAZUDDIN DIED IN SEPTEMBER. PITY NO ONE NOTICED.When Riazuddin—that was his full name—died in September at age 82 in Islamabad, international science organizations extolled his contributions to high-energy physics. But in Pakistan, except for a few newspaper lines and a small reference held a month later at Quaid-e-Azam University, where he had taught for decades, his passing was little noticed. In fact, very few Pakistanis have heard of the self-effacing and modest scientist who drove the early design and development of Pakistan’s nuclear program.Riazuddin never laid any claim to fathering the bomb—a job that requires the efforts of many—and after setting the nuclear ball rolling, he stepped aside. But without his theoretical work, Pakistan’s much celebrated bomb makers, who knew little of the sophisticated physics critically needed to understand a fission explosion, would have been shooting in the dark.A bomb maker and peacenik, conformist and rebel, quiet but firm, religious yet liberal, Riazuddin was one of a kind. Mentored by Dr. Abdus Salam, his seminal role in designing the bomb is known to none except a select few.


Spurred By SalamBorn in 1930, Riazuddin and his twin brother, Fayyazuddin, were often mistaken for each other. Like other lower middle class Muslim children living in religiously divided Ludhiana, they attended the Islamia High School run by the Anjuman-i-Islamia philanthropy. The school had no notable alumni, and was similar to the town’s single public and two Hindu-run schools. Nothing suggested that these two boys squatting on floor mats, laboriously writing Urdu alphabets on wooden tablets, were to become anything special.In March 1947, as the creation of Pakistan from India drew close, communal riots engulfed the Punjab. Neighbor turned against neighbor; the soil was drenched with blood as entire populations migrated from one side to the other. Riazuddin’s family entered Pakistan from the Wagah border in early October. The brothers enrolled at Lahore’s MAO College but soon moved to Government College, where they performed well but not spectacularly so. A teacher suggested that Riazuddin study physics rather than engineering. Riazuddin agreed, and Fayyazuddin followed.This rather uninteresting situation changed dramatically in 1951 when Salam came to town. Then 25, Salam was a rising star in the world of high-brow physics having just solved an important problem in quantum field theory, a newly emerging subject that was beyond the comprehension of all but the top-ranking physicists of the time. For his research on “overlapping divergences,” Salam was awarded the Adams Prize and offered a professorship at Cambridge University. He declined the offer and signed up instead as a professor of mathematics at Government College.In Lahore, one of Salam’s first initiatives was to introduce a course in quantum mechanics at Punjab University. Drawn by his reputation, students flocked to it; but only Riazuddin and Fayyazuddin could survive the tough mathematics involved. A disheartened Salam never taught the course again. But he had already identified the twins to be the best and brightest of those he encountered. Riazuddin was later invited to become his Ph.D. student at Cambridge. Helped by Salam, Fayyazuddin went to Imperial College London a couple of years later.The rest is history. As a student at MIT in the 1970s, I would sometimes be asked by my professors if I knew Riazuddin, to which I replied yes with some pride. His Ph.D. thesis in 1958 on certain regularities underlying nuclear forces had been noticed as a piece of important work, but his subsequent works elevated him to the ranks of the world’s better known physicists. His 1968

book, Theory of Weak Interactions in Particle Physics, coauthored with C. P. Ryan and Robert E. Marshak, became a bible for physicists.Another exceptionally important piece of work by Riazuddin was done together with Fayyazuddin, who became a prominent physicist in his own right. This work became widely known in physics literature as the Kawarabayashi-Suzuki-Riazuddin-Fayyazuddin Relation. The Pakistani and Japanese authors had done their respective work separately. Kawarabayashi and Suzuki acknowledged that they only became aware of Riazuddin and Fayyazuddin’s work after they had completed their own. The Relation has stood the test of experiment, but even today continues to tantalize physicists—because it works so much better than it really should.Atomic EnterpriseThe story of Pakistan’s bomb, at the least its early beginnings, is well known by now. In the aftermath of Pakistan’s humiliating defeat in December 1971, President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto convened a meeting in Multan on Jan. 20, 1972, to which the country’s preeminent scientists were invited. Bhutto exhorted them to make an atomic bomb, a desire he had first articulated in 1965. Now, it would be a means of avenging national humiliation. I. H. Usmani, then chairman of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, opined that making the bomb was beyond Pakistan’s reach. Bhutto did not want to hear that. Usmani was unceremoniously replaced by Munir Ahmad Khan, an ambitious young engineer with more diplomatic and personal skills than engineering or scientific expertise.Usmani’s apprehension was reasonable. In 1972, the atomic bomb appeared well out of Pakistan’s reach. Creating the weapons that laid Hiroshima and Nagasaki to waste had required enormous effort and resources. The Manhattan Project, with its secret beginning in 1939, eventually employed nearly 130,000 people and cost about $26 billion. Some of the finest minds in physics gave their undivided attention to splitting the atom and, in the process, generated new technologies and scientific ideas. Even if Pakistan could somehow marshal the physical resources, how on earth could it get the required intellectual resources?Time was on Pakistan’s side. Every passing year was putting the bomb within the grasp of more and more nations. Once concealed under multiple layers of secrecy, the science behind the bomb slowly started to make its way out into the open in scientific literature. By the 1970s an enormous amount of such information was accessible; and physicists with sufficient breadth of understanding could do the job.


When Pakistan exploded its bomb in 1998, Riazuddin was pleased but not joyous.Riazuddin, who was then Pakistan’s leading physicist, was abroad pursuing a scientific collaboration at the time of the Multan meeting. But his twin, Fayyazuddin, was present on the occasion. He shared with me his recollections of Multan: Bhutto’s call to action was not as emotive as were his public speeches. But, he recalled with some amusement, how the assembled scientists sought to outbid each other as though at an auction. Tumbling over one another, each rose to declare that he could make the bomb even faster than the last speaker. At that time none had any idea of what this work entailed. A professor of experimental physics at Government College, Rafi Chaudhry, emphatically claimed that only experimental physicists could make the bomb. To this, Salam—who was there at Bhutto’s special invitation—responded by saying that the nuclear programs of the U.S., Britain, India, and other countries had all been headed by theoretical physicists.Soon thereafter, perhaps around September 1972, Salam summoned Riazuddin to his office at the International Center for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy. He had decided that Riazuddin was to design the bomb and, immediately upon his return to Islamabad, must create a group of theoretical physicists who would explore various technical aspects: the conceptual design for a nuclear device, calculation of the critical size of the fissile core, working out of a triggering mechanism, and finding the explosive yield for a variety of theoretical designs. Salam had already discussed the matter with Munir Ahmad Khan, with whom he had a warm relationship. Riazuddin should be given this task, Salam said. Khan agreed; and Riazuddin dutifully complied.Riazuddin set about his assigned task by scouring available literature. He first went through the declassified Manhattan Project report. His scientific visits to the U.S. became more frequent. In 1973, he patiently studied documents at the Library of Congress, and purchased photocopies of a substantial number of unclassified or declassified reports from the Technical Information Service in Virginia. Of particular value was a series of lectures, declassified in 1965, delivered by nuclear physicist Robert Serber. The primer, addressed to members of the Los Alamos Laboratory, proved immensely valuable. While it did not contain detailed, classified information, it laid out all the conceptual issues and turned out to be an excellent starting point for Pakistan’s novice bomb designers. The total cost was only a few hundred

dollars.Armed with his recent findings, Riazuddin returned to brainstorm in 1973 with his colleagues at Islamabad University (later renamed Quaid-e-Azam University). By this time I was a junior faculty member there. The rest of us were dimly aware that something big was going on. We knew that the university was being used as a front organization for buying banned equipment. But it took decades for the whole truth to emerge.From Riazuddin’s group, even those physicists who were in the know slowly dropped out. Fayyazuddin was not interested but Masud Ahmad, who had just obtained his Ph.D. in physics under the twins, became the second member of Riazuddin’s team. He went on to head a much bigger group eventually and was decorated with the Hilal-e-Imtiaz after the 1998 nuclear tests. The third member was Tufail Naseem, who assisted in programming the huge IBM360 located in the mathematics building.The calculations Riazuddin carried out were tedious and complex. The plutonium route had been closed for now and Munir Ahmad Khan had tasked him with the following problem: his bomb must use the absolute minimum amount of highly-enriched uranium, and certainly no more than 20 kilograms. As a particle physicist he had a reasonable understanding of nuclear physics, but knew no hydrodynamics or how matter behaved under extreme compression. This knowledge is crucial for designing an implosion bomb because the high explosive surrounding the bomb’s core creates a shockwave that makes jelly out of even the toughest metal. These unfamiliar things had to be learned from books and papers. Like any good theoretical physicist, Riazuddin refused to accept what the computer churned out until he could verify it by using some clever analytical techniques.Kicking the ClosetPakistan’s successful nuclear tests of May 1998 were the joint result of many who worked on its myriad aspects—mining, conversion of uranium to uranium hexafluoride gas, enrichment, metallization, explosives, device fabrication, testing equipment, etc. But everything really starts with the design, the very first step of any complex project.Arguably, the Chinese bomb design that Pakistan received sometime in the 1980s—and which the Americans say had been passed on by Dr. A. Q. Khan to the Libyans and Iranians—made the work easier. I do not think the Americans are lying when they say they confiscated the detailed bomb drawings in 2004 together with other nuclear materials from the ship BBC Cargo. In fact, around 1994 or 1995, Munir


Ahmad Khan whispered to me confidentially, while we sipped tea in his drawing room, that the Americans had angrily told him that Pakistan possessed detailed Chinese blueprints and drawings. But even these drawings would have been nearly useless without a sound understanding of the underlying theory. The Libyans, given the same drawings, could do nothing with them. Moreover, tuning weapons for different yields or exploring different warhead options without sound theoretical physics would have been impossible.Pakistan erupted in mass jubilation on May 28, 1998—the day the bomb came out of the nuclear closet. Pakistani videos and TV programs of the time show Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif congratulating cheering citizens. The euphoric press compared this historic moment with the birth of Pakistan in 1947. Pakistan’s bomb makers became national heroes. School children were handed free badges with mushroom clouds, poetry competitions around the bomb were organized, and bomb and missile replicas were planted in cities up and down the land (most of these replicas were removed during the Musharraf years). The bomb had attained mythical status; it became an article of faith for the guarantee of national security into perpetuity.Riazuddin was pleased but not joyous. He accepted quiet congratulations from his former colleagues, with whom he had ceased to have a working relationship many years ago, and he also accepted a high government award, the Hilal-e-Imtiaz. For Riazuddin, the bomb was a necessary evil, and a cause for worry. Pakistan and India were heading toward a debilitating and dangerous arms race. What could be done about it?Some weeks after the 1998 tests, Riazuddin wrote to Sharif pleading that Pakistan should now sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty. The first would prohibit more test explosions, which in any case were not essential, while the second would limit the size of the nuclear arsenal and prevent a sharp upward spiral in warhead numbers, costs, and dangers. As quid pro quo, he said, Pakistan should insist on nuclear-power technology transfer from the West. He received no reply. Quite possibly Sharif did not know how much the bomb owe d to Riazuddin.Nuclear BurdenMany Pakistanis think that Salam was opposed to making the bomb. Some say he played no role in it. This is wrong—he did want Pakistan to have the bomb, but felt that he had more important things to do than work out its minute details. The job of theoretical

physicists like Salam is to uncover nature’s secrets at the very deepest level; they think that applications of such discoveries, if any, matter less. Even if they had not developed the world’s first atomic bomb, Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, Hans Bethe, and Enrico Fermi would still have been enshrined in the history of physics for discovering fundamental principles.Information from multiple sources suggests to me that Salam did not do any bomb calculations himself. As a frontrunner in the world of physics, he was after bigger fish, not merely retracing the footsteps of his illustrious predecessors. And so he tasked his student, Riazuddin, with setting up a group of theoretical physicists. Although he lost power and influence in Pakistan after 1974, Salam continued to favor the bomb and to strongly push for its development. Those involved in bomb-design calculations were frequently invited to Trieste to use its ample library facilities. Earlier, Salam had advised the PAEC to purchase a plutonium reprocessing plant from France. That deal fell through after the Indian tests of 1974 and the growing suspicion that Pakistan would travel India’s route.Riazuddin recalls that around December 1973 he had accompanied Salam and Munir Ahmad Khan to the Wah Explosive Factory and met its head, Lt. Gen. Qamar Ali Mirza. He saw TNT for the first time, and recognized from the Manhattan Project report that an explosive called Composition B was used. The Directorate of Technical Development group, created by Munir Ahmad Khan, and later headed by Riazuddin, carried out experimental work on the high explosives needed for triggering implosion, explosive lenses, fast detonators, as well as on the necessary neutronics and electronics.Riazuddin was gentle and unassuming, the sort who couldn’t hurt a fly. So what made him go for designing nuclear weapons, each of which could easily snuff out a hundred thousand lives? Was he like Oppenheimer, who had felt uncomfortable after Hiroshima and subsequently refused to work on the bomb?I do not think so. Apart from the Hilal-e-Imtiaz, Riazuddin accepted various government awards given to him by the government for his “services to the nation,” a euphemism for his bomb work. His unpublished notes, which I have seen, also do not reveal regret; in fact, these exhibit some measure of satisfaction over having done the job right. His mentor and ideal, Salam, was a very different personality. Unlike Riazuddin, he was articulate, assertive, and fully capable of defending his turf. Two very different people agreed that the bomb must be built. Why?


One can only guess at the motivations: it is generally true that scientists who participate in defense-related work achieve positions of much greater importance and wield much clout. (Certainly, Oppenheimer and Teller were the most sought after scientists in their days. Salam also admired Homi Jehangir Bhabha, a fine physicist and fierce nationalist who was the force behind India’s nuclear program.) In those days one could be an Ahmadi and a Pakistani nationalist, and Salam was both. He bought into the idea of rapidly modernizing the nation under Gen. Ayub Khan, becoming the government’s science adviser.Riazuddin was accused of being an Ahmadi. Why else was he so close to Salam?It is interesting to compare the attitudes of Pakistan’s various bomb makers. Dr. A. Q. Khan and Dr. Samar Mubarakmand, Pakistan’s much celebrated scientists, frequently articulate in public their strong, visceral anti-Hindu feelings. This can perhaps be understood from the gut-wrenching partition of India, when Hindus and Sikhs and Muslims mass-slaughtered each other. On the other hand, Salam and Riazuddin never exhibited such hatreds—even though Jhang, Salam’s birthplace, and Ludhiana, Riazuddin and Fayyazuddin’s birthplace, had seen some of the worst atrocities. Was their attitude different from that of other nuclear scientists because of their exposure to the wider world of science?Salam coauthored works with several scientists who were Hindu. While in Italy, one of his most productive scientific collaborations was with Jogesh C. Pati of the University of Maryland, resulting in the famous Pati-Salam Model for proton decay. When Salam received the Nobel Prize for physics in 1979, India immediately conferred on him a national award. (I suspect few of Salam’s Indian colleagues knew of his nuclear past.) Pakistan’s then-president Gen. Zia-ul-Haq would grudgingly honor him a year later.That Salam eventually distanced himself from Pakistan’s nuclear program is no mystery. He had no option. Parliament’s 1974 decision to declare Ahmadis heretics was a sharp turning point for him and his community. Every religious minority in Pakistan is hounded and harassed, but none is more relentlessly persecuted than the Ahmadis. In retrospect, they had erred fatally by raising the demand for Pakistan.The older Salam was a different Salam. Although I had met him a few times beginning in 1971, it wasn’t until 1984 that we actually engaged. On the one hand, he had grown more attached to his faith, a fact that led to some tension in our conversations during my visits to Trieste; on the other, he became more inclined

toward advocating world peace, disarmament, and turning “swords into ploughshares.” By the late 1980s, I think he would have preferred to forget his initial contributions to the bomb.Riazuddin was not an Ahmadi, but was accused of being one—a well-tested and easy way for jealous detractors to defame and endanger a rival. Why else, they argued, was he so close to Salam? Riazuddin shrugged off the allegation. But his world, like Salam’s, had also opened wide through international travels. Riazuddin’s scientific collaborators were many—American, British, Italian, and Indian. This stands in sharp contrast with A. Q. Khan and Mubarakmand, neither of whom had Indian collaborators. Their work, although also essential for bomb making, was entirely concentrated on the engineering and managerial aspects.Quiet RebelBy nature a conformist rather than a dissident, Riazuddin was a religious man who said his prayers five times a day. His instincts were to agree and obey rather than argue. But he was also a technology enthusiast. His expectation, which seemed a tad unrealistic to me, was that the advanced technology demanded by the bomb would automatically usher in a new technological age for Pakistan and strongly boost local research and development. To his chagrin, nothing of the sort happened. Instead, even components that could be made locally were imported and reverse engineering was rewarded. Worse, undocumented financial transactions led to massive corruption within the nuclear establishment. His bomb-related budget in the 1970s had been just a few thousand dollars, of which he had to give complete accounts to the PAEC. But later, undocumented millions would be spent without a trace.Clashes with the establishment became frequent after Riazuddin became director of the National Center for Physics at Quaid-e-Azam University. He sought to make the center a nucleus for Pakistani and international scientists. It would, he hoped, provide intellectual leadership, have an open atmosphere, and would be closely modeled along the lines of Salam’s center in Trieste. But, with real controls resting elsewhere, the center eventually became a mere appendage of the national-security establishment, staffed by retired colonels and brigadiers, and forced to bow to their pressures. Not unexpectedly, its role in nurturing physics has been minimal.Crisis followed crisis. One of particular seriousness involved me as well. In 2006, for unclear reasons, Riazuddin’s bosses took fancy to a particular kind


of machine known as a Van de Graaf accelerator or Pelletron. This had been used in the early days of nuclear research and, although it had doubtful research utility, came with a hefty price tag of over Rs. 400 million. They decided to extract this sum from the Higher Education Commission, which was then flush. Upon reading in the newspapers that this albatross was purchased in the name of my department, I immediately protested with HEC’s top management, who defended the plan and told me that Riazuddin had signed off on the proposal. Horrified, I called Riazuddin. He admitted that he had succumbed to pressure “from above.”But to his credit Riazuddin decided then to stand up and fight to prevent the import of a useless piece of costly junk. The peeved czars of the nuclear establishment brought in their troops—nearly 150 technical personnel from the PAEC, Kahuta Research Laboratory, and the National Engineering and Scientific Commission filled the auditorium of the physics department of Quaid-e-Azam University in 2007. None among them knew anything about the scientific purposes of the Pelletron, nor cared. They came solely with instructions to abuse and insult Riazuddin and myself, often using crude language. The short of it: the Pelletron was imported and installed. It stands at the center as a monument to shortsightedness and willful wastage, with no significant scientific output. A second one, installed at Government College, Lahore, saw a similar fate. Riazuddin paid the price for his dissidence: he lost his job.A quintessential scientist who patiently worked on his calculations until almost the very end, Riazuddin published his last physics research paper in 2013—a remarkable feat for an 82-year-old. For one who had helped set Pakistan on its nuclear path, the farewell Riazuddin got from a bomb-loving nation was surprisingly low key. The country’s powerful nuclear and security establishment was clearly not willing to celebrate a man who had rebelled against it.Dr. Hoodbhoy is the Zohra and Z. Z. Ahmed distinguished professor of physics and mathematics at Forman Christian College University, Lahorehttp://newsweekpakistan.com/the-man-who-designed-pakistans-bomb/

Kathmandu’s Muslim community usually gathers at the Kashmiri Jama Masjid in Jamal for Jummah, or Friday prayers. But not all Muslims feel welcome at the landmark mosque.Followers of the Ahmadiyya sect of Islam, the Ahmadis, say they prefer to keep to themselves because they don’t want to “stir any trouble.”“It’s not that we’ve received any outright threats against our community here,” said Sajeel Ghouri, representative of the Ahmadiyya Nepal Sangh. “It’s just that we don’t know what they may do if they find out we’re Ahmadis.”The Ahmadiyya Muslim community was founded by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, an Indian religious leader, in 1889. The Ahmadis believe him to be the promised messiah, or messenger, a belief that puts them at odds with other mainstream Muslims, and has resulted in their persecution in several countries, including Pakistan, Indonesia and Malaysia.In Nepal too, the community whose history can be traced to the mid-1990s, has faced some backlash. Older members recounted to the Post how they were subject to harassment at the hands of their neighbours who deemed them ‘infidels’. But they are also quick to point out that these incidents are a thing of the past and they no longer have issues with any other community. “People initially thought that Ahmadis were removing Muslims from Islam,” said Qamrul Huda Ansari, a Birgunj resident, who said that he had to relocate to a different village due to mistreatment by other villagers. “But I think these misconceptions have now been cleared and we no longer face the type of harassment that we did earlier.”Less than 5 percent of Nepal’s population is Muslim and of that, Ahmadis make up less than 0.00008 percent. According to the association’s estimates, around 800 Ahmadis live in the country. A quarter of them are refugees from Pakistan who fled the country fearing persecution.“In Pakistan, we were not allowed to read the Quran, perform the Namaz or call Azaan,” said Wazia Iqbal, a Pakistani Ahmadi, who came to Kathmandu nearly seven years ago. “But here, we can practice our religion without any fear.”Pakistan outlawed the sect with a series of constitutional amendments and ordinances passed between 1974 to 1984. Under Pakistani law, Ahmadis are not allowed to call themselves Muslims. Doing so can land them in jail. Ahmadis also face several barriers in obtaining government identification and travel documents. When applying for these documents, Pakistani citizens have to declare non-allegiance to the founder of the sect.https://kathmandupost.ekantipur.com/news/2019-05-29/fleeing-persecution-ahmadi-muslims-find-safe-haven-in-nepal.html

Fleeing persecution, Ahmadi Muslims find safe haven in Nepal- Tsering D Gurung, Kathmandu


The Runaways by Fatima Bhutto — burns with indignation

A convincing and sensitive portrayal of the poor and downtrodden in Pakistan

and England What drives young people to join terrorist organisations like Isis? How does it feel to be told you’re worthless by society and locked out of the opportunities afforded to a privileged few? These are some of the questions at the heart of The Runaways, the second novel by Fatima Bhutto. It’s highly topical, arriving amid the controversy surrounding Shamima Begum, the teenager from east London who travelled to Syria to join Isis in 2015, and Bhutto writes with feeling and authority about the complexities of such cases.This should come as no surprise; politics is in Bhutto’s blood. Her grandfather Zulfiqar Ali and aunt Benazir were both prime ministers of Pakistan, while her father Murtaza, an opponent of Benazir’s government, was assassinated when Bhutto was 14 (in her memoir, Songs of Blood and Sword (2010), Bhutto accused her aunt of “moral responsibility” for his murder).More surprising, perhaps, is Bhutto’s ability to write sensitively and convincingly about the poor and downtrodden in a novel that tells the story of three young people in Pakistan and England.The book begins in Karachi where, in 2016, Anita

and Monty lead wildly contrasting lives. Anita is the daughter of a maalish wali — a masseuse for wealthy women — and lives in a slum. Across the city, Monty attends the American School and spends summers in London where his super-rich parents own vast properties. The novel’s third, and arguably most complex, protagonist is Sunny who, while growing up in Portsmouth, on England’s south coast, is desperate for his Indian father’s approval, confused about his own sexuality

and subjected to racism at school. “All his life,” Bhutto writes, “Sunny never felt he belonged in Portsmouth.”The author moves confidently between her

protagonists’ viewpoints and through different settings. She is as adept at

describing boys selling mynah birds at traffic lights in

Karachi, as she is at evoking the streets around Fratton Park, which are “littered with greasy tissues”, after a Pompey football match. She understands her male characters as much as her

women, and is astute about the mix of bravado and

insecurity that characterises young men’s attitudes to sex.

Sunny tries to conceal his attraction to men by having casual, occasionally

violent sex with girls. Monty’s world is turned upside down when he falls for a mysterious new girl at his school.

Fatima Bhutto

By Fatima Bhutto


In Anita’s story, Bhutto displays a keen eye for the injustices and indignities of poverty. In Karachi, for example, Monty’s mother’s maids are “purged” on a whim and casually condemned to destitution. In Knightsbridge, there’s a fleeting but poignant scene when Monty sees a couple carelessly toss a coffee cup into the road where an elderly Sikh man is sweeping: “[The Sikh] kept his eyes downcast, away from the couple, adjusting himself around them.” There are other sharp sketches of urban life in which Bhutto encourages the reader to consider the cumulative toll of such ignominies.In his book Age of Anger (2017), the journalist Pankaj Mishra, whom Bhutto thanks in her acknowledgments, described the way grievances can build up in marginalised people with catastrophic results. A virulent form of social resentment, Mishra argued, has caused violent upheavals for centuries and is a factor in the convulsions shaking the world today. In The Runaways, Bhutto takes the cultural conditions diagnosed by Mishra and dramatises their effects on individuals who feel rootless and, as Anita says, “unseen”.It’s no spoiler to say that these feelings are exploited by jihadis who lure Bhutto’s trio of protagonists to join the fighting in Syria and Iraq. Their lives overlap as the plot moves towards a thrilling denouement. In the meantime, Monty wilts in the desert sun, Sunny’s angst threatens to propel him to acts of monstrous violence and Anita is transformed into somebody else entirely. All three are representative figures, worn down by global capitalism and preyed upon by charlatans promising revenge and redemption.The Runaways offers an unflinching look at key subjects of our time and the riveting story of three memorable characters. The novel is particularly perceptive about the way that inequality is an incubator for alienation and anger, and it burns with controlled indignation at the state of our world. It is an involving and satisfying novel, with the caveat that its ending feels unresolved. But perhaps this story, for some characters at least, has more distance left to run. If so, the prospect of a sequel is tantalising.The Runaways, by Fatima Bhutto, Viking, RRP£14.99, 432 pageshttps://www.ft.com/content/204cf306-3691-11e9-9be1-7dc6e2dfa65e

At Bloomberg Businesweek, Caroline Winter visits Nestlé’s bot-tling plant in Mecosta County, Michigan to analyze how the multinational corporations targets small communities with promises of jobs, and buys up public land to gain control of wa-ter resources. Nestle sold $7.7 billion dollars worth of bottled water last year, making it the world’s largest bottled water com-pany.It made that money partly by paying a pittance for its product. Nestlé pays the U.S. Forest Service only $524 a year to draw 30 million gallons of public water in San Bernardino, California, and Nestlé pays the city of Evart, Michigan just $250,000 a year for its water. Consumers drink bottled water because they as-sume it’s safer than tap, but that makes us complicit in what many analysts and activists warn is the gradual privatization of water. These multinational corporations don’t have the public’s best interests in mind, activists warn. If anybody should own water, it’s the public.Nestlé has been preparing for shortages for decades. The com-pany’s former chief executive officer, Helmut Maucher, said in a 1994 interview with the New York Times: “Springs are like pe-troleum. You can always build a chocolate factory. But springs you have or you don’t have.” His successor, Peter Brabeck-Let-mathe, who retired recently after 21 years in charge, drew crit-icism for encouraging the commodification of water in a 2005 documentary, saying: “One perspective held by various NGOs—which I would call extreme—is that water should be declared a human right. … The other view is that water is a grocery product. And just as every other product, it should have a market value.” Public out-rage ensued. Brabeck-Letmathe says his comments were taken out of context and that water is a human right. He later proposed that people should have free access to 30 liters per day, paying only for additional use.Compared with the water needs of agriculture and energy pro-duction, the bottled water business is barely responsible for a trickle; in Michigan, it accounts for less than 1 percent of total water usage, according to Michigan’s Department of Environ-mental Quality (DEQ). But it rankles many because the natural resource gets hauled out of local watersheds for private profit, not used in the service of feeding people or keeping their lights on. There’s also, of course, the issue of plastic pollution.In the U.S., Nestlé tends to set up shop in areas with weak water regulations or lobbies to enfeeble laws. States such as Maine and Texas operate under a remarkably lax rule from the 1800s called “absolute capture,” which lets landowners take all the groundwa-ter they want. Michigan, New York, and other states have stricter laws, allowing “reasonable use,” which means property owners can extract water as long as it doesn’t unreasonably affect other wells or the aquifer system. Laws vary even within states. New Hampshire is a reasona-ble-use state, but in 2006, the municipality of Barnstead became the first nationwide to ban the pumping of its water for sale else-where. https://longreads.com/2017/10/04/nestle-is-sucking-the-worlds-aquifers-dry/

Nestle is sucking the world’s aquifers dry By Aaron Gilbreth


The poison of ignorance and extremism that Bhutto and General Zia jointly fathered during their dictatorial

regimes has fully indoctrinated even those who otherwise describe themselves as educated.This week the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN inched closer to the discovery of Higgs Boson or the God Particle as it were. In this extraordinary story of human achievement, Dr.Abdus Salam is a key player who put Pakistan on the map of theoretical physics. In his homeland though, a group of self-styled champions of Islam have started a posthumous campaign of scurrilous slander claiming that Dr. Salam was giving out nuclear secrets. Forget that even a confirmed bigot like General Zia held a ceremony in our only Nobel Prize winner’s honour or that no one ever accused Dr. Salam of any such thing; in Pakistan to be a hero you have to actually transfer technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea.Now consider the case of 11 year old Sitara Akbar. Every Pakistani and his mother in law are citing her as a crowning national achievement, blissfully oblivious of the fact that she is an Ahmadi. To them her religion is suddenly unimportant or irrelevant or is it?

How many Sitara Akbars have been expelled from our schools for being Ahmadis? How many productive citizens of this republic have been killed and maimed for believing differently?Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s National Assembly imagined itself the Islamic equivalent of the Council of Nicea. Just as that ancient bastion of Christian orthodoxy excommunicated Unitarian Christians for not believing in the trinity of the father, son and the Holy Ghost, the National Assembly saw it fit to – primarily at the instigation of the Prime Minister and his law minister- declare an entire sect non-Muslim. Just like the post hoc elevation of the principle of trinity at Nicea, Pakistan’s National Assembly located Islam in the principle of the finality of Prophet hood.This act of our sovereign legislature stood in sharp contrast to the view of this nation’s founding father. On 5 May, 1944, in response to demands of the orthodox Vis a Vis Ahmadis, Jinnah made it absolutely clear that anyone who professes to be a Muslim is a Muslim and welcome in the Muslim League and that those who were raising the issue were trying to divide the Muslims. Here I am forced to say

I Concur With Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah That Ahmadis Are Muslims

By Yasser Latif Hamdani


that I am inclined to accept Jinnah’s view and reject the collective wisdom of our sovereign legislature. There are several reasons which may be cited in this regard:1. First and foremost Pakistan is bound by the United Nations’ charter. Therefore Pakistan is bound to ensure freedom of religion for all its citizens and freedom of religion means freedom of religion according to the definition of the subject of the said freedom.2. Identity is subjective not objective. The state of Pakistan or any other state cannot tell an Ahmadi that he is not a Muslim because it is intrinsic to the faith of an Ahmadi. This is an inviolable, inalienable right as part of right to life which every state in the world is bound to protect. If Ahmadis say they are Muslims they ought to be accepted as such.3. Pakistan is a signatory to the ICCPR and without reservations since June 2011. Therefore every piece of legislation that discriminates against Ahmadis or forces a label upon them is ultra virus the ICCPR.4. The Islamic argument: According to the Holy Prophet (PBUH) anyone who utters the Kalima Shahadah is a Muslim. None of the Kalimas, including the Primary Kalima Shahadah contains any reference to the principle of the finality of Prophethood as understood by the Muslim majority today.5. Finally because by conduct and promise, Pakistani state is stopped from claiming otherwise. In 1947, Pakistan laid claim to Qadian as a Muslim holy place, a counter-blast to Sikh claims on Nankana Sahib and Hassan Abdal. Similarly in 1946 elections which is the basic referendum on the question of Pakistan, Ahmadi votes were instrumental in getting Muslims Pakistan. These are undeniable facts of history.Therefore- fully aware of the stigma attached to this statement- I concur with Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founding father of Pakistan that Ahmadis are Muslims, if they say they are Muslims and no one, not even the sovereign legislature, has the right to say otherwise.Source: pakteahouse.net/2011/12/15/are-ahmadis-non-muslims/

German court orders fines for ‘sharia police’ group

A German court ordered last month seven fundamen-talists to pay fines over a so-called “sharia police” pa-trol they launched in 2014 to mass media and political outrage.The men aged between 27 and 37 must pay between 300 and 1,800 euros ($336-$2015) for infringing laws against wearing uniforms, the Wuppertal tribunal found.Germany’s laws against wearing uniforms originally aimed to prevent neo-Nazis staging rallies and pa-rades. Judges said the group’s actions were aimed at achieving an “intimidating effect suggestive of mili-tancy” by aping the sharia police as violent organiza-tions.In September 2014, the seven patrolled the streets of Wuppertal, a west German industrial town with a sizeable Muslim population, wearing orange high-vis-ibility vests marked “Sharia Police”.When they encountered young Muslims, they told them not to drink alcohol or visit cafes, betting shops or brothels. Monday’s verdict comes at the end of a second trial for the group after the constitutional court last year overturned their 2016 acquittal.At the time of the “sharia police” patrol, the men were led by one of Germany’s prominent fundamentalist preachers, Sven Lau, a 38-year-old convert to Islam.He was himself sentenced in 2017 to a five-year jail term in a separate case, after being found guilty of “supporting a terrorist organization” by recruiting po-tential militants to travel to Syria.h t t p s : / / e n g l i s h . a l a r a b i y a . n e t / e n / N e w s /world/2019/05/27/German-court-orders-fines-for-sha-ria-police-group.html

Muslims pray in the central mosque in Cologne-Ehrenfeld, western Germany, on October 3, 2017. (AFP)


In Pakistan, Our Mulla Community Is More Di-vided On Religious Matters And Rituals. We Cel-ebrate At Least Two Eids. Being An Islamic State

With Religion As A Government Subject, Our Prime Minister Should Take Bold Steps To Ban All Religious Groups And Parties And Nationalize All Masajid And Madressahs. The Illegally Built Masajid On Open Lots/Plots, Parks, Play Grounds, Big Road Intersec-tions Etc. May Be Pulled Down As They Are Not Al-lah’s Houses As Wrongly Being Called By Our Mullas. Allah’s House Is One And Only Masjid Ul Haraam, Makkah Free From Sectarianism, Fiqah, Maslak Dif-ferences, Free From Donation Collections, Religious Group And Party Interest And To Which Are Linked Khan-E-Kaaba, Hujr Aswad, Muqam Ibrahim, Aab Zam Zam, Hatim And Also Safwa And Marwa Hill-ocks And Where Hajj And Umra Are Performed. Hence The Rest Of The Masajid Are Simply Prayer Halls Only. The Theological Madressahs Attached With Our Masajid Be Upgraded Into Schools With Holy Quran And Its Translation/Explanation As One Of The Sub-jects To Understand And Follow Islam Correctly And Entirely. Actually Islam Is A Complete Way Of Life/Deen (5:3) And Theology/Mazhabi Rituals Are Only Part Of Our Complete Deen. In Arabia There Is No Such Theolog-ical Madressah System To Corner Islam As A Theol-ogy To Simply Read/Recite And Memorize The Holy Quran. Arabic Is Their Common Language And As

Usual Contains Good And Bad Words, Songs And Dances Etc. As In Any Other Language. The Arab Children And Adults Don’t Memorize The Holy Quran Except The Masjid Imams/Speakers. The Arab Chil-dren Read The Holy Quran In Schools Along With Other Subjects--All In Arabic. But We Near ‘Worship’ The Arabic Language And Generally Perform ‘Wudu’ To Touch And Read The Holy Quran And That Too Without Understanding. The Holy Quran Was Bestowed In Arabic On Our Ar-abic Prophet To Warn And Guide The Then Deviat-ed And Erring Arabs To Embrace Islam And Follow The Right Path Of Allah (12:2/ 41:2-3,44/ 42:7/ 43:3). Allah Bestowed The Previous Three Holy Books I.e. Torah, Zaboor And Bible Not In Arabic But In The Then Prevalent Languages Of The Time To Warn And Guide The Then Deviated/Kafir People To Follow The Right Path Of Allah. Hence Being A Universal Deen, We Should All Read Quranic Translation In Our Own Language Again And Again To Understand And Follow Islam Correct-ly And Entirely Instead Of Cornering It To So Called Five Pillars Of ‘Puja Pat’ Rituals Only. Actually The Whole Quran Is The Pillar Of Islam And All Its Spe-cific Guidance/Mohkmaath Should Be Followed In Letter And Spirit To Achieve Allah’s Blessings. Thanks.

WORST EXPLOITATION OF ISLAM IN PAKISTAN

SYED SADRUDDIN HUSSAIN


t the height of the Empire, a select band of British people renounced Christianity and converted to Islam. These are the stories of three such pioneers, who defied Victorian norms at a time when Christianity was the bedrock of British identity.

Solicitor William Henry Quilliam became interested in Islam after seeing Moroccans pray on a ferry during a Mediterranean break in 1887.“They were not at all troubled by the force of the strong wind or by the swaying of the ship. I was deeply touched by the look on their faces and their expressions, which displayed complete trust and sincerity,” he recalled.After inquiring about the religion during a stay in Tangiers, 31-year-old Quilliam became a Muslim, describing his new faith as “reasonable and logical and, personally, I felt it did not contradict my beliefs”.

William Henry Quilliam adopted the name Abdullah after his conversion

Abdullah Quilliam

UK: Victorians who became Muslims

A


While Islam doesn’t oblige converts to change their names, he adopted the name of Abdullah.On his return to England in 1887, he became a preacher, and was said to be instrumental in the conversion of about 600 people across the UK.

Quilliam is credited with converting 200 locals and 600 people across the UK

He also established the country’s first mosque that year in Liverpool - regarded by many at the time as the “second city of the British Empire”.Queen Victoria, who ruled over more Muslims than the Turkish Ottoman Empire, was among those who ordered his pamphlet “Faith of Islam”, which summarised the religion and was translated into 13 languages.She is said to have ordered six more copies for her family. But her willingness to learn was not always matched by a wider society which believed Islam to be a violent religion.In 1894, the Ottoman sultan - with the approval of the Queen - appointed Quilliam as Sheikh al-Islam of the British Isles, a title reflecting his leadership in the Muslim community.

An illustration of Queen Victoria investing Ottoman Sultan Abdul Aziz (centre) with the Order of the Garter

Despite the official recognition, many Liverpudlian converts faced resentment and abuse over their faith,

including being assaulted with bricks, offal and horse manure.Quilliam believed the attackers had been “brainwashed and led to believe that we were bad people”.He was known locally for his work with the underprivileged - advocating trade unionism and divorce law reform - but his legal career came to ruin when he tried to help a female client seeking a divorce.A honey-trap was set up for her allegedly adulterous husband - a practice not uncommon at the time - but the attempt failed and Quilliam was struck off.

Worshippers still pray at the Abdullah Quilliam mosque in Liverpool, which was opened in 1887

He left Liverpool in 1908 to minimise the scandal’s impact on the Muslim community. He resurfaced in the south as Henri de Leon, although many knew who he was, according to Prof Ron Geaves, who has written a book about Quilliam.Although his profile diminished, he became involved with the country’s second oldest mosque, built in Woking in 1889, and was buried in the Surrey town after his death in 1932.The Liverpool mosque bears his name to this day.

Quilliam also became involved with Britain’s second oldest mosque in Woking


Lady Evelyn Cobbold

Lady Evelyn, pictured with her husband John Cobbold, felt she was “Muslim at heart”

It wasn’t uncommon for members of the upper classes to be fascinated by Islam, often inspired by travels in Muslim lands.From an aristocratic family, Edinburgh-born Lady Evelyn Murray spent much of her childhood switching between life in Scotland and north Africa.“There, I learnt to speak Arabic and my delight was to escape my governess and visit the mosques with my Algerian friends, and unconsciously I was a little Muslim at heart,” she wrote.At her ancestral estate of Dunmore Park, she excelled at deer-stalking and salmon-fishing.Her explorer father, the 7th Earl of Dunmore, was often away in destinations including China and Canada. Her mother, later a lady-in-waiting to Queen Victoria, was also a keen traveller.Lady Evelyn inherited her parents’ wanderlust and it was in Cairo where she met and married her husband John Cobbold - a businessman who was part of the brewery dynasty that ran Ipswich Town FC.

Lady Evelyn was the first British woman known to have performed the Hajj

It is not known when she converted to Islam. The seed may have been sown by her childhood travels, but

Lady Evelyn’s faith was apparently cemented after a holiday in Rome, where she met the Pope.“When His Holiness suddenly addressed me, asking if I was a Catholic, I was taken aback for a moment and then replied that I was a Muslim,” she later wrote.“What possessed me I don’t pretend to know, as I had not given a thought to Islam for many years. A match was lit and I then and there determined to read up and study the faith.”It was the religion’s spiritual aspect that attracted many converts, according to historian William Facey, who wrote the foreword to Lady Evelyn’s memoirs.He says they followed a “belief that all the great religions shared a transcendent unity… behind the superficial doctrinal detail that divides them”.In the Middle East, Lady Evelyn - referred to as “Lady Zainab” by her Arab friends - often had access to areas reserved for women and wrote about the “dominating influence of women” in Muslim culture.At the age of 65, she embarked on the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca - the first British woman on record to complete the feat.It offered her “endless interest, wonder and beauty” and her account was later published in a book, Pilgrimage to Mecca.

Lady Evelyn later wrote about her pilgrimage

Little is known about her life afterwards other than she travelled for a short period in Kenya. She died in an Inverness nursing home in 1963 at the age of 95, having instructed that a bagpiper play at her funeral and a Koranic passage, known as the “verse of light”, be inscribed on her gravestone.The marker, located in her Glencarron estate in the Highlands, was later slashed with a knife - perhaps testament to the strong views her conversion drew.“I am often asked when and why I became a Muslim,” she wrote in her memoirs.“I can only reply that I do not know the precise moment when the truth of Islam dawned upon me.


“It seems that I have always been a Muslim.”

Robert Stanley

Robert Stanley converted to Islam at the age of 70

The narrative of Victorian Muslim history is usually dominated by those from society’s upper echelons, whose accounts have been better preserved.Keeping written documents, such as diaries, was “generally more a sign of being middle class”, says Christina Longden, who only found out her ancestor became Muslim after her father researched their family tree.Robert Stanley rose from working-class grocer to Conservative mayor of Stalybridge - a mill town near Manchester - in the 1870s.According to Ms Longden, who has written a book and play about him, he was also a magistrate who set up a fund for workers sacked for not voting in line with their bosses’ views.She also found he regularly wrote about British colonialism to the newsletter of Quilliam’s Liverpool mosque.

Robert Stanley (centre) with Abdullah Quilliam (right) at the Liverpool mosque

Stanley met Quilliam in the late 1890s after he had retired from his political career, and they became close friends.

“Robert was 28 years older than Quilliam so I think there may have been a bit of a father-son relationship there,” says Ms Longden.It wasn’t until he was 70 years old however, in 1898, that Stanley became a Muslim and adopted the name Reschid.Ms Longden believes from her research that there were “no other Muslims” in Stalybridge at the time. Stanley later moved to Manchester and died in 1911.

A 19th Century image shows workers on strike in Stalybridge

His conversion was kept quiet by his immediate descendants and was only discovered by the Longdens in 1998.“Quilliam’s granddaughter said this was ‘an age when, if you didn’t conform, your picture was turned to the wall for all time’,” says Ms Longden.Coincidentally, Ms Longden’s brother, Steven, became a Muslim in 1991 after studying in Egypt as part of his university degree - seven years before finding out about Stanley.When he heard about his ancestor’s conversion, he recalls finding it “incredibly shocking, in a good way”.“The fact there was a man who chose to be Muslim at a time when you couldn’t possibly imagine someone would do something so unorthodox... when you sit and think about it, well yeah, it’s Manchester.“People aren’t afraid to stand up and say what they believe in, whether that’s politically or religiously.”https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-48069763


A GP has revealed he is planning to quit medicine over an investigation by the doctors watchdog into claims he ‘discriminated’ against a Muslim woman for asking her to remove her veil.“Dr Keith Wolverson said he ‘politely’ asked the wom-an to take off the garment for patient safety reasons during a consultation last

year because he was unable to hear her explain her sick daughter’s symptoms.“He was then ‘deeply upset’ when last week he received a letter from the General Medical Council, the pro-fessional regulator, informing him that he was subject to an inquiry over allegations of racial discrimination which could result in him being struck off.“Last night, Dr Wolverson, who has practised as a GP for 23 years and has an unblemished record, said re-gardless of the outcome of the investigation he now plans to leave his job.“He said: ‘I feel a major injustice has taken place. This is why you are waiting so long to see your GP and doc-tors are leaving in droves. This country will have no doctors left if we continue to treat them in this man-ner. I’m deeply upset.‘A doctor’s quest to perform the very finest consulta-tion for the safety of the patient has been misinter-preted in a duplicitous manner to suggest there has been an act of racism committed. I absolutely no longer want to be a doctor.’“Dr Wolverson told how the Muslim woman brought her daughter, aged ten or 11, to see him at a walk-in centre at Royal Stoke University Hospital in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, last June.“The doctor said he asked the woman to remove the

veil as he was unable to hear her explain her sick daughter’s symptoms because of the niqab she was wearing. “The mother said she was concerned the child had tonsillitis.‘But the 52-year-old GP struggled to hear the moth-er’s account of the girl’s health problems because her speech was being obscured by her niqab – a garment worn by some Muslim women that covers the body and face apart from the eyes.“The doctor said he ‘politely’ asked the woman to re-move the veil covering her face so he could be sure what she was saying. “I asked her, would you kindly remove your face veil please because it makes com-munication very difficult,’ Dr Wolverson explained. ‘Normally this issue doesn’t arise because patients au-tomatically do so.‘“One would think that any parent would be wholly supportive and grateful that a doctor was trying to safely treat their child.” “According to Dr Wolverson, the mother complied with his request without raising any objections. “But half an hour after the consulta-tion, her husband arrived and declared he was making a complaint about the GP’s behaviour.‘He sat outside my consultation room and threaten-ingly made eye contact towards me whenever I went out to fetch each patient,’ Dr Wolverson said. ‘He then made a formal complaint and I was prevented from working at the walk-in centre again.’“It has since emerged that NHS bosses sent the GMC a form outlining the complaints. It says the woman told the doctor she did not want to remove the veil on religious grounds but he refused to continue the consultation unless she did. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7046077/Doctor-faces-inquiry-asking-Muslim-lift-veil-says-quit-23-years-GP.html

Dr Keith Wolverson, pictured, has practised as a GP for 23 years but now

plans to leave his job

UK: A British GP Hounded Out Of Medicine By Muslim Claims

Monthly LAHORE International21www.lahoreinternational.com www.lahoreinternational.com21Monthly LAHORE International

Forgotten Muslim

soldiers of World War I

‘silence’ far rightBy Rahil SheikhBBC Asian Network

A hundred years since the end of World War One, historians think recognizing the contribution of Muslims can

help tackle contemporary issues such as Islamophobia.“Muslim soldiers have been forgotten about over time,” Hayyan Bhabha, from the Muslim Experience, says.“The core far-right narrative is that Muslims have never done anything for us.”Well, actually, with facts that are over 100 years old, we can say Muslims fought and died for the history and security of Europe.” It is estimated that 1.5 million Indian troops fought to defend Britain. Of those, 400,000 were Muslim soldiers.The Muslim Experience is working to highlight the global contribution of Muslim soldiers to

World War One and says raising awareness could silence anti-Muslim rhetoric by far-right groups in Britain today. Mr Bhabha says his team is now opening up documents and discovering new information about their role in the War.“Accessing archives from 19 countries, we have discovered that more than four million Muslims either fought or served as labourers during the War, from around the world,” he says. One of those was Sepoy Khudadad Khan, an Indian soldier who fought alongside British troops.He was the sole survivor of a team assigned to defend vital ports in France and Belgium from German forces. According to accounts, Khan managed to hold off the enemy advance long enough for British reinforcements to arrive.On 31 October 1914, Khan, of the 129th Duke


of Connaught’s Own Baluchis Regiment, became the first South Asian to receive the Victoria Cross, Britain’s highest military honour.

‘Feel more British’Groups such as the Muslim Experience want stories of soldiers to be heard. They also want more British Muslims to find out if they have a personal connection to World War One. Just as a local GP in Nottingham, Dr Irfan Malik, did after he had a chance conversation with a patient that led him to discover two of his great-grandfathers had fought for Britain.Dr Malik’s great-grandparents, Capt Ghulam Mohammad and Subedar Mohammad Khan, were two of 460 soldiers from a tiny village called Dulmial, in modern-day Pakistan, sent to fight in the 1914-18 conflict.“One of my patients is a researcher of Commonwealth contribution to World War One and I told him about a village in modern-day Pakistan where I’m from that has a cannon commemorating the Great War,” he says.“From that point four years ago, my journey began and I found out my two great-grandparents fought for Britain. “I’m very fortunate to have images from 100 years ago. It means a huge amount to me. It’s made me feel more British as we have this shared history in common and I believe it helps community cohesion.”But how connected do British Muslims feel to the War and how aware is the community itself of its links to British military history? Mr Bhabha thinks some young Muslims in particular are not engaged with British military history.“Most Muslims are not engaged with military history because they can’t relate to it,” he says. “The way it

is taught currently is very European-centric. “The history that is taught doesn’t show the true diversity of everyone that took part in the First World War.”A study by think tank British Future found just 22% of people in Britain knew Muslims had fought in the Great War.So, it has launched a campaign, Remember Together, to raise awareness in schools.Steve Ballinger, from British Future, says: “Finding out that Muslim soldiers fought and died for Britain to protect us and to protect the freedoms we enjoy today, that’s an important history for everyone to know.”It has certainly meant a lot to Daleesha Naz, 14, of Eden Girls School, in east London.”Today I learned that 400,000 Muslims fought in the British Indian army and it has made me feel closer and more connected to British history,” she says.As the 100th anniversary of the end of World War One is remembered, historians, campaigners, and descendants of the soldiers are making sure the contribution of Muslims is never forgotten.Luc Ferrier, who chairs Forgotten Heroes 14-19 - the umbrella group for the Muslim Experience - says: “If the world really wants to reach out to the international Muslim community, then they need to know the enormous contribution these people have made, fighting a war none of their making.“Only by recognising and honouring the global Muslim sacrifices, not only these of the British colonies, we are reaching out to them and saying a genuine thank you”.

Muslim graves in French military cemetery Notre Dame de Lorette.

Indian troops serving with the British army pray outside the Shah Jahan Mosque in Woking, Surrey


NOW that the hype and hysteria he helped create is fading, recently retired chief justice Saqib Nisar deserves to wear a pointed dunce cap on his head as he, with the most powerful men in Pakistan today behind him, walks slowly through the Hall of Shame. Had they understood from schooldays the importance of a few innocent-looking zeros to the left of a decimal point, they’d recognise a million from a billion. We might have then been spared the deep national embarrassment everyone now wants to forget — the Diamer-Bhasha and Mohmand dams.From yesterday (Friday) morning here’s the math: The Supreme Court website shows Rs10,669,728,001 in the dam fund with inflows starting July 6, 2018. Looks huge, eh? In US dollars that’s just $0.07bn. Worse, since February the graph is flat because salaried people are fighting against more forced deductions. Still worse: the un-invested fund has lost Rs10m a day in interest (the recent decision to invest this by June 20 is way overdue). Now compare the measly $0.07bn with the whopping $14bn needed for Diamer-Bhasha alone (2013 estimate). In July 2018 the intrepid Khurram Husain calculated that 199 years of donations were needed to achieve this. With reduced inflows, that time rockets up to 600-700 years.Favourite excuses: overseas Pakistanis didn’t deliver their $1,000 per person as Imran Khan imagined they would; local Pakistanis were stingy despite prods and nudges and hourly exhortations over establishment-controlled radio and TV; the trillions of looted money supposedly returning to Pakistan somehow got lost on the way; and the dollar went through the roof. All predictable but to foresee something you need brains, not just eyes.Mathematics is all about reason but reason in Pakistan appears to have dried up in recent times.In a mathematically savvy country no major project — civil works, manufacturing, or health — is approved

without a full fiscal and cost/benefit analysis, detailed supply chain management, and logistics connecting the nodes. Teams of technical experts guide political leaders through the maze. But for Pakistani decision-makers, whim suffices.Question: why so few genuine Pakistani experts and why is math illiteracy so rampant? We have good soldiers but not a single top-level Pakistani mathematician anywhere in the world — even those recently decorated with Pakistan’s highest national awards for mathematics would probably flunk undergrad math exams at places like MIT. Why is the math taught in our schools and universities ridiculously bad?The answer has two parts. First, most people confuse math with arithmetic and with cut-and-dried formulas. But it’s not that! Mathematics is the music of reason whose rich melodies need good tutoring and hard work to understand. Second, math matters much but only if you think the laws of physics, expressed mathematically, actually govern the physical universe. Where Inshallah holds sway, math based predictions are easily overridden. Precise planning then becomes useless or secondary; math skills are unneeded.Case in point: some geniuses in Gen Musharraf ’s cabinet one day decided to substitute CNG for petrol. They priced CNG so low that poor taxi drivers and land cruiser owners alike rushed to buy a CNG conversion kit costing Rs20,000 or more. Millions saved and scrimped to buy one but the net savings were still good. Then one day: poof! As gas started petering out, queues became impossibly long. Thousands of CNG stations closed down and millions of kits were thrown away.Again, bad math! Computer modeling of supply and demand, with the model’s output actually determining policy, is normal elsewhere. Did our experts and Supreme Court think that divine intervention would

By Prof Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy

Bad mathbig blunders


bring back the gas? It didn’t and so everything collapsed.Listing every such bungle could fill countless thick volumes. But there’s a mega-bungle deserving inclusion in Ripley’s Believe it or Not. Since it’s from the backwaters of Sindh, almost no one knows about it.Way back in 1989 a brand new campus was acquired for Shah Abdul Latif University near the shrine of Shadi Shaheed some 25 kilometres from Khairpur city. Spread over 900 acres, construction proceeded until 1995. And then before the first class was held it was abandoned forever. Thirty years later, there’s talk about converting the campus to a date plantation — but that’s if they can find water.Colleagues in Khairpur invited me there in 1997 for physics lectures but insisted I also tour the new campus. Driving over an un-metalled road in the blazing desert heat brought us to 30-odd buildings standing silently in the backdrop of barren hills. It was like visiting a town after an earthquake except there had been no earthquake. After it rained in 1995 the ground settled unevenly and some buildings lost roofs, others leaned to one side. The only occupants I encountered were desert lizards and stray dogs.Bad math, bad soil engineering! Nevertheless, the accused pleaded in court that “this incident should be seen as an act of God which mere mortals could do little to prevent” and argued that unseasonal rains were due to Him. It worked: no one was ever punished.Math illiteracy also means ‘exponential growth’ is not understood. The consequences of this are graver than anything imaginable. Pakistan currently has a ‘small’ net population growth rate of 2.1 per cent. This means every 33 years the population will double, and then double again and again. If continued, by this century’s end Pakistan’s population will exceed that of Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand combined. This shocking piece of math is something that no government or its minders dare discuss; the ministry of population planning was abolished years ago.A silver lining, howsoever slight: Fawad Chaudhry, the current minister of science and technology, is pushing an Islamic calendar. Four hundred years ago, after he invented infinitesimal calculus, Isaac Newton found that gravity and inertia alone determine lunar and planetary orbits. Unlike what had been imagined in mediaeval times, it wasn’t teams of harnessed angels that were pulling them around. Today we know to within half an inch where the moon will be 1,000 years hence. Will Chaudhry and his new scientific almanac succeed in convincing us when the next Eid-ul-Fitr will be? Let’s wish him luck.The writer teaches physics and math in Lahore and IslamabadPublished in Dawn, June 15th, 2019

Norway Island wants to be time free zone

Residents of a Norwegian island where the sun doesn’t set for 69 days of the year want to go “time-free” and have more flexible school and working hours to make the most of their long summer days.People on the island of Sommaroy are pushing to get rid of traditional business hours and “con-ventional time-keeping” during the midnight sun period that lasts from May 18 to July 26, resident Kjell Ove Hveding said. Hveding met with a Norwegian lawmaker this month to present a petition signed by dozens of is-landers in support of declaring a “time-free zone” and to discuss any practical and legal obstacles to basically ignoring what it says on clocks.“It’s a bit crazy, but at the same it is pretty serious,” he said.Sommaroey, which lies north of the Arctic Circle, stays dark from November to January. The idea behind the time-free zone is that going off the clock would make it easier for residents, especial-ly students, employers and workers, to make the most of the precious months when the opposite is true.Having no clocks “is a great solution but we likely won’t become an entirely time-free zone as it will be too complex,” Hveding said. “But we have put the time element on the agenda, and we might get more flexibility ... to adjust to the daylight.”“The idea is also to chill out. I have seen people suffering from stress because they were pressed by time,” he said. Sitting west of Tromsoe, the is-land has a population of 350. Fishery and tourism are the main industries.Finland last year lobbied for the abolition of Euro-pean Union daylight savings time after a citizens’ initiative collected more than 70,000 signatures.

Sikh elders of the Ludhiana Village Hedon Bet refuse to let anyone demolish the Mosque built in 1920 despite zero Muslim population in the village.“We will not let anyone demolish the masjid”

“It is the house of god”

This is the masjid in the village Hedon Bet of Ludhiana district

The elders stated that the Mosque is the house of god and no one has the right to demolish it. The residents of the village overwhelmingly support the elders and prevent anyone from occupying the abandoned site.The elders stated that as long as they live the Mosque will stand and they will stand guard to prevent demolition. The Muslim population of the village moved to the newly formed Pakistan in 1947 and abandoning their places of worship.The Sikhs have a long history of protecting other’s places of worship. The 6th Guru, Guru Hargobind Sahib Ji even built a mosque for Muslims.

http://dailysikhupdates.com/sikh-elders-wont-let-anyone-demolish-mosque-in-ludhiana-village-despite-zero-muslim-population

SIKH ELDERS WON’T LET ANYONE DEMOLISH MOSQUE DESPITE ZERO MUSLIM POPULATIONDAILY SIKH UPDATESLudhiana, Punjab

Monthly LAHORE Internationalwww.lahoreinternational.com 25

Lahore International Magazine

: @lahoreintl

: @lahoreintl

: lahoreinternational

: Lahoreintl

: +447940077825

: +447940077825

: [email protected]


The new secularism law, once known as Bill 21, makes it illegal to wear religious symbols at work if you’re a public school

teacher, a police officer, a judge, a prison guard, a wildlife officer, a Crown prosecutor or if you work as a lawyer for the government. The legislation also lays out the rules requiring citizens to uncover their faces to receive a public service for identification or security purposes.Quebec’s Bill 21 is finally law. Premier François Legault’s government invoked premature closure to end fierce debate over the weekend, and it passed 73-35, the Parti Québécois in support, the Liberals and Québec solidaire opposed. The law enjoys overwhelming support amongst ethnic

Québécois, but almost none amongst minority groups, who read xenophobia and even racism into its proscription of religious symbolism in the public-service sector. The bill, as passed, includes the Notwithstanding Clause, which is expected to discourage Charter challenges to the law.the public-service sector. The bill, as passed, includes the Notwithstanding Clause, which is expected to discourage Charter challenges to the law. Yousra Khitouch, centre, was among the more than 300 protesters who took to the streets in Montreal to protest Bill 21 on Monday evening. (Claire Loewen/CBC)I’m on record in support of Bill 21. The government’s philosophical position is that secularism, as an

Canada: Quebec’s new secularism law bans religious symbols

By Barbara Kay

Yousra Khitouch, centre, was among the more than 300 protesters who took to the streets in Montreal to protest Bill 21 on Monday evening. (Claire Loewen/CBC)


existential component of Québécois identity, may reasonably trump the multiculturalist paradigm in areas of civic interaction under the state’s aegis, such as public education, law enforcement and the bureaucracy. Multiculturalism is one vision of society that happens to prevail in most Western societies. But it is not the only vision that is entirely consistent with democratic principles, especially in societies desirous of preserving and strengthening the cultural identity that made their nation (or as in Quebec quasi-nation) the attractive destination it is for immigrants.I think many Canadians, not just Québécois, feel that policies like Bill 21 will be a positive force for social integration of immigrants, just as Bill 101, the 1977 Charter of the French Language, equally contested, ensured that immigrants to Quebec became successfully integrated linguistically. Progressives should resist the facile reflex to label it “Islamophobic,” even though extreme distaste for face cover in Quebec — and the forthrightness to say so, unlike in the rest of Canada, where it is viewed with almost as much distaste — was the spark 11 years ago that got this whole ball rolling.Bill 9 was also passed in the wee hours of Sunday morning. This law reforms Quebec’s immigration system over which, uniquely amongst the provinces, the province has near-autonomous control. New selection criteria will more efficiently match immigrants with employment needs, as opposed to the first-come system of the past.Controversially, the law will condition permanent-residency eligibility on immigrants passing a language and “values test.” The change will pre-emptively cancel out 18,000 immigration applications, jeopardizing the fate of about 50,000 immigrants already in the processing queue, and they will have to start over under the new rubrics. That last part seems pretty indefensible ethically. But in principle, the idea of prioritizing immigrants who offer immediate economic and cultural value to Quebec makes sense and accords with the wishes of most Quebec voters.By coincidence, a new Leger poll that asks Canadians what the first priorities of the federal government should be, finds that 63 per cent of respondents want the government to limit the

number of immigrants we welcome each year, “as we may be reaching our limit to integrate them in our communities,” while 37 per cent of respondents think the federal government should prioritize increasing the numbers “to ensure that we can meet the demands of our growing economy.” (Notably, the poll did not provide a third choice of keeping immigration levels the same, so add that caveat to your mental hopper.)Uncertainties over Canada’s evolving national identity won’t be stifled by mockery and derision. Federal Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen does his party and the nation no service by associating a wish for a more manageable immigration flow with “misinformation and conspiracy theories.”The sudden, startling success in the last EU election of Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party, but also the slow, steady gains by populist parties like Switzerland’s People’s Party, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France, Matteo Salvini’s The League in Italy and Alternative for Germany, are linked to rising concerns over immigration and its impact on national identity. Brexit Remainers were all about the economic reasons for staying in the EU. Leavers wanted to open up a conversation about the cultural changes wrought by mass immigration. Liberal pundits insisted that Leavers were all old white men nostalgic for cultural homogeneity, but in fact, Brexit was endorsed by 50 per cent of women, 50 per cent of 35-44 year olds and one in three black and ethnic minority voters.https://nationalpost.com/opinion/barbara-kay-why-quebecs-immigration-and-secularism-bills-get-it-right

After Tuesday night’s Virginia primary elections, human rights activist Qasim Rashid will face off with Republican Richard Stuart in a district that’s been held by Republicans since 1978. Qasim Rashid And with partisan control of Virginia’s state senate narrowly in favor of Republicans — who have 21 senators while Democrats have 19 — Rashid could potentially flip control of the Virginia state senate if he wins the general election this coming November.Should he prevail in November, Qasim Rashid told Grit Post he plans to address “skyrocketing healthcare costs” and “a very underfunded education system,” as well as the legislature’s failure to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment.RICHMOND, Va. — Ghazala Hashmi has won the Democratic primary in State Senate District 10. State Senate District 10 includes portions of Chesterfield County and the City of Richmond plus all of Powhatan County.Hashmi will challenge incumbent Republican Senator Glen Sturtevant, a lawyer and former member of the Richmond School Board who was elected to the Virginia Senate in 2016. Ghazala Hashmi wins democratic primary in Virginia senate district 10 “For me, this race is about taking my advocacy and turning it into policy,” Rashid told Grit Post. “Given that I’ve dedicated my life as a human rights lawyer to these really important issues

of women’s rights, increasing education access, increasing healthcare access, and criminal justice reform, these are critical policies that we need to improve upon.”Rashid’s primary victory on Tuesday night was a

milestone for Virginia, as both Rashid and Ghazala Hashmi in Virginia’s 10th Senate District are the first Muslims in the history of the commonwealth to win primary elections for the Virginia state senate. It was also a personal milestone for Rashid — as he tweeted earlier in the day, neither Rashid nor his family were able to vote in their birth country of Pakistan.Virginia’s legislature has become so comfortable with corporate-friendly backdoor dealmaking

that governance in Richmond has been dubbed the “Virginia Way.” A more recent example of the Virginia Way in action was the House of Delegates (Virginia’s lower chamber) awarding $750 million in tax breaks to Amazon for its new headquarters after a mere nine minutes of debate.Rashid railed against the deal, pointing out that Amazon paid $0 in federal taxes on more than $11 billion in profit last year. He also proudly mentioned that his campaign has flatly refused donations from corporations, lobbyists, and real estate developers, “to stay accountable to people, because that’s who we’re elected to serve.”As of the most recent reporting cycle, Rashid’s state senate campaign has raised approximately

USA: Qasim Rashid & Ghazala Hashmi win Virginia senate primaries

By: Carl Gibson

Qasim rashid

www.lahoreinternational.com28Monthly LAHORE International


$130,000, with 98% of those donations coming from donors giving $100 or less.Rashid promised to not only upend the Virginia Way, but to combat wealth inequality, calling it “one of the single greatest cancers afflicting America right now.” To underscore his point, Rashid pointed to the Gini coefficient, which the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) uses to measure income inequality throughout the world. The United States’ Gini coefficient ranks between Lithuania and Turkey, and three billionaires — Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, and Berkshire Hathaway founder Warren Buffett — own more wealth than the poorest 150 million Americans combined.“There’s a widening gap between the haves and the have-nots,” Rashid told Grit Post. “The level of wealth inequality now is worse than before the Great Depression in 1929, so 90 years later we’ve unfortunately not learned from the mistakes of the past.”“Every aspect of society, whether it’s education, healthcare, whether it’s criminal justice reform, it’s all intrinsically tied to wealth inequality,” he continued, adding that he would vote to make “millionaires, billionaires, and mega-corporations pay a fair tax rate,” and that Virginia would “lower the tax burden on the lower and middle class.”Rashid will face an uphill battle in winning the upcoming general election for Virginia’s 28th senate district this November. While his opponent, Richard Stuart, has been the district’s state senator since 2007, his predecessor, Republican John Chichester, held the seat for nearly 30 years. District 28 also includes Westmoreland County, which is described by Ballotpedia as one of the 206 “pivot counties” that voted for Barack Obama in 2012 and Donald Trump in 2016.However, Rashid — a devout Ahmadi Muslim — isn’t worried about the Trump supporters in his district and told Grit Post some of his supporters include Republicans who have since distanced themselves from President Trump.https://gritpost.com/qasim-rashid-virginia-state-senate-primary/

RIYADH: Two Saudi Arabians have been awarded on their return to the Kingdom for reaching the summit of Mount Everest in May 2019. Saud Al-Eidi and Mona Shabab were welcomed on their return to Jeddah by Prince Bandar bin Khalid bin Fahd, chairman of the Saudi Federation for Climbing. Saudi ambassador to US Princess Reema bint Bandar was also present at the ceremony.Two Saudi Arabians - Shabab (center, left) and Al-Eidi (center, right) have been awarded on their return to the Kingdom for reaching the summit of Mount Everest last week. (SPA)It took the duo 60 days to complete the trek to the top of the world’s highest peak (8,850 meters). Prince Bandar paid tribute to their achievement and urged them to continue in their efforts to reach other world heights.Speaking to Arab News earlier this month from Everest Base Camp, Shabab said: “One of my goals is for us to gently shake the world, to change misperceptions, and maybe even shatter some stereotypes. Many raise an eyebrow when they hear a Saudi woman has achieved something. “Saudi women can, Saudi women will, reach whatever heights they set their mind and heart to,” she added.Shahab now wants to scale two of the world’s highest seven summits — Australia’s tallest mountain, Mount Kosciuszko, and Denali, the highest point in North America. They form part of the world’s “Seven Summits” and the Explorers Grand Slam title — which requires adventurers to reach the North Pole and the South Pole in addition to the seven peaks.Mona Shabab’s climbing journey so far. (Arab News)Once she achieves that she intends to make her way to the North and South Pole on skis and become the first Saudi to complete the Explorers Grand Slam challenge. In 2012, she scaled the summit of Africa’s tallest mountain Kilimanjaro and two years later reached the peak of Mont Blanc in France.Al-Eidi, on a different ascent, posted a picture to his Instagram profile once he reached the summit with a message thanking friends and family for their continued support after “six years of training and 60 days in the Himalayas.”http://www.arabnews.com/node/1503266/saudi-arabia

Saudi Arabians Mona Shabab and Saud Al-Eidi praised after reaching Everest summit

www.lahoreinternational.com30Monthly LAHORE International

Paterson’s new class of police officers is breaking historic ground as the first all-female class, including among them the first Palestinian-American woman and hijabi.

Mayor Andre Sayegh swore in the three officers, Yeniry Medina, Gabriela Toribio and Serein Tamimi, at a City Hall ceremony Tuesday in what he called a “proud moment for the city of Paterson.”“They’re trailblazers,” Sayegh said, as he introduced the new officers. “They’ve broken the glass ceiling. Now young Patersonians, young people in our schools and our streets, can look up and say, ‘I want to be just like them.’ “The women started in a class of six Paterson recruits, including four women and two men. After a rigorous six-month program of physical and academic training, the three were left standing. Tamimi, 22, who came to the U.S. when she was less than a year old, ran track in high school, majored in justice studies at Montclair State University and excelled at the academy. On Tuesday, she became the first city police officer to wear a hijab, or Islamic headscarf, in the city.She hopes to inspire other young Muslim women to follow their dreams, but also wants to set an example for other Americans who may not know much about Muslims.“I want to be there for the community and be able to relate to them in a sense, and let everybody know, if they need anything, they can ask questions,” said Tamimi, whose mother, sister and cousin cheered her on in the audience.“I want to show them that we’re not what the media portrays us to be,” she said. “We’re friendly people, we love what we do and we are there for the community.”Toribio and Medina are Dominican-American and have lived their whole lives in Paterson. They join a police force of just over 400 people, including 57 women.Toribio, 22, said she was inspired to become a police officer because of an encounter with a kind cop who helped her when she was a kid and because of the example set by police officers in her family.https://www.northjersey.com/story/news/2019/06/11/paterson-police-welcome-first-all-female-class-first-hijabi-officer/1410115001/

USA: Paterson NJ police welcome first hijabi officer

Yeniry Medina, Serein Tamimi and Gabriela Toribio (left to right) were sworn in as Paterson police officers in the city’s first

all-female class on June 11, 2019. (Photo: Hannan Adely)

Yeniry Medina, Serein Tamimi and Gabriela Toribio (left to right) were sworn in as Paterson police officers in the city’s first

all-female class on June 11, 2019. (Photo: Hannan Adely)

More than 30 years before his funeral procession crept along West Broadway toward Cave Hill Cemetery, Muhammad

Ali stood where a McDonald’s stands now, autographing copies of the Quran, making indelible memories.“He made sure he made contact with every kid in that crowd,” Robert Holmes III remembered Saturday. “I was one of those kids. It made a lasting impression on my life.”Raised Baptist, Holmes never dared to read Islam’s most sacred text, and he lost track of the copy Ali gave him long ago. Yet for the 31 months since Ali’s death, Holmes has been one of the champ’s most devoted champions.He started the petition drive that produced 14,000 signatures in favor of renaming Louisville’s airport after Ali, and he led a sometimes lonely fight with the mayor’s office and at airport authority meetings. He was growing resigned to defeat before his cause came off the mat Wednesday to score a decisive victory.Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport might be a mouthful, but it is an enormous improvement on the former Standiford Field, named for a U.S. senator who died 16 years before the Wright Brothers went airborne. The new name links the city’s most prominent transportation hub with its most famous

citizen, a man whose gravesite was adorned with a dozen roses Saturday morning — 11 red, one white. And while we’re on the subject, how about rebranding the airport’s A & B concourses, “Butterfly” and “Bee?”As Abe Lincoln once observed at a dedication ceremony, it is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. Though Ali remains a polarizing figure, still anathema to some because of his conscientious objection to the Vietnam war, his resistance to the draft was ostensibly based on principle rather than dubious bone spurs.That there are people who will condemn the former and condone the latter says something disturbing about racial politics and partisan hypocrisy in this country.“You can imagine the hatred and the vitriol that I received over time,” said Holmes, a 47-year-old educator at Noe Middle School. “My faith waned. I said it’s probably not going to happen during my lifetime. For me on a personal level, it showed that if I’m obedient to God, God can move mountains. He can do the heavy lifting.”Holmes suspects the lifting became lighter after Greg Fischer won a third term as Louisville’s mayor, knowing he could not run for a fourth until after he had been out of office for four years.

USA: Louisville KY airport named after Muhammad Ali, the Greatest


Monthly LAHORE International

“The mayor was gearing up for a campaign,” Holmes said. “To touch on the Ali renaming would have been an extra bag for him to carry. Even in 2019, the idea of renaming the airport is not well-received by all Louisvillians.”“Mayor (Fischer) had been looking for an appropriate way to honor Ali since his death,” said Fischer’s spokeswoman, Jean Porter. “... (The) mayor is pleased that Mr. Holmes and so many others agree it’s a great way to go.”If Fischer’s lame-duck agenda is more ambitious than were his previous platforms, it’s fair to say his enthusiasm for Ali has been consistent and unequivocal. Moreover, the airport authority’s working group has been considering renaming the facility after Ali since at least November 2017.These things don’t always happen quickly. Though airports in New York and California were rechristened within months of the deaths of John F. Kennedy and John Wayne, Chicago’s Orchard Depot Airport was not renamed after Butch O’Hare until six years after the Medal of Honor recipient was shot down in the Pacific theater. Louis Armstrong had been dead for 30 years before New Orleans changed its airport’s name to honor the great jazz trumpeter.Ali’s aversion to air travel was so great that he had to be persuaded to participate in the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome. Later, he reportedly traveled with his own personal parachute, betraying a level of fear in stark contrast to his trademark bravado.Though it is probably apocryphal, the story is told that Ali once boarded a plane without fastening his seat belt. Reminded to buckle up by the flight attendant, Ali responded, “Superman don’t need no seat belt.”“Superman,” the flight attendant replied, “don’t need no airplane.” h t t p s : / / w w w. c o u r i e r - j o u r n a l . c o m / s t o r y /sports/2019/01/19/louisville-muhammad-ali-international-airport-properly-named-citys-most-famous/2624124002/

32 www.lahoreinternational.com

There are 7.8Billion people on planet. (earth).The report showsWomen = 5.6Billion- Men = 2.2BillionSo, they advised women to be careful in showing attitudes to any man because out of the 2.2 Billion men:• One billion are married already.• 130 million are in prison.• 70 million are mentally ill.That means that we have just about 1 billion men available for marriage and out of the 1billion:• 50% are jobless• 3% are gay• 5% are Catholic Priests• 10% are your relatives• 35% are above 66yearsFor details visit UN demography report.https://www.independent.ng/breaking-un-publish-es-1st-quarter-demography-report-2019/

UN Demographic

report


About 100 miles outside Las Vegas, deep in a remote patch of desert, is a $19 billion hole in the ground. That’s how much it has cost to fight over and build a five-mile test tunnel under Yucca Mountain. Now largely aban-doned for almost a decade, it was designed to be the an-swer to America’s nuclear waste problem – a problem still piling up at faraway places, like San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant, midway between Los Angeles and San Die-go, where engineers produced power for half a century.San Onofre shut down in 2012. About 50 years’ worth of spent radioactive spent nuclear fuel – 536 tons of it – is temporarily buried beneath a massive concrete slab.Ron Pontes, who helps manage the decommissioning of San Onofre, said, “The fact that Yucca Mountain had failed to materialize as the nation’s repository for spent nuclear fuel has stranded fuel, not only at this site but at sites across the nation.” Congress designated Yucca Mountain as the location for a national permanent nu-clear waste repository back in 1987. A test tunnel was dug but never licensed.Wyoming Senator John Barrasso is now pushing legisla-tion that would restart the licensing of Yucca Mountain, a process the Obama administration put on hold almost a decade ago after opposition from a bipartisan group of Nevada politicians.“It is an isolated location which has the right geology which can make the difference for safe use of nuclear power and storage of nuclear waste for generations and generations to come,” said Sen. Barrasso. Senator Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada has been fighting Yucca Mountain for more than 20 years. “Part of the infrastructure that is necessary is to build all of the rail lines that need to come across Nevada, across this country, to bring it there,” said Sen. Cortez Masto. “And a lot of those rail lines and the shipments would come right through the heart of Las Vegas.”She said it would create a bottleneck for shipments of radioactive waste if Yucca Mountain goes online. “Two shipments a day for 50 years – what? I mean, it’s crazy,”

Coretz Masto said.Correspondent Jonathan Vigliotti received a rare tour of the tunnel at Yucca Mountain. He asked William Boyle, from the Department of Energy, how good a site it rep-resents for storing the country’s nuclear waste, which will remain toxic for thousands of years.“Well, the department felt it was good enough that we submitted the license application in 2008,” Boyle replied. “Do you agree with that submission?” Vigliotti asked. “It wouldn’t have been submitted if I didn’t agree,” he said.But Sen. Cortez Masto disagrees. She says some scien-tists worry that water in the ground will mix with nucle-ar waste and enter the drinking supply of small, nearby farming communities. Boyle feels that risk is safely man-ageable.The senator says the fight is over political science: “When they passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act we didn’t have any seniority at the time, in the state of Nevada, to be able to change that. And so literally, it got crammed down Nevada’s throat.”Vigliotti asked, “At what point does time just run out in the debate and it becomes just such an issue that, [with] all of this waste collecting, we just say we have to put this somewhere?”“It’s my impression that if we were to ask the people that live near San Onofre, live near San Diego, that they reached that point a while ago,” Boyle replied.Temporarily storing nuclear waste at places like San On-ofre is costing hundreds of millions of dollars – money subsidized by utility customers, taxpayers, and the very same federal government that can’t agree on what to do with it.Ron Pontes said, “We collected money from our cus-tomers that went to the federal government, and they haven’t used that money to build anything. We would like to see the government do their job and come get the fuel like they promised.” ttps://www.cbsnews.com/news/yucca-mountain-nucle-ar-waste-storage-controversy/?ftag=CNM-00-10aac3a

About 50 years’ worth of spent nuclear fuel is temporarily housed at the decommissioned San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant in Cali-fornia.

USA: A rare tour of the tunnel that is ground zero for a nuclear waste controversy


Documents

JULY 2019I Concur With Quaid-e-azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah That Ahmadis Are Muslims German Court Orders Fines For ‘sharia Police’ Group Worst Exploitation Of Islam In Pakistan UK: