AbdulMajeed Abid

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Book Review: Ye Khamoshi Kahan Tak (Silent no more?) by Lt Gen (Rtd) Shahid Aziz

Reviewing Lt Gen Shahid Aziz’s memoir Ye Khamoshi Kahan Tak, the reviewer uses generals’ books to ask which traits the Pakistani army rewards, and presents the author as a self-described…

AbdulMajeed Abid12 June 201837 comments
What would ‘secularism’ mean in Pakistan?

The author argues that secularism is not atheism, recalls Jinnah’s 11 August speech, traces Pakistan’s drift from it through the Objectives Resolution and Zia, and concludes Pakistan deserves a secular…

AbdulMajeed Abid4 April 201835 comments
Aasia Bibi case comes full circle(part 1)

In part one of a personal account, the author explains how Salmaan Taseer’s assassination over the Aasia Bibi case shook the worldview he inherited from a conservative Salafi upbringing in…

AbdulMajeed Abid21 November 201833 comments
A Tale of Two countries

A review essay on books by Husain Haqqani and Myra Macdonald argues that Pakistan’s Islamic identity, defined against secular India, has shaped its foreign policy, and that India is now…

AbdulMajeed Abid6 April 201827 comments
Aasia Bibi case comes full circle (part 3)

In part three of a series on the Aasia Bibi case, the author uses Shahab Ahmed’s What Is Islam? to separate literal Islam from its human, historical practice, and asks…

AbdulMajeed Abid13 December 201822 comments
Looking back at COVID-19

A pathology trainee in Texas, writing on policy rather than clinical medicine, looks back at the Covid-19 response, drawing on two New Yorker pieces and recalling early complacency about outbreaks…

AbdulMajeed Abid18 February 202116 comments
Film Review: What Will People Say?

A review, with spoilers, of What Will People Say?, in which a Pakistani teenage girl in Norway is taken to Pakistan by her father after being caught with a boy.…

AbdulMajeed Abid29 September 201916 comments
The Conundrum that is Husain Haqqani

A reader profile of Husain Haqqani, requested by AnAn, uses public information and two witnesses to argue he is hard to call an opportunist since many Pakistani politicians changed course,…

AbdulMajeed Abid18 April 201813 comments
Toxic textbooks and social engineering in Pakistan

A piece originally published at Naya Daur, citing K. K. Aziz’s The Murder of History, argues that Pakistani history and social-studies textbooks are an instrument of social engineering, and that…

AbdulMajeed Abid25 April 201812 comments
Modern Love

A reader’s short story, part memoir and part fiction, follows a Pakistani man living alone in an American city for the first time, written after a post on racism in…

AbdulMajeed Abid23 April 201811 comments
Maududi and Iqbal: A Brief History

Answering a tweet that Iqbal was indirectly a founder of Jamaat-e-Islami, the author calls the claim simplistic and traces the relationship between Iqbal and Maududi from Maududi’s 1927 articles on…

AbdulMajeed Abid16 November 201810 comments
Book Review: Flat Earth News by Nick Davies

The author reviews Nick Davies’s Flat Earth News, which he calls excellent, drawing on his own experience of Pakistani journalism. He uses the book’s account of how the millennium bug…

AbdulMajeed Abid30 December 20189 comments
Pakistan, communists and a stained dawn

The reposted piece uses the band Laal and Faiz’s poem ‘Umeed-e-Seher’, an anthem of Pakistan’s 2007 lawyers’ movement, to explore Marxists in Pakistan and argue that international media ignore stories…

AbdulMajeed Abid19 March 20187 comments
Aasia Bibi case comes full circle (part 2)

In part two of a personal account, the author describes visiting a peace and secular studies institute after a rally, meeting students attracted to Hizb ut-Tahrir who rejected democracy, and…

AbdulMajeed Abid22 November 20185 comments
Farewell, Houston

A doctor recalls arriving in Houston in 2017 to pursue medical training, the people and places that shaped his years in the city, the move to Galveston for residency, and…

AbdulMajeed Abid12 July 20224 comments
Rise of the millennial grifter: Book Review

Reviewing Reeves Wiedeman’s Billion Dollar Loser on WeWork and Adam Neumann, the author places it within a wave of millennial grifter stories, from Fyre Festival to Theranos, and examines how…

AbdulMajeed Abid28 December 20204 comments
A letter to Gandhi

A Pakistani writer addresses a letter to Gandhi, recalling how he learned of him through textbooks and the Two-Nation Theory as a rival to Jinnah, whom he idolised as a…

AbdulMajeed Abid5 October 20194 comments
Mass Psychology in the Age of Trump

Excerpts from a Democracy Journal essay asking why Trump provokes such alarm among liberals, answering that liberal ideology and the psychology of those drawn to it play a part, and…

AbdulMajeed Abid4 May 20184 comments
Ammar Rashid and the frailty of Pakistan’s state narrative

Defending Ammar Rashid, an Awami Workers Party officeholder, artist and teacher arrested while protesting the detention of PTM leader Manzoor Pashteen, the author argues his case exposes how fragile the…

AbdulMajeed Abid2 February 20203 comments
Book Review: The Battle for Pakistan by Shuja Nawaz

A review of Shuja Nawaz’s The Battle for Pakistan, praised for balanced treatment of civil-military imbalance and foreign policy since 9/11. The reviewer discloses a personal debt to Nawaz from…

AbdulMajeed Abid23 November 20193 comments
Interview with a Tiananmen Square survivor

An interview with a Chinese doctor who was at Tiananmen Square and escaped in the early 1990s, first published in the Daily Times, tracing his rebellious youth, family hardship after…

AbdulMajeed Abid6 June 20183 comments
Junaid Hafeez and Teaching in Pakistan

Recounting how Junaid Hafeez, a Multan lecturer arrested for blasphemy in 2013, was sentenced to death after his lawyer’s murder, the author reflects on what teaching and thinking freely in…

AbdulMajeed Abid2 February 20202 comments
The damage done to third world countries by Harvard and UChicago

Prompted by an Economist article on Bolsonaro’s Chicago-trained economist, the author argues that US-trained ‘luminaries’ harmed third-world countries including Pakistan, quoting at length on the Chicago Boys’ market reforms in…

AbdulMajeed Abid26 May 20192 comments
Father of the Bum

A critical account of how Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1972 asked scientists to build a bomb and how the engineer known as AK, a translator at a European enrichment consortium,…

AbdulMajeed Abid9 May 20182 comments
The role of Comedy in our age

An aspiring stand-up comic describes growing up in Pakistan with little stand-up culture, learning humour from Urdu television and Western shows, and the gap between written Urdu humour and performance.…

AbdulMajeed Abid14 December 20191 comment
Book Review: The Sensational Life & Death of Qandeel Baloch

The reviewer calls Sanam Meher’s book on the murdered social-media personality Qandeel Baloch a poignant portrait that also follows others, such as a digital rights activist and the investigating officer,…

AbdulMajeed Abid6 June 20181 comment
Echo Chambers and Epistemic Bubbles

A post recommending an Aeon essay by C. Thi Nguyen on the difference between epistemic bubbles, where voices are omitted, and echo chambers, where outside voices are actively distrusted, with…

AbdulMajeed Abid23 April 20181 comment
Objectives Resolution: Logical Culmination or Building Block?

Arguing that Pakistan culminated an ‘Indian Muslim National Project’ led by elites from UP, the author says the Ashraf elite chose Islam as the state ideology, and asks whether the…

AbdulMajeed Abid23 July 20171 comment
Clarifying Two Misconceptions

Though a critic of the Pakistan Army’s political interference, the author sets out to correct two common misconceptions, first examining whether General Zia played a role in Jordan’s Black September…

AbdulMajeed Abid29 June 20171 comment
Book Review: In their own words by C.Christine Fair

Reproduces passages from C. Christine Fair’s In Their Own Words, which argues that Lashkar-e-Taiba is a loyal and governable proxy of the Pakistani state and uniquely opposes violence inside Pakistan,…

AbdulMajeed Abid29 December 20180 comments
The Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case

A reposted Friday Times review of Hassan Zaheer’s book on the 1951 Rawalpindi Conspiracy, a military plot against Pakistan’s civilian government that grew out of discontent after the first Kashmir…

AbdulMajeed Abid9 April 20180 comments
Early Indian Islamists (An Overview)

An overview of early Indian Islamists argues that the Raja of Mahmudabad, a Muslim League leader and practising Shia, helped popularise Islamist ideas by presenting Pakistan as a project for…

AbdulMajeed Abid6 April 20180 comments