Shia Islam
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India and Pakistan Are Playing Chicken; simply to hurt themselves
Two nuclear states with shared languages, shared music, and shared families are accelerating away from each other, each waiting for the other to swerve. Neither is. Both are losing. A…
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Iran and Pakistan Are Not the Same Kind of State
X.T.M argues that Iran cannot be analysed like Pakistan because it is a civilisation-state some three thousand years old. He says authority there rests on inherited ideas, from monarchy to…
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How will the Iranian Regime Survive? By Becoming Persian & Crowning a Pahlavi Queen
X.T.M argues that the Iranian regime can survive only by de-ideologising: Islam should become a civilisational substrate with Persian features. He cites the English Restoration as a model, and says…
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The Myth of the “Average Pakistani”
X.T.M rebuts a commenter’s praise of a ‘liberal’ Shia couple from Baltistan as unlike the ‘average Pakistani’, calling the framing patronising and a colonial hangover, and arguing that Pakistanis prize…
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Why Iran Is Not Iraq
The author argues that Iran is not Iraq: a unified, largely Shia ‘fortress civilisation’ whose legitimacy lets it adapt under attack. He holds that foreign regime change or a Pahlavi…
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A Shocking Decision
Ali Minai recounts how, around 816 CE, the Abbasid caliph al-Mamun offered succession to the eighth Shia Imam, Ali al-Rida, who accepted only under pressure and died within about a…
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Blasphemy and blasphemy laws in Pakistan
Reposting a 2015 piece revised in 2021, the author argues that blasphemy cases in Pakistan have reached a new level, with police now killing accused men in custody, and questions…
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The Shias of Kashmir
Hamid Hussain traces how Shia migrants and missionaries from Iran and Iraq came to Kashmir in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and sets out where Shia communities live today, as…
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Hindu genocide ongoing in Pakistan
Sharing a news report on three Hindu men killed in an Orakzai suicide bombing, the author describes it as ongoing genocide of Hindus in Pakistan, and argues that India must…
