Dark side of the Colosseum

People go to Rome to see the Colosseum - very touristy -, but it has nothing but a dark side in its basement - prisoners and women from the streets.

 - From the Old Colosseum, 1888. painting by Danish artist Valdemar Irminger

 

An important peace of Karachi's history

 

He who stands up for an ignorant people...

It is often said that when Che Guevara was finally captured in his Bolivian hideout—betrayed by a shepherd who revealed his position—one of the astonished soldiers asked the shepherd:

 “How could you betray a man who spent his life defending people like you and fighting for your rights?”

The shepherd, unmoved, calmly replied:

 “His battles frightened my sheep.”

This story reflects a tragic reality in history: many who sacrifice for the oppressed are ultimately abandoned by those they defend.

A similar episode took place centuries earlier in Egypt, during the French invasion led by Napoleon Bonaparte. The Egyptian commander Mohamed Karim (1751–1799), who valiantly resisted the French in Alexandria, was captured after a long struggle.

The French court sentenced him to death, but Napoleon intervened, saying:

 “I regret executing a man who defended his homeland with such courage. I do not wish history to remember me as a killer of heroes. I will pardon you—if you can pay 10,000 gold coins as compensation for my army’s losses.”

Karim laughed and replied:

 “I have no such wealth, but the merchants of Alexandria owe me more than 100,000 gold coins.”

Napoleon granted him time to collect the sum. Karim, still in chains and surrounded by soldiers, was taken to the marketplace. There, he pleaded with the wealthy traders—men for whom he had sacrificed everything—to contribute to his ransom.

Not one merchant stepped forward. Instead, they coldly accused him of being responsible for the city’s devastation and their financial troubles.

Heartbroken, Karim was led back to Napoleon. The French commander then declared:

 “I will not kill you because you fought against me, but because you sacrificed yourself for a cowardly people who love trade more than freedom.”

Years later, the reformist scholar Mohamed Rashid Rida (1865–1935) reflected on such tragedies, writing:

 “He who stands up for an ignorant people is like one who sets his own body on fire to light the way for the blind.”

Dina Wadia to her father Jinnah

 

یہ گزرے ہوئے لوگ، گزر کیوں نہیں جاتے

 تاریخ کی قبروں میں اُتر کیوں نہیں جاتے

یہ گزرے ہوئے لوگ، گزر کیوں نہیں جاتے

جون ایلیا | کتاب : کیوں

Islam's Greatest Stories of Love

 I assure you, you will love this episode on PBS

https://www.pbs.org/show/islams-greatest-stories-of-love/

On the right side of the history

اگر آپ حق کے ساتھ نہیں کھڑے تو پھر تاریخ کو اس سے کوئی غرض نہیں کہ آپ مسجد کے حجرے میں تھے یا طوائف کے کوٹھے پر ۔

‏۔ڈاکٹر علی شریعتی‏ 

How life balance itself!

 

Israeli Historian Tom Segev on Zionism

This is a remarkable piece of writing from a credible historian, in the last leg of his life. 

"We need to remember that the majority of the Holocaust survivors did not come to live in Israel and that the majority of Jews in the world are not coming to Israel. Zionism is not such a great success story. It also doesn't provide security to Jews. It's safer for Jews to live outside Israel."

Full article here: https://archive.md/NOrTF

On Human History

 

The Second Vulture

In the 1990s, a photo of a vulture waiting for a starving little girl to die so it could feed on her body was widely circulated.

This photo was taken during the 1993/94 famine in Sudan, by Kevin Carter, a South African photojournalist, who later won the Pulitzer Prize for this “incredible photo.”

However, while Kevin Carter was enjoying his achievement and being celebrated on major news channels and networks around the world for his “exceptional photographic talent,” he only lived a few months to enjoy his supposed success and fame, as he later suffered a breakdown and committed suicide!

Kevin Carter’s depression began when, during one of these interviews (a phone-in show), someone called and asked him what had happened to the little girl. He simply replied, "I didn't wait to find out after that flash, because I had a flight to catch..."Then the caller said, "I just wanted to make you understand that there were two vultures that day, and one had a camera."

So, Kevin Carter's constant thinking about this statement later led him to depression and he eventually committed suicide. He could have still been alive today and even much more famous, if he had just picked up that little girl after her photo and taken her to the UN Feeding Center, which she was probably trying to reach, or at least taken her to a safe place.

Today, unfortunately, this is what is happening all over the world. The world celebrates stupidity and inhumane acts, at the expense of acts of heart and bravery.

Kevin Carter should have taken the little girl away from that place, which would have cost him nothing, but he didn't.

This is the inhumane posture: "he had plenty of time to take his flash, but he didn't have time to save a little girl's life."

So, we all need to understand that the purpose of life is also to touch lives.

Are you also a vulture?

In everything we do, let us put humanity first, before what we can gain from the situation. In everything we do, always think of others and how we can be useful to humanity, how we can help them.

On "Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel"

 Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel has been a riveting yet hefty read.

 It may not be the best text on West vs. the Rest, but at least I did not see racist undertones while trying to understand his problematization of the oversimplified history.

He claims that he was looking for the answers to why history evolved differently on different continents over the last 13 thousand years. He apparently shunned the common racist response of some people/races to be superior to others. His thesis was that the answer had little to do with people and everything to do with their surroundings.

He/his argument/books did become quite controversial. He has been accused of having masked his biological determinism or historical racism in the garb of natural disposition and distribution of resources. However, biology has been used to explain a lot of other world dynamics: gender relations, patriarchy/matriarchy, sexuality, success, wealth, and cognition.

The "Jared Diamond is a racist" argument suggests that environmental, ecological, and geographical factors led to the West's colonization of the rest, ignoring the determinants of this. Diamond's argument is seen as racist, as it overlooks the terrible actions of Europeans and their unfavorable ideologies.

European descendants can find comfort in the thought that those before them weren't so bad after all while the Whites may find comfort in the thought of no longer having to deal with the horrors of invasion, slavery, and genocide.

But JD (though sometimes extends it too far) does not say any of that. He says that the different historical paths of different countries are not due to racial superiority but to environmental factors. He thinks geographical traits and the availability of plants and animals that can be tamed are two of the most important factors that determine how societies grow. He challenges the idea that racial differences alone are to blame for past events and stresses how important it is to understand these factors to fix world problems of inequality.

Dr Mubarak Ali on India's Muslim History

Dr. Mubark Ali is one of the most distinguished teachers of history in Pakistan, who knows how to read and teach lessons from history from an unbiased view.

‏ہندوستان میں مسلمانوں کی تاریخ دراصل حکمران شاہی خاندانوں کی تاریخ ہے

‏اگر تاریخ خاندانوں کے نام سے موسوم رہتی تو بادشاہ فاتح منتظم اور بڑے بڑے منصب دارو جاگیر دار تاریخ کا کردار ہوتے اور اس حیثیت سے ان پر تنقید کی جا سکتی تھی

‏اور تجزیے کے بعد تاریخی حقائق کو بیان کیا جا سکتا تھا

‏اس صورت میں محمدبن قاسم، محمود غزنوی اور معزالدین غوری تاریخ کی تنقید کی زد میں آ سکتے تھے

‏مگر ایک مرتبہ جب انہیں تاریخ سے نکال کر مذہب کے دائرے میں لے جایا گیا تو پھر ان پر تنقید کرنا ممکن نہیں رہا

‏کیونکہ اب عقیدت نے ان کے گرد تقدس کا ہالہ بنا دیا اور اسلامی تاریخ عقیدت کا شکار ہو کر اپنا تاریخی کردار کھو بیٹھی-

‏برصغیر میں مسلمان معاشرہ کا المیہ

‏ڈاکٹر مبارک علی

Worst year to be alive

 

No Gare Hira? - What!

 This video came as a shock to me

Khojak Tunnel

 

History

 

A lesson in Justice

 A 16th-century painting showing the skinning alive of a corrupt judge, Sisamnes, in the year 500 BC. Sisamnes was a corrupt royal judge at the time of Cambyses ll in Persia. It was discovered that he had taken a bribe in court and passed an unfair judgment. As a consequence, the king ordered that he be arrested for his corruption and ordered that he be skinned alive. Before passing judgment, the king asked Sisamnes who he wished to nominate as his successor. Sisamnes, in his greed, chose his son, Otanes. The king agreed and appointed Otanes to replace his father. He subsequently passed judgment and ordered that Sisamnes removed skin should be used to upholster the seat on which the new judge would sit in court to remind him of the potential consequences of corruption. Otanes, in his deliberations, was forced to always remember that he was always sitting on the skin of his executed father. This helped to ensure fairness and equity in all his hearings, deliberations, and sentences.

How Islam first came to India

 

Raavi