Jan Achakzai

By Helmand Khan As to what should be the language of Pakistan, is still a dilemma facing the country even after over five decades of its inception. Pakistan is a home to over dozens of languages. While officially the urdu is still the mainstream language promoted by the state, it is the language of minority dwelling in Karachi and parts of Sindh who migrated to Pakistan over five decades ago. For the rest of the population in Pakistan, it is still a foreign language: it is not the mother tongue of millions of Punjabis, Pashtoons, Sndhis and Balochs who have to speak, read and write urdu once they go to public sector institutions. However, the elite of the country and the well off sections prefer to speak, read, write and get educated in english. So why is this contradiction and confusion even today? The language debate in Pakistan is often being conducted on the premise set by the right-wing-tabloid and semi-tabloid press in the country. The premise is: firstly, (that) urdu is a nation...

Courtesy: The Economist print edition Apr 12th 2006 Sending a message to the faithful back home “I BELIEVE there is no European Islam,” said Mustafa Ceric, a Bosnian imam, at a meeting of Islamic clerics and advisers in Vienna. Yet two months ago, his supreme Islamic department of Bosnia said that “Muslims who live in Europe have the right—no, the duty—to develop their own European culture of Islam.” Such contradictions are part of a broad debate over the role and character of Islam in Europe, which could have profound implications, and not only because Muslims are the continent's largest minority. It might affect the wider Islamic world if it shows that Muslims can adapt to modern, secular democracies. Traditional teaching frowns on the idea of distinctive forms of Islam, holding that there is a single community of believers, the umma. Differences clearly exist between Sunni and Shia, or between Saudis and Malays, but Muslims are reluctant to proclaim fresh ones. As a declaration ...

By Helmand Khan There is an interesting saying in Pashto that "women has no home in pashtoon society". It means while being young , she lives at parent's home. Once get married, she starts residing in husband's home when her husband dies she stays at her son's home. Nearly Half of the Pashtoon population comprise women. They continue to live their lives according to the dictation of a male elder as such father, husband or son. They have been given a second class status. All rules have been laid for her and she has to follow till her death. In tribal society she is excluded form all walks of life. Her main role is confided to home. It involves bearing children and performing unpaid domestic duties .Under the name of "Ghayrat" male dominated society considers women as an object and treats them as if they are material possession. Hundreds of pashtoon women are killed every year under the name of "honor killing". They feel harassment from parent, a...

The language business in China English beginning to be spoken here Apr 12th 2006 SHENZHEN From The Economist print edition The market for English-language education in China is huge. The profits are not OnAsia “MY MOTHER used to be an engineer, but now she's a housewife. I don't like her job. I want to be a designer. I like to think up new ideas.” Not the words of a young British or American child, but a nine-year-old Chinese girl in Shenzhen city, southern China. And Shun Yushun is no prodigy. She is typical of her English First school, one of 68 on the mainland started by a Swedish-owned language-teaching chain. Yushun belongs to a new generation in a country where older folks, deprived of education during the Cultural Revolution, speak almost no English at all. Even young adults struggle, having passed through an archaic school system that still insists on the brute memorisation of words and grammar. Zhang Jin, a 24-year-old from remote Guizhou province, studied English fr...

The importance of sex Apr 12th 2006 From The Economist print edition Forget China, India and the internet: economic growth is driven by women EVEN today in the modern, developed world, surveys show that parents still prefer to have a boy rather than a girl. One longstanding reason why boys have been seen as a greater blessing has been that they are expected to become better economic providers for their parents' old age. Yet it is time for parents to think again. Girls may now be a better investment. Girls get better grades at school than boys, and in most developed countries more women than men go to university. Women will thus be better equipped for the new jobs of the 21st century, in which brains count a lot more than brawn. In Britain far more women than men are now training to become doctors. And women are more likely to provide sound advice on investing their parents' nest egg: surveys show that women consistently achieve higher financial returns than men do. Furthermore,...

By Helmand Khan This is related to the present situation in the South Western Province-Baluchistan- of Pakistan. At the moment, there is a low- level insurgency going on and Baluch militants are involved in armed struggle with Pakistani security forces. Their struggle is portrayed as if they are fighting for securing the rights of the people usurped by the federal government. Baluchistan is my province of origin. I suspect that in practice these militants want to have resources from the federal government, only to be utilized by the sardars and nawabs of Baluchistan. Most of sardars (chieftains) and nawabs(chieftains) stand for tribalism.They thrive on tribalism. They have a direct incentive to keep the people and their tribesmen uneducated so that their sons and grandsons continue to be sardars and nawabs. They are not democratic in character. They have never allowed democracy even among their tribesmen. By very nature, tribalism is anti democratic, against women's emancipation an...

Today's wars are less about ideas than extreme tribalism The West must oppose the reduction of Islam to raw tribalist tenets. By David Ronfeldt WASHINGTON – Western strategists and policymakers should stop talking about a clash of civilizations and focus on the real problem: extreme tribalism. Recent events - riots in many nations protesting cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, Sunni-Shiite warring in Iraq, the Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan - confirm that the West is not in a clash with Islam. Instead, Islam, which is a civilizing force, has fallen under the sway of Islamists who are a tribalizing force. Unfortunately, the tribalism theme has difficulty gaining traction. After the end of the cold war, many American strategists preferred the optimistic "end of history" idea that democracy would triumph around the world, advanced by Francis Fukuyama in 1989. A contrary notion - reversion to tribalism - made better sense to other strategists, such as France's Jacques At...