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India-Pakistan
Reshaping Pakistan Along Religious Lines
2003-06-20
EFL
LAHORE -- At Punjab University last month, professors of English literature were flabbergasted when they learned that a top administrator had ordered their curriculum reviewed for un-Islamic texts. Among the books deemed offensive to public morals: "Gulliver's Travels" and "Tess of the unbelievers d'Urbervilles." "It was so absurd," one of the professors recalled. "We didn't know whether to laugh or cry."
or to run and hide
I usually tend more toward uncontrolled weeping when the subject is Pakland, but sometimes it's a close run thing...
Clerics have mounted a partially successful campaign to curb the spread of pedestrian-friendly "food streets" in Lahore's historic walled city. Such amenities, the clerics say, promote mixing of the sexes and prostitution.
Dens of iniquity! Here in the West, food courts promote, ummm...food.
I'd hate to think what women in the Muslim world were like before the advent of Islam. They must have been jumping everything in sight. Their men sure expect them to nowadays.
"I have questioned them: Is there room for entertainment in your religion?" said Kamran Lashari, the U.S.-educated head of the Punjab Parks and Horticulture Authority, which has promoted the food-street plan. "I think they're basically joy killers. I don't see any event which has brought public joy and happiness being accepted by these elements."
That sneaking suspicion that someone, somewhere, is having a good time. And libs mock the Puritans? Cheeze. These beauzeaux make Cotton Mather look frivolous.
... a small but influential Westernized elite, whose generally secular outlook is evident in the city's many art galleries and a performance of "The Vagina Monologues" scheduled for later this month.
hmm, my sympathy meter is acting funny..... Mahmoud, remember to get your pills refilled.
"You can go to parties here and you can imagine you were in New York
but you can smoke
or anywhere in the world," said Shehla Saigol, the city's leading art patron — Lahore's "Peggy Guggenheim," in the words of one associate — and the wife of a wealthy industrialist. Sitting in her billiards room one recent night, Saigol, 49, said she sometimes frets that her grown children "seem to know Monte Carlo and Cannes and Sardinia more than they know Pakistan."
Probably because they're more fun. And nobody beats them up...
At Punjab University last month, militant students used wooden clubs to beat a male and female student — both from Iran — after the two were discovered sitting together on a campus veranda, according to three professors. Masud Haq, a retired military officer and the university's registrar, said in an interview that he has taken a number of steps to curb fundamentalism on campus and that one of the students who carried out last month's attack has been expelled.
and the others were placed on the Muslim honor role!
"I have firm control of the university," he said. "I don't allow any student or any extremist to raise his head."
A lesson from the trenches that Haq is elevating to the ivory tower.
And then there was the flap over English literature, which began when Haq ordered a member of the department, Shahbaz Arif, to scrutinize the curriculum for offensive material. Arif compiled a long list of examples, including Jonathan Swift's description of "a monstrous breast" in "Gulliver's Travels"
"Monstrous breast, is there any other kind?"
and the title of Alexander Pope's "The Rape of the Lock,"
"Gasp, hair!.... get the pills, woman!"
according to a copy of the memo he supplied to colleagues in the English department. Ernest Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises," was deemed especially offensive: "All characters sexually astray: men homosexuals; females lesbians/promiscuous," he wrote.
Fatima, it's the big one!
Islam apparently imparts the inability to realize that the rest of the world is laughing at you and making twirly motions around their ears with one finger...
Posted by:Dick Saucer

#3  "The Vagina Monologues" in Lahore? Oh, I'll have to stay tuned on that one...
The "small but influential Westernized elite" might be getting a lot smaller and a lot less influential after the local loons check that out.
Posted by: tu3031   2003-06-21 00:21:11  

#2  
Fred,
Thanks for cleaning up the formatting. I owe you a piece of pie.
Posted by: Dick Saucer   2003-06-20 18:13:30  

#1  i wonder if the new Harry Potter book is being released in Pakland?
Posted by: liberalhawk   2003-06-20 15:57:45  

00:00