We demand names. I know four of them: Pinky, Babli, Twinkle and Dimple. But who were the others?

Baby, Billo and Lolo.

*All names have been changed to protect the not-even-remotely-innocent-anymore

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TCH,

That is me! Have you been spying on me? [TCH looks out to night time street. Shadowy figure steps back out of lamp light. A cigarette burns in the dark]

Wild guess (he says, hoping he sounds believable). By the way, you might want to delete your internet browsing history. *shakes head disapprovingly*

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Fug,

i am an advocate of sherwani based officewear.

Actually sherwanis do look extremely cool. Unfortunately, in this day & age and in this part of the world, and in the absence of any nearby royal courts affiliated to some princely state, if we did try to pull it off workwise we’d either look like a wedding party that accidentally took a wrong turning off the A406 and got lost, or as though we’re about to spontaneously burst into a Bollywood song & dance sequence.

That is me! Have you been spying on me? [TCH looks out to night time street. Shadowy figure steps back out of lamp light. A cigarette burns in the dark]

“Caught in bed with seven Bollywood starlets.”

We demand names. I know four of them: Pinky, Babli, Twinkle and Dimple. But who were the others?

I don’t mind a bit of humour, satire or quirkiness. My comment at 44 was in relation to the comment at 43.

Hahaha Jai. You are no slouch on the historical front yourself.

Me ?

The 23rd Maharajah of Chandigarh ?

Caught in bed with seven Bollywood starlets on the run from arranged marriages to some of Pickled Politics’ most notorious commenters, an empty tub of Ben & Jerry’s finest, a broken horsewhip, a semi-used feather duster, and a comedy “Anjem Choudary” mask ?

With my reputation ?

Gosh…..

Who is a British Muslim is an easy question: it is anyone who follows Islam and holds a U.K. passport. This is at once the easiest and probably the only workable definition. The more teasing question, which I wish to raise in this article is: what is a British Muslim? The query raises two problems related to belonging. What does it mean to be a British person who belongs to Islam? And, what does it mean to be a Muslim person who belongs to Britain? How do we map the overlap zone in a way that makes sense, and is legitimate, in terms of the co-ordinates of both of these terms?

Clearly, by virtue of the first definition, the British Muslim population, all 1.5 million of it, divides into three groups. Firstly, and least problematically, there are men and women whose cultural formation was not British, but who have migrated to this country. This essay will not touch centrally on their own particular struggle for self-definition, which is quite different to that addressed by converts.

Secondly, there are the children of the first group, and occasionally now their grandchildren. These people are usually seen to be torn between two worlds, but in reality, the British world has shaped their souls far more profoundly then they often recognise. Modern schooling is designed for a culture that puts an increasing share of acculturation and upbringing, as opposed to the simple inculcation of facts, on the shoulders of schoolteachers rather than of parents. Muslims who have moved to this country have done so at precisely the time when British education is also going into the business of parenting; most Muslim parents do not recognise the fact, but Muslim children in this country always have a third parent: the Education Secretary. Even those second-generation Muslims here who claim to have angrily rejected Britishness are in fact doing so in terms of types of radicalism which are deeply influenced by Western styles of dissent. Most noticeably, they locate their radicalism not primarily in a spiritual, but in social and political rejection of the oppressive order around them. Their unsettled and agitated mood is not always congenial to the recent convert, who may, despite the cultural distance, feel more comfortable with the first rather than the second generation of migrants, preferring their God-centred religion to what is often the troubled, identity-seeking Islam of the young.

From the transcript of a lecture delivered in 1997. But clearly still valid today.

Or if internal squabbling and betrayals hadn’t lead to the huge chunk of territory ruled by the Sikhs at the time of Maharajah Ranjit Singh’s death being annexed by the Brits.

Or if the Rajputs had just kept on fighting to the death during initial Mughal expansion, instead of (mostly) eventually joining the imperial administrative machinery.

Or if all the 600+ semi-autonomous princely states had joined forces to liberate the subcontinent as a whole from colonial rule (which ended up covering about 2/3 of the region).

Or if Prithviraj Chauhan had killed a certain invader from the northwest instead of freeing him upon the promise that he wouldn’t return, only for him to break the promise the following year and defeat the Rajput Confederacy.

Ah, speculation is a wonderful thing, ain’t it…..

While the Visigoths had been Arians, they had largely been wiped out by Justinian’s reconquest. Arianism had declined to the point of irrelevence by the time of the Arab conquests. The division by the 7th century was between the Chalcedonians of Constantinople, and the monophysites of North Africa, over the nature of Jesus- were Jesus’ two identities, that of God and the son of God, separate or not? A third group, the Nestorians, had mostly fled to Persia and settled there.

Hahaha Jai. You are no slouch on the historical front yourself.

‘White’ in the pejorative sense wouldn’t apply to him, like it does to your slavish mental tendancies.

the common humanist.
luck, weather and all sorts of things affect how stuff before us has unfolded.

imagine what could have happened had hardcore ottoman militarism cohered with kung fu?

if the arabs hadnt been led astray by the brits?

if the muslim naval navigators hadnt enabled european ‘discovery’?

if tipu sultan had repulsed the invading britishers and launched a counter attack to liberate the britsh from the clutches of nascent colonial capitalism?

and more interestingly, had strategic bits of the muslim world not aligned with the US against the USSR?