Articles by Dr. Parvez

Who was Lady Sumaiyah?   I t is very easy for a young person to accept new ideas and alter his thinking and beliefs with the advent of new experiences and requirements of life. With time, he adopts his own principles, religious beliefs and manners, which may or may not be in sync with society. As he approaches old age, whatever views he has acquired in these years become rigid and inflexible and any chance of his mindset changing or any external attempt to do so is almost always impossible.   H owever… we know of a person whose direction in life was changed in this very old age. All aspects of this person’s life became diverted towards the pursuit of a particular goal and such was this diversion that no power proved strong enough to avert this change. What is all the more enchanting is that this person was a frail old lady who was neither wealthy nor did she belong to a family of distinction; who, on the contrary, belonged to a slave family and she was herself a slave!   I

Ashura- A Day of Gratitude or Mourning? Come Muharram and our newspapers are filled with images of decorated street processions and young men wailing on the streets and flogging themselves to mourn the martyrdom of Imam Hussainؓ  and his family (May Allah be pleased with them). Discourses are held at every other street corner- by Shias and Sunnis both- in the first ten days of Muharram (recollecting the day-to-day account of the battle that took place at  Karbala  1400 years back) ostensibly as a mark of piety and devotion. Juma sermons touch upon the fateful events of  Karbala  and the entire period is marked with mourning and covered with a sense of melancholy and grief. Though Shia Muslims held fort in this regard till the last many centuries, Sunni Muslims are also now catching up and erecting  Sabeels  of water and arranging huge programs every year now. The point I want to make is that Ashura (the 10 th  of Muharram), which was originally meant to commemorate the exodus of the C

Cultivated Islamophobia… lessons from History History always tends to repeat itself. Events that have already taken place some centuries back recast themselves in a new environment, playing in the hands of a new generation. And that is precisely why we do read history in the first place- to learn from man’s past mistakes and to adopt the steps taken to rectify the same. The topic under discussion, Islamophobia can also be traced as far as History takes us back. We know from the Qur’an that all nations revolted against their prophets who essentially preached nothing but Islam. Be it Aad or Thamud, Madyan or Pharaoh, Nimrod or Sodom , the underlying narrative has always been Islamophobia. Of these, some saw Islam as a threat to their kingship, some to their businesses, some to their lewd lifestyles and some to their priesthood. We also notice that there was never a logical or sound basis to their opposition. Their response to Islam had also been the same… ridicule the believers