Authors From Pakistan

"It requires worth fully to appreciate a man of worth."

"There is only one person that can be "more than a father", it is your dear mother, whose love for her offspring is unbounded by heaven and earth."

"Time never returns once lost."

"All of you please avoid smoking, drinking habits as venomous things. By keeping away from them you will be happy and healthy."

"In the Jail, there is a Government supplied radio, and I hear music and news occasionally. My time, however, passes in my pastime; I live by myself, alone."

"I have done nothing but my duty, and which I shall be doing so long as there is life in me."

"Everyone has to follow the road (to death)!"

"I announced 'Jehad' - a movement to represent the silent majority to raise controversial issues that most people feel afraid to speak about. It liberated me from the corrupt politics that I had witnessed. I decided to stand apart and away from the mainstream of the rotting political system and the deficient and self-serving politicians that consumed our national wealth and exploited our people."

"Feudalism was a licence to plunder, rape and even murder. The rich got richer; the poor despaired."

""... I am shocked at what I have just heard and seen!! Sick to the core. This same man who abused a woman on tv is revered and given project after project because of what? We are as much to blame if not more for perpetuating this thinking!...”"

"“I was shocked when I heard what he said recently, others, cursing out on live TV.......This man is trying to stamp a stereotype upon actresses which has persisted for years and years, and which we have been trying so hard to break. It makes me angry. But then, look at how the masses have responded to him. They are calling him a hero. It’s scary calling out someone in a world like this.....I have seen so much negativity but now I have developed empathy for people like Khalil sahib, and also for people who think that it’s okay to lash out at a woman on social media. I think that they must lead troubled lives that have made them so vicious. Khalil sahib must have had a difficult childhood and terrible relationships with the women in his family, perhaps his mum or his sisters. Why else would he pass such judgments so easily?”"

"Khalil sahib was an enigma five years ago; ... We had no clue who he was at the time,...He has done a disservice to himself – though he doesn’t think so, because now he is a cheerleader for very, very ugly conservative, problematic thoughts in this country. He has unmasked himself and what he has revealed is deeply ugly...The very, very sad thing is that he has a constituency. I saw him speaking on a channel the other day and men were cheering him on. The producer told me, aap ignore karein, ap bhi tou engage kar rahi hain (ignore him, why are you engaging). Why should I ignore? He is sh**ting on my fellow artists, on women, on transgender folk.... This is the country where we live....,"

"...On the surface, there are a lot of problems with the series. For starters, it is written from a very male perspective for a female audience. .... Despite these flaws, MPTH caught the nation’s imagination and how? ... Was this the male #MeToo I wondered as a man appeared on a vlog to talk about his own real-life now former cheating wife?...The serial ) wins mainly because it appeals to our inner do takka that loves everything bad, non PC and immoral...."

"“...shirk toh khuda bhi maaf nahi karta.”"

"English translation"...Unfortunately, an army of transgenders has infiltrated the industry and ruined it. You can also see some of these as heroes....""

"English Translation:"...Our strayed women were dancing there on 8th March, taking out untimely dirty inferior march without reason..." ~ Khalil-ur-Rehman Qamar"

"“A woman’s beauty lies in her piety and loyalty. When a man leaves the house, he leaves his trust, wealth, love and respect in her hands and if she opens that up to another man, then I’m sorry to say, I don’t consider that a woman but rather a non-woman”."

""...aap shorts pehne gi ye permission kabhi ni di jaigi apko. Subcontinent mai kabhi ni di jaigi...”."

"”The first time a man sees a woman, she has Rs50,000 worth of makeup on. After marriage, she turns out to be something else. You should only sell the product that I’m going to spend the rest of my life with… I’m not going to spend the rest of my life with makeup from Depilex. Show your true face.”"

"”What is the greatest thing women fear from men? That he’ll leave them for another. So that other woman is another woman, right? The other woman is not a man. They’re bringing each other down on the one hand and raising a fuss about it too.”"

"What even are these rights that women want? Your problem is that us men have stolen your rights so cleverly you don't know what they are. Instead of finding that out, you want our rights."

"Have you seen the news where a woman was kidnapped by five men? But have you ever heard of five women kidnapping a man? Do that! If you want equality then do that!.....I'll know there's equality if I hear about women robbing buses and gang-raping men."

"I am fighting for the good women, there is no bigger feminist in Pakistan than me....I will give them equal rights, but a little below [men]"

""..Khuda gawa hai mere se bara feminist Pakistan mein koi nahi hai”"

"I don't call every woman a woman, whether you like it or not... There's only one thing that makes a woman beautiful and that's haya (modesty) and wafa (loyalty). If you don't have those, I call you non-women."

"English Translation: ...Women are not a cheaters (to their husbands), and the ones who cheat on (their husband), are not women."

"Original urdu language quote: "...Jo aurat hoti hai woh bewafa nahi hoti, aur jo bewafa hoti hai woh aurat nahi hoti’ ." Ref"

""...Just had a horrible encounter with toxic masculinity. Khalilur Rehman Qamar lost his marbles during a talk show when I called him out over his hateful rhetoric. He left the show while yelling at the top of his lungs. Called me a RAW agent and spewed sexist slurs,..”"

"Since wealth is the property of God, humanity does not have autonomy in this ownership but through the specific path He has instituted in the Islamic Shari‘ah."

"Nothing destroys one’s respect in the hearts of others more than greed."

"[elements of explicit modernity are engulfing] the whole world in the tornado of nudity and obscenity, and has provided an excuse for fornication, and more so it has led under thunder claps to the passage of a bill in the British House of Commons to legalize homosexuality. It is in the shadow of the same modernity that Western women are openly displaying banners on the streets demanding legalization of abortion."

"The question is whether aggressive battle is by itself commendable or not. If it is, why should the Muslims stop simply because territorial expansion in these days is regarded as bad? And if it is not commendable, but deplorable, why did Islam not stop it in the past? … Aggressive Jihad is lawful even today for the purpose it was lawful in those days."

"None of them was able to compose even a few sentences to match the Qurānic verses. Just think that they were a people who according to ‘Allāmah Jurjāni, could never resist ridiculing the idea in their poetry if they heard that there was someone at the other end of the globe who prided himself on his eloquence and rhetorical speech. It is unthinkable that they could keep quiet even after such repeated challenges and dare not come forward… They had left no stone unturned for persecuting the Prophet. They tortured him, called him insane, sorcerer, poet and sooth-sayer, but failed utterly in composing even a few sentences like the Qurānic verses."

"I am a citizen of Great Britain, therefore I have a legal and moral obligation to live like other Britons and raise my children as British citizens, who are free to practise any religion they like."

"Mufti Mohammed Saeed Ahmad Saeed, president of World Muslim Unity, after declaring Shaikh a renegade, an apostate and an infidel, went on to declare: Anwar Shaikh has claimed he believes in God, but not the Prophet. This is like someone who says I acknowledge my mother, but not my father. Such a person is commonly known as a bastard."

"His prose is repetitive and, on occasion, an incoherence seeps into his argument, but this can be effective if written for an audience used to reli- gious texts and sermons that are always repetitive and incoherent. His books and pamphlets circulate throughout the Muslim communities in Western Europe and Pakistan like sanuzdats in the former Soviet Union or Aaron MacGruder's cartoons in the post-September United States. They are read, copied, passed on, endlessly discussed. It is this that makes Shaikh a danger�ous opponent of orthodoxy. He is the enemy within. When I finally met up with him, I was taken aback by his self-confidence: They will never succeed in gagging my mouth, because I speak for millions of silent Muslims.'"

"Shaikh was a warm and friendly character with a great sense of humor and hospitality."

"Non-governmental Islamist forces are also becoming more circumspect. In Great Britain, after thousands of Muslims openly shouted "We will kill Satan Rushdie," the next death edict, against Pakistani-born Anwar Sheikh in 1995, was much more restrained. Unlike the novelist Rushdie with his oblique and ironical challenge to Islam, Sheikh very formally renounced and criticized Islam in a bilingual English/Urdu quarterly, Liberty, and in a series of erudite books. When news of his critique reached his homeland Pakistan, at least fourteen clerics there issued death sentences against him. A Pakistani daily reported: All Pakistani clergy demand extradition of the accursed renegade Anwar Shaikh from Britain to hang him publicly. A renegade must be murdered—this is a fundamental rule of the Islamic Law. — Anwar Shaikh must be called back, some lover of the Prophet is bound to kill him. If he is not eliminated, more Rushdies will appear. He is an apostate for denying heaven, hell, revelation, Koran, Prophet and angels. The Muslims of the world are ready to behead the accursed renegade to defend the magnificence of their Prophet."

"Anwar Shaikh was born in 1928 in Gujrat, now in Pakistan, in a Muslim family that vaguely remembered its pre-conversion Hindu origin as Kashmiri Pandits. In an age of mounting religious tensions, however, he grew up to be a committed Muslim. Come 1947 and the Partition of India, he was living in Lahore, a Hindu/Sikh-majority city expected to remain with India yet allotted to Pakistan because it was the metropolis of Muslim-majority West Panjab. Consequently, the city became the flashpoint of the worst interreligious violence, ending in its complete cleansing of non-Muslims. The young Anwar Shaikh took part in the Partition violence against Sikhs and Hindus, killing three Sikhs with his own hands."

"Anwar Sheikh, for example, was a typical Muslim in 1947. He even killed three (Sikh) Hindus in the back-streets of Lahore during the post-partition riots and felt proud of performing a jihadic act. But once he saw through Muhammad, his creed, his book and his god (Allah), Sheikh not only discarded Islam with contempt but is now a committed scholar producing powerful literature and defiantly fighting the Islamic thought-police."

"I am a liberal humanist. I believe in the unity and dignity of people, who have the right to believe what they like. No one has the right to impose his beliefs on others. Faith must be a strictly personal affair. Believing in God or no god is immaterial, what matters is human dignity, human freedom, and human welfare. A human-loving atheist is a thousand times better human than a theist who hates his fellow beings on the grounds of religious bigotry. A true humanist is free from the restraints of race, color, and creed; he believes in human rights, civil liberties, and democratic principles."

"It was during the first week of August 1947, when I was an accounts clerk in the railway office in Lahore, that I saw a train pull in from East Punjab. It was full of mutilated bodies of Muslims: men, women, and children. It had a terrific, horrendous effect on me. When I went home I prayed to the Lord asking him not to forget my share of houris and boys. Now this is true. I actually prayed and then I took up a club and a long knife, and I went out in search of non-Muslims. Those days were remembered for the curfew orders and everybody seemed terrified of everybody else. I found two men, Sikhs, a father and son. The father was perhaps not more than fifty, perhaps younger, and his young son. I killed both of them. Next day I did not go to work. I felt nauseated, but I wanted to kill some more non-Muslims. I encountered another Sikh at Darabi Road and I killed him too. Often memories of those terrible days haunt my mind; I feel ashamed and many times have I shed tears of remorse. If it had not been for my fanaticism, engendered by the Islamic traditions, those people might have been alive even today. And I might not have felt the guilt, which I still do."

"I regret to say that 1947 was the darkest period of my life. We were told that murdering the non-Muslims, seducing their wives, and burning their properties, was an act of jihad, that is, holy war. And jihad is the most sacred duty of a Muslim because it guarantees him a safe passage to paradise where no fewer than seventy-two houris, that is the most beautiful virgins, and pearl-like boys wait for him. Such a reward is a great temptation!"

"These non-Arab Muslims develop a special sense of contempt for their own cultures and motherlands under the pretence of believing in the Muslim nationhood."

"The prophet Muhammad also divided humanity into two sections - the Arabs and non-Arabs... the non-Arabs are to be ruled through the yoke of the Arab Cultural Imperialism... one ought to remember that Islam is less a religion and more an Arab National movement."

"The Arabs made a profession of robbing and murdering the non-Muslims in the name of Allah, but they called it jihad. Egypt and Iran were the early casualties. It was the pillaged wealth and abducted daughters and sisters of the foreign nations which lent the golden touch to this Arab era."

"no place on earth bas ever exacted such a tribute of reverence from mankind as the Kaaba. Respect to the Kaaba means, respect to Mecca, respect to Mecca means respect to Arabia, and respect to Arabia means respect to Arabs, the dwellers of Arabia."

"I was not only born and bred as a Muslim but also fought grimly for the glory of Islam. Even today, my loved ones are Muslim. There is no way I can be anti-Muslim."

"The prophet Muhammad divided humanity into two sections - the Arabs and the non-Arabs... The Arabs are the rulers and the non-Arabs are to be ruled... Islam is the means to realize this dream... Islam has caused more damage to the national dignity and honour of non-Arab Muslims than any other calamity ... Yet they believe that this faith is the ambassador of 1. Equality and 2. Human Love. This is a fiction."

"India is yet another major victim of Islam. The day Muhammad bin Qasim, entered Sindh as a conqueror, must rank as the most ominous, odious and outrageous moment in the history of India, whose proud, pious and powerful traditions have been the torch-bearer of world civilisation. The Indians, used to enjoying the warmth of ahinsa, were stunned by the violence that the Arab raiders displayed in robbing the rich and seducing the indigenous damsels. Yet the irony was that they did all this in the name of the Most Compassionate and Just Allah, who counts these felonies as acts of fairness when they are committed to torture the unbelievers. Then, this land that had become indifferent to the vicissitudes of history owing to a very long period of prosperity and plentitude, was attracted by more Islamic predators, who rushed in through the Khaiber Pass to loot her wealth, dishonour her daughters and crush her ethos that had stood the test of time despite its proneness to physical comforts and spiritual mirages such as ahinsa."