Mohenjo-Daro is one of the oldest settlements in the Indus Valley Civilisation. It is believed to have been built 5,000 years ago in an area which today is in the Sindh province of Pakistan. Most historians suggest that Mohenjo-Daro was abandoned some 3,000 years ago. It remained buried underneath thousands of years of dust, sand and stone until it was rediscovered in 1920 by archaeologists.

Subsequent studies of the site exhibit that Mohenjo-Daro was a sophisticated settlement of traders, fishermen and farmers. It had a written language (which is yet to be deciphered) and complex religious cults. The site is located west of the mighty Indus River in Sindh’s present-day Larkana District. Mohenjo-Daro was one of the largest cities of the Indus Valley Civilisation which spanned much of what today is Pakistan.

In the 1960s, archaeologists who took part in some of the last major excavation works on the site claimed that Mohenjo-Daro as a city declined due to invasions of warrior-nomads of Central Asia (the Aryans) who subdued the people of the Indus Valley Civilisation.

However, many later-day archaeologists and historians now believe that cities of the Indus Valley Civilisation such as Mohenjo-Daro had begun to decline and started to be abandoned due to a change in course by river Indus and the impact of climate change in the area which curtailed rainfall during the monsoon seasons.

I first visited the ruins of Mohenjo-Daro in 1974. I was just eight years old and a class three student at a school in Karachi. My visit was part of a ‘class away day', during which students from grades three and four from my school were flown on a PIA flight to Mohenjo-Daro in the morning, and then flown back to Karachi in the evening.

PIA used to operate regular flights to Mohenjo-Daro (mainly from Karachi) and for which a special (albeit tiny) airport had been constructed near the site. The site was hugely popular with historians, archaeologists and tourists who in those days used to visit Pakistan in large numbers.

I don’t remember much about the visit, but I do recall strolling with classmates and teachers on a sprawling site, surrounded by men and women, most of whom were quite clearly not Pakistani. I also remember constantly sensing the ground beneath my feet to physically feel the story of an ancient land which we had begun to be told about at school.

I had believed that the tale of this ancient land being taught to us in class was just another fairytale; but there I was, standing in the middle of this story, often thumbing my feet on its rough ground, now believing that what one can physically feel is the truth; and that which one can’t, is a fairytale. Or something of the sort.

The second time I visited Mohenjo-Daro was 11 years later, in 1986. By now I was a grade 12 student at a state-owned college in Karachi. Between 1984 and 1986, I often travelled deep inside the Sindh province, mainly for political reasons.

I was a member of a progressive student outfit, and since in the 1980s the interior of Sindh had become a hotbed of agitation against the Ziaul Haq dictatorship, members of the student outfit I was a part of frequently travelled to various cities and towns in central and northern Sindh.

In November 1986, I accompanied four other members of the student outfit on a trip to the ancient city of Sehwan Sharif in Sindh’s Jamshoro District. Our plan was to join anti-Zia protests being planned by some small far-left groups. We travelled by bus to Hyderabad (some 100 miles from Karachi) and from there we were to take another bus which would have taken us directly to Sehwan Sharif.

Sehwan is best known for its beautiful shrine of Sufi saint, Lal Shahbaz Qalandar. The protests were being planned around the shrine during the colourful and boisterous annual festivities.

In Hyderabad, some of our friends in that city warned us that the Zia regime had sent ‘hundreds of plain-clothed policemen’ to Sehwan who were to begin arresting possible agitators a day or two before the protests. We were advised to stay put until the rumours were confirmed or refuted.

Instead of staying in Hyderabad, we decided to travel to the diminutive city of Larkana and stay with an acquaintance there. We reached Larkana by bus but couldn’t locate him. One of his brothers told us that he may have been arrested in a nearby village where he had gone a few days before our arrival.

We ended up staying the night at a cheap, rundown hotel (Hotel Chaand), sharing a room which had just one rickety charpoy but lots of bedbugs! So we decided to sleep on the cold floor. What helped us sleep better (or at all), were neat swigs from a bottle of the very strong and entirely unsmooth whisky that we had bought for Rs60 from an employee of the so-called hotel.

The next morning one of the guys, Rehan (aka Roosi Sundi or Russian insect, because he was always claiming to be ‘more surkh' [red] than any of us) rented a motorbike (Honda 50) from a motorbike-rental-cum-tier-shop. The plan was to ride into the village where our Larkana buddy was supposedly arrested from. I accompanied Roosi. We failed to locate the village and on our way back to Larkana, I saw a board that read "Mohenjo-Daro 20 KM."

So, now, instead of Larkana we were riding towards Mohenjo-Daro. We reached the site late afternoon. I was stunned. It was breathtaking. Vast, and very still. As we made our way towards the ruins, I somehow remembered the spot where I had stood and thumped my feet on the ground 11 years ago.

There was hardly anybody there. There were just two gentlemen in the distance standing on a heap of ancient bricks. They were intensely studying what looked like a large map. I think one of them was Japanese. Or he might have been Chinese, I am not sure. Nearer to where we were, was a man sitting on a crumbling wall. He was smoking a cigarette and looking straight ahead in what seemed like a rather vacant gaze.

As I made my way to the spot where I had stood as an eight-year-old schoolboy, Roosi began walking towards the two men who were about 100 metres ahead of us. I stood on that spot again and began to gently thump it with my feet. This made me smile and chuckle. This was when I heard a voice (in Urdu) from behind where I stood: "Sain, are you trying to look for oil?"

I turned and saw the gazing man now gazing at me. I smiled at him and took out my pack of cigarettes (Gold Flake) and lit one. I then began to walk towards the crumbling old wall on which the man was sitting.

"Asalam o alaikum" I greeted him, shaking his hand. He must have been in his 60s, but his moustache was jet-black, most probably dyed. His head was covered by a grey turban and he was wearing a rose-coloured traditional Sindhi shalwar-kameez.

He responded to my greeting with a slight nod of his head as closely studied me. My longish, unruly hair blowing left to right, my four-day-old stubble, my dark glasses, my fading Lou Reed T-shirt, my dusty blue jeans and my beige Peshawari chappals.

"Are you from Karachi?" he asked in his heavily-accented Urdu.

"Yes," I responded. "Is it that obvious?" I chuckled.

He remained poker-faced and then began to gaze into the distance once again, as he lit himself another cigarette (King Stork, or 'Bagla Brand’ as it used to be known in these parts, a filter-less blast of unadulterated tobacco smoke).

"Are you from around here?" I asked.

He slowly turned his head towards me: "I used to be a guide here …" he said. "Nowadays there are more guides here than visitors," he added, expressionless.

I nodded my head: "Yes, looks that way. I first came here as a child in 1974. Were you a guide in those days?"

He just softly shrugged his shoulders: "My memory is not very good these days. My father was a guide here as well. Many people used to visit this place."

"Are you still a guide here?" I asked.

He finally managed to crack half a smile: "I can be if you want me to."

I smiled back: "I don’t have much money," I had said in a rather apologetic tone.

This made him laugh. Actually laugh: "Hahahaha … Sain, who asked for money? This is our motherland."

I nodded in agreement.

Watching me nod, he asked: "What did you understand?" The pokerface was back.

"Pakistan?" I almost whispered.

He began to laugh again: "Hahahaha … no, Sain, not Pakistan, but birthplace of Pakistan. Birthplace of India too. All this," he replied, gesturing with a jerk of his head and eyes towards me to look at the ruins around us. "Land of Sindhu."

"River Indus …" I said.

"Yes," he agreed (finally). "Sindhu gave birth to this place (Mohenjo-Daro), which gave birth to India and then Pakistan. What did you understand, Sain?"

"What about the Arabs?" I just had to ask this.

He was slightly taken aback. "Qasim?" He enquired.

"Yes." I said. "Bin Qasim."

"He was our guest," he said, matter-of-factly.

"But he invaded Sindh (in the 8th century) and defeated its ruler," I informed.

He gazed towards me again, but this time with more intent. He then shared a rather remarkable little tale. He said back in 1979 when one of his younger brothers travelled to Oman as an electrician, he was once badly insulted by his Arab employer. He said his brother told his Arab boss off by saying that he (the brother) came from the land of Sindhu which had taught the Arabs many things that they did not know.

"So what did his Arab boss say?" I asked.

"His boss actually began to respect him! He started to call him ancient Pakistani!" he laughed.

"Wasn’t your brother insulted?" I probed.

The man stared at me with a most unconcealed what-the-heck expression: "Sain, why would he be insulted? The ancestors of you and I were all from here. We are ancient people. What did you understand, Sain?"

I nodded and offered him a cigarette from my pack. He took one and I lighted it for him: "Where have all the visitors gone?" I asked.

He took an intense drag from the cigarette. Then exhaled as intensely. "Good," he said, praising the cigarette.

"Gold Flake," I said.

He nodded and then began to gaze at the sun which was about to set behind the ruins.

"You know what my brother began to call his boss?" he asked. "Camel driver!"

I laughed: "Really? And the boss did not mind?"

"I don’t know. I haven’t seen my brother for the past three years," he said, now gazing at the sunset.

"Why?" I enquired.

"He called his wife and children to Oman and then never came back. He thought this was not a suitable place anymore for his children."

"How come?" I asked.

He shrugged his shoulders: "Only Allah knows. But he began to look at us as if we were from some other land. He also stopped coming here (Mohenjo-Daro), even though he once used to love this place. So he went, and so did the visitors. Maybe they (the visitors) too began to see this place as some other land."

"Strange," I chuckled.

"Your friend is a Sindhi?" he asked, watching Roosi walking towards us.

"Yes," I said. "He is from Khairpur, but studies with me at a college in Karachi."

Addressing the approaching Roosi, he loudly asked him (in Sindhi): "Sain, what did you learn?"

"I learned that there is not a single cigarette shop here!" replied Roosi, equally loudly.

I laughed out loud. So did Roosi. But the man remained serious: "It’s not good to smoke at the burial site of one’s ancestors," he said to Roosi, who was now with us.

"But you were smoking," I immediately reminded him.

He smiled: "Like my brother, I too have lost the respect of our ancestors." Then addressing both Roosi and me, he added: "But you two are still young. You should not lose what we have lost."

And then it happened. In a blink of an eye, Roosi swooped down and touched the man’s feet: "Bhali Sain (sure, sir)," he said in Sindhi and then softly reminded me it was getting late. We bid farewell to the man whose name I never got to know, nor asked. We were soon riding back to Larkana. Silently.

From that day onward, till I last met him sometime in the early 1990s, I never saw Roosi smoke a cigarette again. He quit. Just like that.

A few years ago, I had gone on a long trip to south Punjab in Pakistan, where I wound my way through various Sufi shrines belonging to several traditions, some similar and others distinct.

I was working on my second book then, In Search of Shiva, a collection of several such idiosyncratic Sufi shrines around Punjab that draw their religious inspiration from pre-Islamic religious traditions of this land.

This ended up being a rather unique collection of shrines — there was the shrine of phallic offerings, one of sacred dogs and another of sacred cows, to name a few.

The search for one such shrine took to me to Tibba Haji Deen, a small village next to the colonial city of Bahawalnagar. On the outskirts of the village, on a vacant plot, was a huge shrine, thought to have the power to cure mental illnesses.

Those suffering from psychological disorders would be left at the shrine for a few days and would recover miraculously, or so it was believed. Beyond these myths about the shrine, they were also several stories of oppression and abuse, which could perhaps be discussed in another column.

While roaming the village in search for this shrine, I chanced upon another Sufi shrine with several graves in a row, all covered with colourful shawls and containing Quranic inscriptions.

An old man came up to me and told me that these graves belonged to seven generations of 12th-century Sufi poet Baba Farid’s male ancestors — his father, grandfather, great-grandfather and so on.

Baba Farid is buried in the city of Pakpattan 70-odd kilometres from here. His Punjabi verses are still sung by folk singers and qawwals in Punjab on both sides of the border. He also had a huge impact on Guru Nanak, the first Sikh guru, who collected Farid’s poetry from his ancestor and that is how it found its way into the Sikh holy book, the Guru Granth Sahib.

Before that, the great Punjabi poet’s work only existed in the oral tradition, remembered and passed on to the next generation through songs.

In one corner of this open courtyard was a small, humbly decorated grave. “Whose grave is that?” I asked the old man. “That belongs to one of my ancestors,” he replied. “Our family has been serving this shrine for the past several generations.”

Driving down the Multan road, on my way back to Lahore, I was still thinking about the shrine of Baba Farid’s ancestors and the connection between the old man’s family and the family of the saint.

Stories of the saint’s miraculous and spiritual prowess must have passed from one generation to another. His poetry recited, analysed and remembered through this channel. This was perhaps one of the few remnants of our country’s oral culture, once the backbone of our heritage.

Musical memories

Just as I was thinking about this, a rendition of Amir Khusro’s Aaj Rang Hai by Hadiqa Kiani on Coke Studio started playing in the car. The iconic Sufi poet’s 13th-century song is a tribute to Nizamuddin Auliya, Khusro’s spiritual master.

In the typical qawwali style, the song builds up slowly and gradually and after much repetition, bursts into its culmination, a divine ecstasy. Nizamuddin Auliya was the head of the Chishti Sufi order, still one of the most prominent Sufi schools in India as well as Pakistan.

Qawwali remains one of the central tenets of this Sufi order, a way for them to express their devotion. It is this unique relationship between music and devotion that allowed the Chishti order to become so popular in India, drawing devotees from Hinduism and Islam.

Almost midway into the qawwali, Kiani goes into a trance-like state, repeating a particular composition. This is an important stage before the song’s culmination.

In this repetition, she recited the name of the heads of Chishti order — Nizamuddin Auliya, Alauddin, Faridudin, Shah Qutubudin, Moinudin. The names melted into the melody of the song, slowly entering the collective memories of the listeners. These few lines contain 100 years of the Chishti order’s history in India.

Over generations, from the 13th century when this qawwali was first sung to the present, these names have been repeated and memorised by those who have heard the song. This is how oral history was preserved. While the written word was the preserve of the elite, the ordinary folk preserved their history by committing it to memory in other ways, of which songs are just an example.

Stories in names

Another beautiful example is that of names. Much before the Saffronisation of India and the Islamisation of Pakistan, names sometimes preserved within them a memory of an entire generation to be passed on to the next one. A few years ago, I heard about one Baba Raiyyah, an old man who lived in Lahore and whose family migrated to Pakistan from India’s Punjab at the time of Partition.

The word Raiyyah comes from ra, which means 'way' in Punjab. Raiyyah was born on the way to the new country in 1947 when his family, uprooted from their ancestral village, headed west to the safety of Pakistan. Three or four generations after him heard the story of how Baba Raiyyah got his name, tales of their family’s lost homes and the long journey to Pakistan.

There was also a story in the name of Baba Laskhar from Ferozepur — now a border town — before Partition. In the year he was born, their village was attacked by an armed group called Lashkar. Through his name, several generations of Baba Lashkar’s family kept alive the memory of that attack.

Sometimes, history is also preserved in a ritual. Maraka was a small, insignificant village when the forces of Afghan king Ahmad Shah Abdali, bored with a prolonged siege of the walled city of Lahore, burnt it down in the 18th century.

Decades later, as some surviving members of the village repopulated it, they constructed a small shrine and named it Shaheedan da mazaar, or the shrine of the martyred. Every year they organised a fair at the shrine to commemorate the barbaric attack on their village. The festival continued well into the history of Pakistan before it slowly faded away.

The article was originally published on Scroll and has been reproduced with permission.

This article was originally published on June 3, 2015.

One of my colleagues asked me some time ago:

‘Can you believe that Hindus and Muslims can pray at the same place simultaneously?’

‘Well, of course not, at least not in Pakistan,’ I swiftly retorted.

He smiled and responded mysteriously, ‘There is a place not far from here where they do.’

It was the curiosity to confirm this statement that led me to the shrine of Jhulay Lal. Interestingly, contrary to the popular conceptions of the puritanical and narrow confines of religion, there still exist certain elements in our society that are a manifestation of our centuries’ old traditions of religious coexistence.

The shrine of Saint Jhulay Lal is one of these examples.

We visited the shrine on a hot April day, though the cool breeze made it somewhat bearable. The town of Udero Lal, where the shrine is situated, lies almost 40 kilometers away from the Sanghar district. It is a small sleepy town with the shrine of a saint at its epicenter.

We arrived to see vendors selling edible items as people sipped tea in dhaba-styled hotels, with radio waves sailing through the air around us, piercing it with Sindhi folk music. The houses were small and the streets congested. But we had no difficulty reaching the shrine, for everyone we met knew the directions like the back of their hands.

The white domes of the shrine could be seen on the horizon from a distance. We entered the shrine and found it spick-and-span, painted spotless white with its battlements and bastions, reminiscent of an old fortress.

The inner sanctum, which is comparatively new, is a beautiful structure with ornate doors and exquisite woodwork. An Urs and fair commemorating the disappearance of the saint is held annually, where a large number of devotees from across Pakistan and abroad come and pay homage.

There is an adjoining room where a pair of sandals is kept, reportedly belonging to the saint.

Jhulay Lal is related to the River Indus and sometimes revered as an incarnation of the River God Varuna in Sindh.

Most Muslims call the saint Khwaja Khizar, who is believed to guide people travelling through water courses and on voyages. The muhanas or mallah (as the fishermen are called in Sindh), held the saint in high esteem. Jhulay Lal is also called Zinda Pir, Sheikh Tahir, Khawaja Khizar, Udero Lal and Amar Lal.

According to various historical and colonial accounts, Jhulay Lal is said to have lived in the 17th century. Mirkh Shah, the despotic ruler of Thatta, tried to forcibly convert his Hindu subjects to Islam. On hearing this, the Hindus went to the bank of the Indus, fasted and prayed to the River to liberate them from this ordeal.

As a result, an image appeared from the depths of the River and told them that a child would be born to an aged couple living at Nasarpur, who would help them.

The child was named Udero Lal and also given the title 'Jhulay Lal', as his cradle was said to swing on its own. This child grew up into a valiant man and argued with Mirkh Shah, who realised his mistake and let the Hindus peacefully live in his domains.

We entered the complex to the welcome of an eternal peace, enveloping everything around us. The tiled floor felt wonderfully cool, so we sat down in silence for some time. Inside the shrine, the air was laden with fragrance as the oil lamps were cast shadows over the walls; filling the room with a light yellowish glow.

Jhulay Lal is often depicted as sitting on a Palla fish (an indigenous species of the Indus) or riding on his horse. It is believed that he and his horse disappeared into a well mysteriously; his shrine now erected at the same place.

From that day on, the shrine has been a centre of attraction for thousands of Hindus and Muslims alike. The shrine, located in Udero Lal, houses a Hindu temple alongside a Muslim-style tomb, and the caretakers include both Hindus and Muslims. In the evenings, Hindus perform pooja and aaarti while Muslims too, offer prayers at the tomb .

In the courtyard, people tied colourful threads and cloths on a tree, as tokens of prayers which would only be removed once the problem was resolved. Then, they would bring offerings to the saint, especially miniature swings and cradles.

Before we left, we prayed to the saint of The River Indus too, silently wishing that we may revert to our old values of peace and harmony.

This shrine stands as perhaps one of the few remaining strongholds of the eclectic elements of the Sindhi society, which are now being threatened by fundamentalism. The heritage of our mystic traditions should be promoted at state level, so that we may revive the love of humanity and co-existence which has always been part of our quintessential values.

—All photos by author

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February is Black History Month in the United States. It originated in 1926 with the efforts of the Association for the Study of African-American Life and History, founded by historian Carter G. Woodson and the minister Jesse E. Moorland.

Black History Month started as a week-long commemoration of the history of and accomplishments by African-Americans and peoples of African descent. It was held during the second week of February to coincide with the birthdays of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln.

This week-long commemoration evolved into a full month, and in 1976, President Gerald Ford officially recognised Black History Month, telling the public “to seize the opportunity to honour the too-often neglected accomplishments of black Americans in every area of endeavour throughout our history.”

South Asians have a lot to learn from African-American history, including during Black History Month. The history of African-Americans in the United States has directly impacted the lives, struggles, and resistance of South Asian-Americans. Moreover, South Asian and African-American communities have meaningfully collaborated and allied with one another to fight oppression.

Despite this history of collaboration, the reality remains that South Asians continue to perpetuate anti-Black racism (also called anti-blackness) against African-Americans and peoples of African descent, both in the United States and in South Asia.

Black History Month and African-American history more broadly are relevant to South Asian communities. The racism that both communities suffer has a common origin: white supremacy.

South Asian-Americans and African-Americans both live in a country that was founded on preserving white supremacy, through the attempted genocide of indigenous peoples, slavery, racial segregation, and restrictions on immigration and xenophobic policies. Furthermore, South Asians and peoples of African descent have both suffered through colonialism.

In the United States, African-Americans have long been perceived as being more criminal or dangerous than other people.After the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, South Asian-Americans have also come under suspicion and are treated as criminals even when they have not committed any crimes.

The intersection between the treatment of African-Americans and South Asian-Americans was highlighted in the case of Sureshbhai Patel. Mr. Patel, an Indian grandfather, was brutally assaulted by two police officers in an Alabama suburb in 2016. He was walking outside his son’s home, when a neighbour thought he looked suspicious and called the police.

The police officers arrived on the scene and later claimed that Mr. Patel would not answer their questions although Mr. Patel claimed that he had told them he did not speak English. The police officers then assaulted Mr. Patel resulting in him being seriously injured.

At first, this incident seems like a straightforward case of anti-South Asian racism. However, it was later revealed that the neighbour who called the police did so because he thought Mr. Patel was a Black man.

The incident reflects not only anti-South Asian racism but also anti-Black racism. It reinforces the fact that African-Americans are immediately considered suspicious and criminal, even when the person in question is simply walking down the street.

But the incident emphasises something else: Mr. Patel could not speak English and was considered uncommunicative by the police officers, which led them to assault him.

His status as a non-English speaking immigrant intersected with the fact that the neighbour who called the police thought he was African-American.

The result was that he was brutally assaulted. In this way, the oppression that African-Americans and South Asians face is often not only similar but also can be part of the same incident.

Black History Month is also relevant to South Asians because many South Asians are Muslim, just like many African-Americans. In fact, the history of Islam in the United States can be traced through the history of African-Americans Muslims.

African Muslims were in North America at least as far back as the 1500s. In 1522, a group of people including enslaved West African Muslims led a revolt against Christopher Columbus’s son, Diego.

Throughout American history, many slaves in the United States were Muslim. Even after slavery was abolished, Black Muslims continued to shape US history and participate in American life.

For example, in the 1920s, P. Nathaniel Johnson, who changed his name to Ahmad Din, was the leader of an integrated mosque in St. Louis. And of course, figures like Malcolm X and organisations like the Nation of Islam significantly shaped the Civil Rights Movement.

For South Asian Muslims, this aspect of Black History is also our history as Muslims. Non-African-American Muslims in this country can live and thrive here largely due to the efforts of Black Muslims, who were the earliest Muslims in America and who have continued being active and vocal in support of Islam, human rights, and civil rights.

South Asians, Muslim or not, should also care about Black History and about standing in solidarity with African-Americans because that is a part of our history. African-American and South Asian collaboration and solidarity has existed for a long time.

For example, African-American figures in the United States provided assistance during India’s fight against colonialism and for independence. In 1942, the African-American press covered resistance movements in India. Moreover, the famous American civil rights leader Bayard Rustin organised the Fellowship of Reconciliation’s Free India Committee in 1945, and he even visited South Asia during this time.

South Asians showed solidarity to African-Americans as well. For example, Ram Manohar Lohia, an Indian political leader, spoke out against Jim Crow laws and went to jail in Mississippi after participating in civil disobedience to oppose segregation.

These examples of solidarity between African-Americans and South Asians are very important. But it is equally important to remember that South Asians have perpetuated anti-blackness in our communities for a long time.

The colourism that is endemic in our cultures is reflected through our fear of dark skin and our attempts to lighten our skin as much as possible, through the use of creams like Fair and Lovely.

Many South Asians both in the United States and in South Asia use terms like “kala” to derogatorily refer to African-Americans and peoples of African descent. We perpetuate false and racist beliefs about African-Americans being more likely to be criminals.

Many South Asians use the n-word and other racist terms. South Asians also co-opt aspects of Black culture, including music, dress, and African-American Vernacular English, without giving any credit to African-Americans or without reflecting on their own co-optation and cultural appropriation.

During this Black History Month (as well as every other month), South Asians should reflect on their own contributions to anti-Black racism and should take concrete actions to combat such racism in our communities.

We should remember the rich history of solidarity that we have with African-Americans and the importance of the accomplishments of African-Americans to the history of the United States. We should also strive to fight the oppression that African-Americans face and stand in solidarity with them without co-opting or appropriating their struggles.

In order to do so, we must have difficult conversations with our family members and friends about their anti-blackness and stereotypical beliefs. We should take the time to learn more about Black history and educate others in our communities.

We should also attend meetings and protests and provide financial resources to the extent that it is possible to African-American-led organisations that are standing against human rights violations of African-Americans. This month, let us all commit to combating our own anti-blackness and supporting African-Americans in their struggles for justice.

We don’t realise how terrorist attacks affect our children indirectly. Have we ever stopped to think how it is changing our younger generation’s behaviour pattern?

I will never forget the conversation I had with my ten-year-old cousin when he came home from school a day after the attack on Lal Shahbaz Qalandar’s shrine. It was on this occasion that I understood the long-term impacts that these attacks have on children.

I couldn’t believe when he excitedly said to me, "Zawarah baji, you know what happened today? Two suicide bombers came into my friend’s brother’s school. All the children hid under the desks and Ayyan’s brother lay down on the floor pretending to be dead so that terrorists wouldn’t kill him. Then, the police came and took the terrorists away."

What he did not know was that this was a mock operation conducted by security forces to prepare and train children on how to react in case of an actual terrorist attack.

Read next: How to defuse a bomb, and other security training for Pakistani students

His naive enthusiasm transported me back to 2015 when he had returned from school on the day that marked the one-month anniversary of the tragic Army Public School massacre. I remember how proudly he told me, "You know what? Our teachers now have an app in their phones and if they tap it four times, the police will come in two minutes." Intrigued, I asked him to tell me more.

"Oh and before this, we had only four guards and now we have nine. Oh and you know what, before this we only had cameras inside the school but now we have cameras outside as well. The best part is that our windows are now bullet-proof and will only shatter if a bomb explodes. Our teacher told us that when we hear an alarm, we all have to duck and hide under our desks till our principal gives us more instructions using her special microphone."

I kept listening, till I finally gathered the courage to ask, "Why do you keep saying ‘before this’? Before what?" And then came his reply: "You don’t know what happened on 16th December? "No, what happened?" I asked him. "Terrorists killed so many innocent children in a school."

I wondered how a seven-year-old child knew all this since we have always tried to keep him away from television. Our news channels fail to understand the basic ethics of reporting and keep showing gruesome footage from different incidents, not taking into account how it affects the families of the victims as well as children who are exposed to such images.

He then continued telling me that terrorists did this. "Who is a terrorist?" I asked him. "Don’t you know? Terrorists are mad men. They are monsters. They are not Muslims or Christians, they are not even humans. They kill people for no reason because they are crazy," he angrily told me.

"Why did they attack children?" I asked him next. "Because, they strike for little meat first before targeting the big meat", was his unconventional reply.

Related: Tackling implications of enhanced security on schoolchildren

I was still marveling at his response when he added, "When I grow up, I will join the army and kill all these terrorists." "I thought you just said killing someone is a bad thing. If you kill them, wouldn’t that make you a bad person as well?"

That was the moment when he lost his calm and started arguing with me. "If I don’t kill these terrorists, they will kill more of us. They will strike our families. Do you want them to come after your family? Do you want them to kill all of us?" It took me a good five minutes and a chocolate bar to calm him down and change the subject.

Later after our conversation had ended, I sat down thinking about what had become of our country.

More than two years since the massacre in Peshawar, Pakistan is still in shambles. Instead of care-free morning assemblies, our younger generation has emergency drills.

The only thing I had to worry about when I was in school was whether my mother had packed Super Crisps and Frost juice or French toast for lunch.

Having French toast for lunch was my worst nightmare. But today, our kids face a different reality. Their worst nightmare is a terrorist attack. It breaks my heart.

We are a resilient nation, but how long will we keep suffering? I hope I live to see the day when we stop losing our people to war and terrorism.

Have your children or family members been affected by terrorist attacks in the country? Tell us about it at blog@dawn.com

This article was originally published on October 10, 2016

When Donald Trump first made the statement about banning Muslims from entering the United States, I did not take it as an abstract concern.

I did not think he didn’t mean it or that he wouldn’t want to pursue it as a policy if he became President.

Instead, I thought about my Muslim parents who brought my brother and me to the United States from Pakistan in December of 2000, when I was eight years old.

I thought about immigrant parents making sacrifices for their children in a new country, faced with all sorts of new challenges.

And I also thought about what we had contributed to this country during our time here.

I thought about my Pakistani relatives who, after September 11, 2001, found it much more difficult to visit us and perhaps now would never be able to.

I thought about the trips we took to our family home in Lahore every few years and whether those trips could make us liabilities or contribute to us being seen as suspicious.

I also went back to my childhood when in the wake of September 11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it became much harder to be Pakistani and Muslim in America.

The more I felt that America was my home, the more reminders there were that my family and I would be perpetually foreign, suspect and untrustworthy.

What does Donald Trump’s rise mean to me as a Pakistani immigrant in the United States?

Donald Trump’s rise did not occur in a vacuum. He did not come up with his own bigoted rhetoric out of nowhere. Rather, he exploited fears and anxieties that already existed — the fears and anxieties of a country recovering from an economic crisis and in an age of international terrorism.

By repeating beliefs about Muslims being untrustworthy or unwilling to follow the laws of the United States, he provided a convenient scapegoat for the problems the country is facing.

His rhetoric has had tangible effects.

According to the New York Times, “Hate crimes against American Muslims have soared to their highest levels...an increase apparently fuelled by terrorist attacks in the United States and abroad and by divisive language on the campaign trail.”

Moreover, “hate crimes against American Muslims were up 78 per cent over the course of 2015.”

This is startling data.

It should be unacceptable that some people in the United States are choosing to scapegoat an entire religious group and enact violence on them.

But given the success of the Trump campaign so far, hate crimes seem to be becoming more and more common.

Donald Trump’s rise has made American Muslims feel less safe, and his rhetoric and policy proposals on other immigration-related issues would affect Pakistani immigrants as well.

In a statement on immigration on his website, Trump laid out his plan to limit the number of immigrants who can come to the United States and to subject potential immigrants to ideology-based tests to ensure that they can assimilate.

Specifically, Trump’s plan includes keeping “immigration levels, measured by population share, within historical norms” and to “select immigrants based on their likelihood of success in US society.”

He has also discussed asking applicants “for their views about honour killings, about respect for women and gays and minorities, attitudes on "radical Islam", and many other topics as part of the vetting procedure”.

While this seems like an innocuous enough test, Trump is seeking to target Muslim immigrants or immigrants from Muslim-majority countries — one that plausibly includes Pakistan — by including language on asking about honour killings, people’s attitudes on ‘radical Islam,’ and 'Shariah law.'

A less bigoted, more humanising view on immigration to the United States would take into account that most of the people seeking to immigrate likely do not intend to flout US laws, to enact violence or terrorism, or to spread bigotry.

For example, the Wall Street Journal has reported that, “numerous studies going back more than a century have shown that immigrants — regardless of nationality or legal status — are less likely than the native population to commit violent crimes or to be incarcerated.”

Specifically, a study from the Immigration Policy Center states that “for every ethnic group without exception, incarceration rates among young men are lowest for immigrants.”

It is ironic that Donald Trump has proposed an ideological test that would ensure that immigrants to the United States would not spread bigotry or hatred, when his own supporters often do not subscribe to the values of diversity and tolerance.

A recent Daily Show clip brought this irony to the forefront when it showed people at a Trump rally being asked questions that would be similar to the questions on the proposed ideology test and providing answers that do not exhibit the standard of tolerance and respect for the US Constitution that Donald Trump would require from immigrants.

I am not just concerned about Trump's proposed immigration restrictions on Muslims, but also about his immigration policies that would affect other groups as well.

The Pew Research Center has suggested that Trump’s proposed immigration policies “would reduce legal immigration through 2065 by tens of millions”. Pew’s director of Hispanic research put the number of people who would not be able to immigrate to the United States to “at least 30 million.”

I am also concerned about other facets of the Trump campaign.

I am concerned about the way Trump has alienated Mexican Americans and Latino Americans throughout his campaign.

As a woman, I am concerned about the continuous lack of respect that he has shown to women and the misogyny he has perpetrated.

I am concerned as a student of international law about his foreign policy positions and frankly, his lack of the appropriate temperament for diplomacy and for negotiating peaceful solutions to global problems.

I am concerned that in an era of increasing police violence against African Americans, a presidential candidate who has already shown so much bigotry will not be able to institute change and prove that Black lives do indeed matter.

Donald Trump’s campaign worries me as a Pakistani Muslim immigrant, but it also worries me as an American.

Ultimately, it is up to Americans like my family and me to make up the difference and prove that we are capable of being better than a man who has displayed so much bigotry and who has alienated so many of us.

On Friday January 27, 2017, United States President Donald Trump issued an Executive Order titled “Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States.”

The text of the order stops the admission of refugees from Syria indefinitely and further bans entry of all citizens from seven countries including Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen. The refugee ban does not state a time limit.

The ban on visa issuance will be in effect for 90 days after which the list will be reconsidered (and possibly expanded) to include other countries, including Pakistan.

The text of the order refers to 9/11 and the threat of “radical Islamic terrorists” as the basis for instituting the ban.

In an interview following the signing, Trump stated that the ban on refugees would not extend to Syrian Christians who are fleeing persecution. And while the ban does not call itself a “Muslim ban” its effect will be to ban non-citizen Muslims from the listed countries from traveling to the United States.

The day after Trump signed the Executive Order, visa and green card holders from the countries listed were already being stopped at US airports and in several cases pulled out of planes at other airports around the world as they attempted to travel to the United States.

US politicians opposing the ban appeared on various cable news channels, denouncing the action, noting that it had been instituted on Holocaust Memorial Day in the United States.

Prior to intervening in World War II, the United States turned away large numbers of Jewish refugees, many of whom were later killed in Hitler’s concentration camps. Syrian Muslim refugees are likely to face the same fate as they are sent back into the hands of Daesh and the Assad regime.

As for Pakistanis, although they have not – yet – been included on Trump’s list of seven countries, he has proposed “extreme vetting” for Pakistani visa applicants.

Even though the exact procedures that come under the extreme vetting label have not been explained, it is very likely that visa processing for Pakistani citizens wishing to travel to the United States will take longer than usual.

The fact that Pakistan is not included in the list does not preclude directives to consular officials to drastically reduce the number of visas issued to Pakistani citizens.

Another notable facet of the current ban is that it applies to all non-citizens from the countries stated. This means that even green card holders, known as “legal permanent residents” or “resident aliens” are also barred from returning to the United States.

Based on the above, Pakistani citizens who are legal permanent residents of US (green card holders) or hold other US non-immigrant visas must take seriously the possibility of an imminent ban on Pakistani citizens as well.

Pakistani citizens who are currently in the United States on F student visas, H-1B visas, J visas (usually issued to resident physicians and exchange programs) should not travel out of the United States for the next several months if they wish to return there.

Those who hold these visas and are currently in Pakistan and wish to return to the United States should perhaps return immediately.

Those Pakistanis who are legal permanent residents/US green card holders and wish to return and live in the United States must also return as soon as possible.

If the ban is extended to Pakistan, none of these categories of people (save US citizens) will be able to return to the United States.

Several lawsuits have been filed in the United States challenging the ban. Not only will it take a long time for the challenges to these bans to be adjudicated, it is also unlikely that the ban will be deemed unconstitutional.

This is because while religious tests and discrimination are not permitted under the United States Constitution, those constitutional protections do not apply to non-citizens or beyond the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.

Finally, US courts have already ruled that those denied visas do not have the right to appeal the denial in US courts.

For all of these reasons, all Pakistanis holding US green cards and non-immigrant visas should return to the United States without delay and if they are already there, refrain from traveling outside the country.

Update: The Department of Homeland Security has formally issued a notification that green card holders are exempt from the Executive Order.

Have you been affected by Trump's ban or know anyone who has suffered because of it? Tell us at blog@dawn.com.

There is no safe place left anymore.

It is hard to imagine a quieter suburb than Sainte Foy and a town quainter than Quebec City. But this façade of calm and peace collapsed Sunday night when at least two masked gunmen stormed a mosque in Sainte Foy and shot dead at least six Muslims. Several others were seriously injured.

Details about the mass murder, which appears to be hate motivated, are trickling in.

Only months earlier, someone left a pig’s head and a hate-laden message at the front door of the same mosque.

Wrapped in plastic, a greeting card accompanied the pig’s head that read in French Bon appétit, or eat well. The perpetrators knew that Muslims, just like observant Jews, don’t consume pork. It was not a peace offering.

Sunday's attack is a deliberate act of violence intended to terrorise Quebec’s minority groups.

Quebec is unique in Canada and North America for its distinct cultural roots. Most Quebecers speak French as their first or only language. For decades, French-speaking Quebecers have campaigned for independence from the rest of Canada. A 1995 referendum on the future of Quebec was decided by less than a percentage point difference when 50.6% Quebecers voted not to separate.

It is not just the French language, cuisine or architecture that makes Quebec unique. Most Quebecers have strong opinions about religion. The Quiet Revolution, as it is known in Quebec, was the people’s reaction against organised religion. Thus most Quebecers are steadfast seculars and oppose any overt manifestation of religion in the public sphere. Some also campaigned to remove a crucifix that hangs in Quebec’s National Assembly.

To have a mass murder unfold in the heart of secular Canada appears a puzzle. Quebec City, a mid-sized town of half-a-million is the capital of Quebec, Canada’s second most populous province. The city had its fair share of conflicts starting with the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759 when the English and the French fought for its control.

But that was in the past. Today’s Quebec City is a sophisticated, modern town that has remained faithful to its traditions.

The city is home to Canada’s oldest institution of higher learning, Université Laval, which opened its doors in 1663. A modern university with over 35,000 students, Laval attracts brilliant minds from across Canada and the world. The city’s architecture is perhaps Europe’s farthest outpost where Château Frontenac’s stunning façades rival the very best across the Atlantic.

Why then such a ghastly act of violence descended on Quebec City?

Regrettably, this is not the first incident of mass shooting in Quebec. The worst known incident took place in Quebec’s largest city, Montreal, where a deranged man shot dead several women studying engineering at École Polytechnique.

14 women lost their lives on that fateful day in December 1989. The 25-year old murderer, Marc Lépine, was born to an Algerian immigrant and a Canadian woman.

Quebec can be a tough place for immigrants. I lived in Montreal for several years when I taught at McGill University. Immigrants are often caught between the subtle struggle between the Anglophones and Francophones. Both want to influence Quebec, and both have succeeded only temporarily.

Often, the province is governed by a separatist political party whose stated aim is to separate Quebec from Canada. In the larger struggle for an independent homeland for Francophones, immigrants become the unintended victims.

I am reminded of the ordeal of a McGill student who was detained by the police for taking photographs at a transit station. The student, a native of Montreal, was of Sri Lankan heritage and worked in my research lab at the university. I had assigned him to document commuter flows at a subway station. He carried a letter from me explaining his assignment in case someone would question him. He was still arrested and charged.

On any given day, hundreds of visitors take thousands of photographs while riding Montreal’s buses, subways, and trains. They are neither discouraged nor detained. Yet, a dark-skinned young man with a camera put the security establishment in overdrive. Months later the authorities settled the matter out of court.

Such incidents are not necessarily rare. As recently as in 2013, the then provincial government run by the separatist Parti Québécois proposed a secular charter, Bill 60, which would have, among numerous other provisions, prevented public sector employees from wearing religious gear and symbols.

Hijab wearing Muslim women, and men who wore religious headgear, e.g., Sikhs, Orthodox Jews, and observant Muslims were the direct victims of Bill 60.

Several incidents of hate and racism followed when individuals tried to forcibly remove hijab from women in malls and on public transit. The crucifix hanging in the Quebec’s National Assembly was exempted.

Muslims are not the only victims of the infrequent racism in Quebec. In April 2016, Supninder Singh Khehra, while vacationing in Quebec City, was verbally abused and physically attacked by a group of men.

The Toronto native was trying to hail a cab in Quebec City when a group of young men in a car first hurled insults at him and then attacked him. The perpetrators ran away when the police arrived at the scene.

“I’m really worried about the safety and wellbeing of young kids of my community who wear turbans,” Mr Khehra told a news reporter.

Mr Khehra believed that he was attacked because of his race, colour, and the headgear. The Quebec police, however, didn’t consider it a hate crime.

The video of the attack is available online and leaves little to the imagination. It was a hate crime and ignoring it would only encourage bigots. One of the attackers, Gabriel Royer-Tremblay, was found guilty and sentenced to 10 months.

Mohammed Yangui, president of the Quebec City mosque, confirmed that the remains of the victims were already in the city’s morgue. There could be more fatalities as the number of injured is large. For now, at least six families in Quebec City, have lost a loved one in an act of terror.

It is hard to say what the future holds for the minorities in North America. American President, Donald Trump, has restricted nationals from seven Muslim-dominated countries from visiting the United States. Mr Trump is about to build a wall with Mexico. The space and welcome for refugees are fast shrinking in Mr Trump’s America.

Canada, despite the carnage in Quebec City, remains a welcoming place for refugees. Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister, pledged to keep Canada’s doors open to victims of war and violence.

“To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength,” he wrote in a tweet.

Are you an immigrant living in Canada who has experienced discrimination? Share it with us at blog@dawn.com

One of the most common liberal responses to the excesses committed by the powerful in Pakistan is to call for people to ‘speak out’.

This familiar refrain, voiced often in the aftermath of the January disappearances of liberal activists, is in most cases understandable and necessary. In the context of a society like Pakistan’s where critical speech and political outspokenness can be a death sentence, speaking truth to power is vital to break the grip of fear and expand the sphere of political possibility.

However, in light of the recent abductions and the vicious, coordinated campaign to malign the activists, there is an urgent need to reevaluate this approach. We must begin to conceive of a horizon to progressive politics that lies beyond the exercise and defence of speech and reactive protest.

The call to ‘speak out’ is a cornerstone of liberal pluralism the world over, often understood as a necessary antidote to the inequalities and prejudices perpetuated under authoritarianism. As an approach to political action, it is inherently tied to liberal political philosophy, exemplified in Hannah Arendt’s essay Truth and Politics.

This approach sees politics as being principally about debate, involving contestation between different ideological positions where citizens play the passive role of passing judgment on the course of society through the exercise of their free opinions (hence the inviolability of free speech within the liberal framework).

As an activist tactic, it has gained particular prominence in the age of social media, where words can be shared and weaponised at the service of political agendas with a speed and scale that was unimaginable some years ago.

The present decade has produced millions of social media activists who politically participate mainly through memes, videos, blogs and tweets, often with the sole purpose of ‘calling out’ the ideological deficiencies of their opponents and then measuring success in shares and retweets.

In reality though, politics is not just about conflicting viewpoints – it consists of concrete social and economic forces with material interests that are aggregated under various class, ethnic, racial, religious and ideological groupings. To be a political subject is not just to debate and express opinions, it is to engage in the organisation of collective forces that can advance those ideas and interests.

And organising involves much more than articulation of opinions; it is about creating political organisations, formulating long-term strategy, building institutions, forming coalitions and taking collective action to achieve specific goals. As one theorist of collective action defines it, organising is about turning a social bloc into a coherent political force.

Rarely though are instances of bigotry, terrorism and authoritarianism in Pakistan met with appeals to organise – a word that is conspicuously absent from the vocabulary of liberal politics of the country.

While the country’s liberal minority is relatively well-represented in the speech-heavy spaces of electronic media and civil advocacy, few tend to be engaged in the messy business of organising in a strategic, political sense.

One principal reason for this is class. Most liberals and progressives today tend to come from relatively comfortable and better-educated segments of society for whom political organising is not a survival need as it is for say, residents of informal settlements constantly at the risk of arbitrary eviction.

However, there are also distinct historical reasons for this stark oversight. Part of it has to do with the deeply-ingrained suspicion of political organisations, whereby anything remotely to do with mass politics – including the task of political organising – is seen as being inherently corrupting.

This is not simply a consequence of disillusionment with rampant political corruption; it is the result of the deliberate inculcation of anti-democratic attitudes by the state – through education, historical revision and media manipulation – that has served to undermine the very idea of political participation itself.

This mindset has seeped so deeply into liberal circles that it has bred a stubborn insistence on remaining apolitical even if the issue at hand is intrinsically political. At a meeting held by local activists last year to decide upon the response of civil society to the mob of pro-Mumtaz Qadri clerics that had descended upon Islamabad, a friend suggested involving local political parties in counter-mobilisation efforts. In response, a lady, who is a prominent civil society activist, immediately responded, “No, we don’t want to make this political.” One wonders how it is possible to take on the menace of oganised extremism if one doesn't even see it as a political battle.

Another critical historical factor is that progressives have largely lost the spaces in which they used to organise at a mass level in the 1960s and 1970s – universities and factories. Student politics, the backbone of most progressive movements in Pakistan’s history, has been illegal for 33 years since Ziaul Haq’s student union ban in 1984. An entire generation has passed through the education system without an iota of engagement with organised politics.

Trade unions have been under constant attack since the Zia era, further weakened by the onset of privatisation, occupational fragmentation and informalisation, with the result that now less than 3% of the Pakistani labour force is unionised.

With the near-elimination of these incubators for progressive politics by the state, most mainstream political parties remain in the grip of unaccountable feudal and capitalist dynasties and organised traders, for whom progressive principles are rarely a priority.

On the other hand, the organising spaces of the country's rightwing, including those using religion for financial and political gain, are now a multi-million dollar industry with deep-rooted material interests, from political parties to television channels to charity empires, protected by strength in numbers and arms.

This is hardly a political enemy that can be taken on through a mere ‘war of ideas’. The events of the past weeks are a particularly pressing reminder of both the vulnerability of a politics of self-expression and the necessity of concrete organising in this deeply uneven political arena.

The abductions and blasphemy accusations are a clear sign that critical speech on social media is now a target for violent repression.

At the same time, it is also evident that the protest campaign against the disappearances has only been made possible by the organised Left networks that Salman Haider, who was recently confirmed as “fine and safe” by his brother, was part of. Without these networks, the abductions may well have gone unnoticed like they are in Balochistan, Fata and Sindh.

In these bleak and dangerous times, there are no quick fixes to the fascism plaguing Pakistan. To begin to fight back, all citizens – not just existing progressives – who oppose the present state of affairs must overcome their political inhibitions and begin to organise; build political organisations or join existing ones; recreate and build new spaces for collective action; conceive and implement strategies to redistribute power and wealth, and forge empathetic and cooperative human and political relationships across class, ethnic and gender lines.

Yes, speaking out and protesting must also continue, but not simply in its reactive form; it must be tied to a strategy to build organised political power. Only if we undertake this process will we eventually build the popular political alternative required to push back the fascist tide. If not, we will simply be left counting the numbers of the disappeared and silenced amongst us.

The biggest question about Hafiz Saeed’s house arrest isn’t why, but why now?

After all, we’ve been here before.

He was placed under house arrest in December 2008, just days after the Mumbai terror attacks that New Delhi and Washington believe he helped orchestrate. He was detained again in September 2009. In both cases, he was released in relatively short order.

In more recent years, he has essentially lived free in Lahore, holding rallies and hosting journalists, including those from the West.

So why did Pakistani authorities decide to once again place him under house arrest on Monday?

One Pakistani media report points to US pressure, contending that in the last days of the Obama administration, American officials warned Pakistan to rein in Saeed or risk sanctions.

Saeed himself, in a video released shortly after his detention, bizarrely claimed that Pakistan was obliged to act because of US President Donald Trump’s warm relationship with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. A Saeed spokesman made a similar claim.

Washington, of course, has pushed Pakistan to crack down on Saeed for years, and unsuccessfully so. So it beggars belief to assume that US pressure would suddenly and magically prompt Pakistan to detain Saeed—and particularly at a time when the US-Pakistan relationship appears to be entering a period of drift. Washington is shifting its engagement with New Delhi into overdrive, while Islamabad is cementing its failsafe partnership with Beijing.

It’s also folly to assume the Trump administration was actively pushing Pakistan to move on Saeed. Trump has been in office for less than two weeks, and beyond his rapid-fire issuance of executive orders, his presidency appears frenzied and disorganised—not to mention hamstrung by numerous unfilled senior diplomatic and national security posts.

Bottom line? The Trump administration has too much on its plate to be focusing laser-like on Pakistan.

If any external pressure compelled Pakistan to place Saeed under house arrest, it’s more likely to have come from Beijing than Washington.

In a telling yet underreported development several weeks ago, China’s former consul general in Kolkata published a blog post calling on Beijing to rethink its default policy of blocking Indian attempts to have JM leader Masood Azhar sanctioned by the UN.

This all makes good sense when we think about the high stakes of CPEC. For Beijing (as for Islamabad), rapid and sustained progress on this project is a core strategic imperative.

Hafiz Saeed doesn’t pose a direct threat to China, but so long as he walks free he poses a direct threat to India-Pakistan relations.

The last thing China wants as it pushes forward with CPEC is an India-Pakistan relationship on tenterhooks — not to mention on a war footing, as was the case for several weeks last year.

China has long leaned on Pakistan to tackle terror more robustly — and it’s arguably gotten results. Some have speculated that Beijing’s prodding played a role in Pakistan’s decision to launch the Zarb-i-Azb operation.

The anti-state militants targeted in that offensive had not only terrorised Pakistan; they’d also posed a threat to Chinese investments and workers in Pakistan. Chinese pressure may also have helped prompt Pakistan’s Red Mosque offensive.

In short, we should never underestimate China’s leverage in Pakistan, including its ability to get Pakistan to do things it often resists.

And yet the question still remains: Why now? If we assume China influenced Pakistan’s decision to detain Saeed, why didn’t Pakistan act weeks or months ago?

Enter President Trump’s executive order on immigration.

It’s doubtful Trump actively pressured Pakistan to rein in Hafiz Saeed, but it’s likely Pakistan’s detention of Saeed was done with Trump in mind.

We can read the house arrest, at least in part, as an effort by Pakistan to showcase its counterterrorism bonafides to the new US administration, and to dissuade Trump from adding Pakistan to the list of countries that can’t send their citizens to the United States for 90 days. Trump’s chief of staff has suggested Pakistan could be added to the list.

Of course, all this speculating could ultimately be immaterial and Saeed may be released relatively soon.

Unless, that is, China has the ability to get Pakistan to go beyond token gestures when it comes to addressing anti-India militancy, and unless Pakistan chooses to do some big-time signaling to Washington by keeping Saeed in detention for an extended period.

Alas, given Pakistan’s core strategic interests and the value the authorities seem to accord to Saeed as a key asset, I wouldn’t count on either scenario materialising anytime soon.

The first people

Long before the emergence of the great Indus Valley Civilisation on the banks of River Indus 5,000 years ago, the earliest known people to make present-day Pakistan their home were the Soanians.

They were hunter-gatherers who lived 50,000 years ago. Archaeologists gave them this name because their tools, pottery, and fossils of various wild animals were found in Soan Valley near Islamabad, the capital of present-day Pakistan.

Still standing

16 stones, believed to have been erected almost 2,500 years ago by a civilisation of sun-worshippers, still stand in the Swabi District of present-day Pakistan. Each stone is approximately 10ft tall. Archaeologists believe they may be pillars of an ancient sun temple.

Alexander attacked in Multan

After conquering the vast Persian Empire, the armies of famous Greek warrior-king, Alexander, entered what today is Pakistan. In 326 BC (or over 2300 years ago), his campaign received a severe blow when he was wounded by a poison arrow on the walls of a citadel in Multan. Though he did not die, he soon fell sick and had to abandon his Indian campaign.

The citadel where Alexander was wounded was being defended by the Brahmin Malli tribe. Today, on the site of the citadel stands the magnificent tomb of Sufi saint Shah Rukh-i-Alam. It was built in 1324 CE by Muslim king, Ghiasuddin Tughlaq.

Born in Swat

Padmasambhava, the founder of Tibetan Buddhism (also called ‘the second Buddha’), was born in the 8th century CE in an area which today lies between Lower Dir and Swat District in modern-day Pakistan.

After ruling as a Buddhist king in the area, he is said to have abdicated his throne and travelled to Tibet to introduce Buddhism there. He is still revered as a sacred figure in Tibet.

Barbarian rule in Sialkot

Huns were fierce nomads in Central Asia. In the 5th century CE they managed to conquer vast lands in Europe, Central Asia and ancient India. They entered India through present-day Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province in Pakistan.

Huns were fire-worshippers. A Hun warrior, Mehr Gul (Sunflower), established himself as king here. He ruled from his capital in what today is Sialkot in Pakistan’s Punjab province. His rule was brutal and he was defeated and removed by a confederacy of Hindu Rajput rulers from Rajasthan (in present-day India) and Multan (in present-day Pakistan).

Qasim’s Landing

Armies of 8th century Arab general Muhammad Bin Qasim invaded Sindh from the sea. The army landed on the shores of Debal. Debal stretched all the way to the ancient city of Banbhore in Sindh from where Qasim’s forces defeated the armies of Brahmin king, Raja Daher.

Debal today is the Manora area in Pakistan’s metropolitan city, Karachi. An ancient Hindu temple can still be seen in the background.

A 5-star battle

Central Asian Muslim king Mahmud Ghaznavi invaded India from Afghanistan. In 1001 CE, he marched on to Punjab after defeating Hindu king, Jayapala, in a battle in what today is Peshawar in Pakistan. It was a fierce battle. Jayapala set himself on fire after his army was defeated.

In 1971, when a site in Peshawar was being dug up to lay the foundations of Hotel Intercontinental (now called Pearl Continental), workers found hundreds of old human, elephant and horse bones. Archaeologists believe that the ground on which the hotel was eventually built was the site of the fierce battle between the armies of Ghaznavi and Jayapala.

Sindh’s romantic rise

Famous romantic folk-tales Sassi-Punnu, Umer-Marvi, and Soni Mahiwal were all first conceived during the powerful Soomra rule in Sindh between 1024 and 1351 CE. During this period, Sindhi language and culture were greatly enriched. The Soomra dynasty folded in the mid-14th century when the last Soomra king was defeated by Allauddin Khilji, the second king of the Khilji dynasty ruling from Delhi.

Many of the folk-tales created by Sindhi storytellers during the Soomra rule inspired the famous 17th century Sufi saint, Shah Abdul Latif, who reproduced them in writing when he came and stayed in Sindh. It is through him that these tales also reached Punjab.

The war which ended the Soomra dynasty in Sindh was fought over a princess. Her name was Bilquees Bhagi. The Soomra dynasty had friendly relations with the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad. But when the power of the Caliphate began to weaken (due to attacks by the Mongols), the Soomras tried to rekindle their links with the Delhi Sultans.

Allauddin Khilji asked Soomra king, Doda, to send Bilquees to him as his bride. Doda refused and went to war with the Sultan. After Doda’s defeat, Bilquees is said to have vanished. Most believe she committed suicide. Her body was never found.

Medieval safari

Wild animals were aplenty in the region, which today is Pakistan, when Mughal king Babur invaded India from Afghanistan. A painting of him hunting rhinoceroses in the outskirts of Peshawar appears in his autobiography Baburnama. Babur founded India’s Mughal Dynasty in 1526 CE.

Rhinos, elephants, lions and cheetahs were common all across what today is Pakistan. Out of these, rhinos, elephants and lions became extinct here from 18th century onwards, mainly due to hunting, human encroachment and climate change. Cheetahs became extinct in the 1950s.

Paradise lost

Lahore’s famous Shalimar Garden was built in 1641 CE during the rule of fifth Mughal king, Shah Jahan. The land on which it was built belonged to ‘Mian’ family belonging to Punjab’s Arain tribe. The family was given the custodianship of the Garden by Shah Jahan.

The Mian Arian family retained the custodianship of the Garden for over 350 years until the site was taken over by the government of Pakistan in 1962 during the Ayub Khan regime.

Between 1965 and late 1970s, the Shalimar Gardens hosted a number of high-profile functions and receptions. It was also a favourite tourist resort. However, from the 1980s onward, the Garden began to deteriorate. Since 2001, it has been placed on UNESCO’s list of Endangered World Heritage Sites.

A flood of crocodiles

In a large pond adjacent to an old shrine of a Sufi saint in the Mangopir area of present-day Karachi are dozens of crocodiles. Legend claims that they have been staying and breeding here ever since a Sufi saint settled in this area in the 13th century CE.

19th century British colonialists, when they annexed Sindh, were fascinated by the phenomenon. They would go up to the shrine and watch the crocodiles being fed.

Scientists and archaeologists have found crocodile bones in the area which are actually older than 13th century CE. Scientists believe the bones may actually be 5,000 years old. They also added that the crocodiles were carried here in an ancient flood thousands of years ago that originated in what is called Hub and is situated in present-day Balochistan area. The crocodiles were stranded in Mangopir when the floods receded. They have been staying and breeding in this pond for centuries.

Even today, the crocodiles here are largely docile and are regularly fed by pilgrims who continue to visit the shrine.

The late blooming of Eid Miladun Nabi

Eid Miladun Nabi is celebrated on the birthday of Prophet Muhammad (Peace be Upon Him). He is said to have been born in Makkah in the late 6th century CE. Eid Miladun Nabi is a colourful and joyous occasion, which is observed by most Muslims - except for some Muslim sects and sub-sects. Eid Miladun Nabi is said to have first gained prominence in the 11th century CE in Egypt under the rule of the Fatimid dynasty. By the 13th century, it was being celebrated in Turkey during the rise of the Ottoman Empire.

In the subcontinent, Eid Miladun Nabi became a lively and boisterous occasion in the 16th century CE during Mughal rule. In the context of the area which is present day Pakistan, Eid Miladun Nabi was most actively observed in Punjab and Sindh during British rule. It was declared a national holiday by the government of Pakistan in 1949.

The Africans of Karachi

Lyari is one of the oldest areas of Karachi. The area grew from a community of fishing villages and began to expand in the 18th century CE. Lyari has always had a large community of Sheedis or Sidis. They are also known as Afro-Indians and/or Afro-Pakistanis.

The Sheedis were first brought from Africa to South Asia as slaves by Portuguese traders in the 16th century CE. After they gained their freedom during the start of British rule here, most Afro-Indians settled in Gujarat (in present-day India) and in the Makran area of Balochistan, and in Sindh in present-day Pakistan.

Sheedis who have lived for generations in Lyari were brought from Central and Southern Africa. According to some recent DNA tests of Lyari’s residents, scientists suggest that a majority of Sheedis once belonged to the Bantu-speaking tribes of Africa. Most of them converted to Islam.

Lyari has always been a working-class area. It started to become a slum in the 1940s. Crime and drug addiction began to increase in the area from the late 1960s. Lyari then became a hotbed of anti-government activism during the Ziaul Haq dictatorship in the 1980s. In the 1990s, violent gang warfare erupted here which lasted until 2015.

Unlike the rest of the country where sports such as cricket, hockey and squash have been popular, Lyari has produced some of the best Pakistani boxers and footballers.

The first cinema

One of the first cinemas in India was built in Karachi, Star, which was erected in 1917. It lasted until the 1940s before being pulled down.

In the 1970s, another Star cinema was built on the site where the original one had stood. The new Star cinema stood adjacent to Bambino cinema.

When Pakistan’s film industry collapsed in the 1980s, this Star too was closed down.

Bruce’s Quetta

When Quetta came under British rule in 1877, a British architect called Mr Bruce designed a street in that city which was said to be one of the most beautiful in the region. Called Bruce Road, it was lined up with high-end shops. It also had a pub simply called Bruce’s Inn which had Mr Bruce’s image on its signboard. The pub was often frequented by the British and local elite of the city.

The older buildings here were destroyed in an earthquake which razed the city of Quetta in 1935. However, until the early 1970s, there was still a tailor shop and a liquor store here both named after the enigmatic Mr Bruce.

Once upon an oil field

In 1915, oil was discovered in Khaur - an area which today is in the Attock District of Pakistan. British drilling companies believed that the area had huge reserves of crude oil. In fact, in 1938, when vast reserves of oil were discovered in Saudi Arabia, the British were sure that the oil fields of Khaur would be able to produce as much.

The oil fields of Khaur did produce oil but not as much as expected. When the area became part of Pakistan, the Pakistan government continued to drill more oil wells in Khaur. The last such well was drilled in 1954. But by then the oil in the grounds of Khaur had been exhausted.

Cleaner days

In the late 19th century when a plague struck Karachi, British colonialists (who had annexed the city in 1839), devised a hectic plan to cleanse the city. By developing the city’s creaky infrastructure and building a complex sewerage and garbage-disposal system, the British were successful. By the 1920s, Karachi was being described as ‘the Paris of Asia’ and it became one of the cleanest cities in South Asia. The roads were regularly scrubbed with water.

Even after Karachi became part of Pakistan in 1947, the practice of cleaning the streets and roads of the city with water continued. The practice stopped sometime in the mid-1960s.

Overcrowding in the 1970s created larger slums and by the mid-1980s, the city’s old infrastructure (which had not been improved) began to break down. The city fell into a crime-infested, frenzied mass of chaos.

Karachi also began to face a serious garbage-disposal problem from the late 1980s. This problem has continued to worsen.

The forgotten tides

One of the main threats faced by all cities by the sea are tidal waves generated by an earthquake or a raging storm. Over the years, Karachi has been lucky to have only received the fading tale of storms. However, the lesser-known fact is that the city has actually been hit twice by deadly tidal waves.

The first one hit the city in 1944 due to an earthquake in the waters of Makran coast. Newspapers of the time reported that as the earth shook, a 40ft tidal wave smashed the shores of the city. Over 400 people lost their lives. The water also made its way in the more populated areas of central Karachi.

In December 1965, an abnormal winter cyclone developed in the Arabian Sea. It generated massive waves which crashed into Karachi and completely submerged the entire southern end of the city. Newspaper reports suggest that over 10,000 people lost their lives. The cyclone which created this devastation was called Cyclone 013A.

A tent regime

When Pakistan gained independence in 1947, it was extremely short on land and other resources, especially when millions of Muslims migrated to the new country from India. Vast refugee camps were set up to accommodate the refugees. But the refugees alone did not live in the tents in these camps. Open fields in Karachi and Lahore were covered with tents which were also used by government officials and bureaucrats as offices.

Many government officials, including some ministers, and bureaucrats worked from these tents until new office buildings were built or acquired in the early 1950s. Pakistan’s first stock exchange in Karachi was also situated in one such tent.

Angry wives

When the 1956 Constitution declared Pakistan an ‘Islamic Republic’, many newspapers reported that the wives of most parliamentarians accused their husbands of hypocrisy. Cartoons began to appear in the papers satirising the situation.

In 1958, when military chief Ayub Khan and President Iskandar Mirza imposed the country’s first Martial Law, they suspended the Constitution, claiming that it had been used by cynical politicians ‘to peddle Islam for political gains'. The country’s name was changed to Republic of Pakistan.

The name was changed back to Islamic Republic of Pakistan in the 1973 Constitution.

A Little Israel in Karachi

Jews in South Asia first arrived in the 19th century. Most of them came to cities such as Karachi, Peshawar and Rawalpindi to escape persecution in Persia. By the 1940s, Karachi had the largest concentration of Jews, with most of them living in the city’s Saddar and Soldier Bazar areas.

Most Jews living in Rawalpindi and Peshawar began to leave after the creation of Israel in 1948. The last Jewish family to leave Pakistan was in the late 1960s. It had been living in Karachi for decades and its members were all registered Pakistanis who had supported Mr Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan.

The drowned town of Azad Kashmir

In 1967, the government of Pakistan completed the construction of the Mangla Dam. It remains to be the 7th largest dam in the world. Built on Jhelum River in the Mirpur District of Azad Kashmir, the dam’s construction caused the ‘controlled flooding’ of some villages and one major town. They were completely submerged underwater.

The inhabitants were all evacuated and compensated well before the submergence. For years, some structures of the drowned town would slightly emerge during low tide. Some of these structures can still be seen, but today they appear a lot more rarely than before. Curious folk still dive in this section of the river to investigate the remains of the drowned town.

The phenomenon inspired the finale of the popular Pakistan television serial, Waaris (1979). In the final episode of the series, a conservative and traditionalist feudal lord, Chaudhry Hashmat, decides to remain inside his ancestral house as his vacated village begins to submerge under water due to the construction of a dam.

The national dress

The shalwar-kameez (for both men and women) is often considered to be Pakistan’s national dress. The fact is, this wasn’t always the case. Until the early 1970s, Pakistan’s national dress (for men) was actually the shervanee.

Until the late 1960s, urban white-collar Pakistanis and politicians were expected to turn up to work either in a shervanee, a three-piece-suit or in shirt and trousers. Shalwar-kameez was not allowed.

Even college and university students were expected to turn up in a shervanee or a three-piece-suit during special occasions and functions.

The shalwar-kameez only got traction in urban Pakistan when the populist Prime Minister, Z. A. Bhutto (1971-77), began wearing it at mass rallies. Even though he was also known for his taste for exquisite and expensive three-piece-suits, he almost always appeared in shalwar-kameez at large public gatherings. The shalwar-kameez became a populist political statement of sorts and was then labeled as awami libaas (people's dress).

In the 1980s, however, during the conservative dictatorship of Ziaul Haq, the shalwar-kameez somehow began being associated with the Muslim faith. This was strange because, according to famous archaeologist and historian, Ahmad Hasan Dani, the first ever variants of the shalwar-kameez were actually introduced in this region almost 2,000 years ago during the rule of Buddhist king, Kanishka, in present-day Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

The tikka inventors

Most Pakistanis when they order a chicken tikka outside Pakistan get small boneless barbecued pieces of chicken. In Pakistan, a chicken tikka means either a whole barbecued leg piece (with thigh) or a chunky chest piece of a chicken.

Very few know that this version of the chicken tikka is available in Pakistan alone. In fact, it was invented by the chefs of the once famous Cafe de Khan in Karachi in 1960. The cafe offered this unique version of the chicken tikka which it then encouraged to be had with a paratha and a chilled Coke or a pint of beer.

People loved it and ever since 1960, this version of the chicken tikka has been popular all across Pakistan - and, for decades, only in Pakistan.

The casino

On the site where Pakistan’s largest shopping mall stands today (in Karachi’s Sea View area), there was once a stylish building erected between 1975-76. It was a widespread structure which was supposed to be the country’s first major casino.

The land for it was allotted by the Z.A. Bhutto regime to an entertainment business tycoon, Tufail Sheikh, who already owned a hotel and a nightclub in the city. The idea was to construct a giant casino to attract rich Arab sheikhs to Karachi after a civil war had broken out in Beirut. Beirut, before the war, had been a favourite haunt of rich Arabs and Americans frequenting its casinos.

The casino was completed in April 1977. It was an impressive and imposing structure with a huge hall where gambling tables and machines were placed. The casino also had bars, restaurants, guest rooms and a nightclub. The Bhutto regime was expecting a windfall of foreign exchange and a booming entertainment and hoteling industry to emerge around the casino.

In March 1977, the Bhutto regime got cornered by a violent protest movement by a right-wing alliance of opposition parties. In April, he agreed to their demand of closing down nightclubs, gambling at horse racing and the sale of alcoholic beverages (to Muslims). Ironically, these sudden bans were imposed on the day the casino was to be inaugurated.

Karachi already had the most number of luxurious hotels in Pakistan. Anticipating a flood of visitors from oil-rich Arab countries, Europe and the United States after the emergence of the casino, a huge hotel too began to go up in the city’s Club Road area. It was to be the Hyatt Regency and was one of the biggest in the region.

There were already two 5-star hotels on Club Road (Intercontinental and Palace) and two nightclubs (Playboy and Oasis). But as the casino’s inauguration was halted, the construction of the hotel too stopped.

In July 1977, the Bhutto regime fell to a reactionary military coup. The doors of the casino were locked, even though Mr Sheikh still owned the land and the building. In the 1990s, the casino building was turned into a recreational spot for children, with rides and all. In 2011, the building was bought over by real estate developers. It was finally torn down and a massive shopping mall was erected in its place. Many believe that had the casino survived and functioned as planned, Karachi would have become what Dubai is today.

Pakistan’s Polish soldiers

As the situation in Poland got worse during the Nazi occupation and then after World War-II, 45 Polish officers and scientists flew to Pakistan in 1948 and signed a 3-year contract to serve in Pakistan’s nascent armed forces.

The most prominent was a brilliant aeronautical engineer, Władysław Józef Marian Turowicz.

Turowicz joined the Pakistan Air Force as chief scientist and helped set up technical institutes to train fighter pilots and develop new aeronautical technologies. In 1952, he was made Wing Commander in the Pakistan Air Force and in 1959 he was promoted to Group Captain. The very next year he became Air Commodore.

In 1966, he convinced President Ayub Khan to develop Pakistan’s space programme. He was teamed up with future Nobel laureate, Dr Abdus Salam, to develop rocket technology for Pakistan. Salam and Turowicz’s work lay the foundation of Pakistan’s missile technology.

Turowicz stayed in Pakistan with his wife and two daughters, while rest of his Polish colleagues returned to Poland. His third daughter was born in Pakistan and became a gliding expert. She trained the cadets of Shaheen Air in the 1990s.

Two of his daughters married Pakistanis and the third one married an East Pakistani (now Bangladesh). Turowicz died in a car crash in Karachi in 1980.

He was given a number of state and military awards in Pakistan: Sitara-i-Pakistan (in 1965); Tamgha-i-Pakistan (1967); Sitara-i-Khidmat (1967); Sitara-i-Quaid-e-Azam (1971); Sitara-i-Imtiaz (1972); and the Abdus Salam Award (1978).

All photos are taken from Archives 150

My father always wanted me to be a lawyer. Like many Muslim parents, he was thinking of a job that was safe, secure, and lacking in ostentation. So I went to law school, passed the Bar Exam in my first attempt, and was sworn in as an attorney in May 2012.

But instead of choosing a safe, secure desk job that kept me tied up in paperwork from 9am to 5pm, I chose a job in criminal defence, defending people accused of serious felony offences both in the state of Illinois and federally across the United States. I spent my days with (alleged) gangsters, robbers, and murderers, and I was honoured to do so. I chose to be the kind of lawyer that fights.

When Donald Trump signed an executive order that has widely come to be known as the Muslim ban, I was at a loss for what to do. I had been trained to fight the good fight, but without any knowledge of immigration law, what was I supposed to do? My strength lay in defending sexual assault cases, not treading through the minefield of complex immigration laws.

After a day or so, watching news stories trickle in about an Oscar nominee unable to enter the country for the Academy Awards and a five-year old boy held in questioning while his anxious mother waited with protesters, I decided that I could no longer sit on the sidelines. I had to put my strengths to use. It may not have been precisely what my father envisioned for me, but neither of my parents have ever held me back from righteous fights.

My friend Elleni and I had attended the Women’s March in Chicago the weekend before, marching down Michigan Avenue with signs in our hands to the federal courthouse.

One week later, on January 29, each armed with a satchel containing a computer, tablet, adaptor, and some legal pads, we drove to O’Hare International Airport to offer our services as attorneys.

Terminal 5, by the McDonald’s. These were the directions I had seen on Twitter or Snapchat. They are excellent sites and apps for real-time updates on grassroots events and scrolling endlessly through them was the form my anxiety had taken since Trump had assumed office.

Sure enough, several tables were set up and attorneys were divided up in stations. Some were scouring social media to get updates on what was happening at other airports across the country and to coordinate procedures. Some were working on declaratory injunctions on behalf of those detained, while others were making signs. The woman heading the operation was speaking to a CNN reporter.

The first thing I noticed – because Elleni elbowed me excitedly and hissed it in my ear – was that the vast majority of the volunteer attorneys were women and a significant number of them were women of colour.

“It’s always women,” Elleni murmured to me. “We are always the one that rush in to help and actually get things done.”

We milled about for a few minutes, unsure what to do. The assembled attorneys were polite, but busy. Elleni and I made ourselves name tags, scrawling LAWYER with a pink marker, and tried to discern where we were needed. We made our way to a small table and, desperate to be productive, Elleni used the time to teach me one of her skills – drafting petitions for emergency guardianship of minors, in case a detainee wanted to name a guardian for his or her children in the event of deportation.

One of the female attorneys from a national firm noticed us and suggested we look at the intake sheets. She printed us a copy each and we skimmed it. This was an intake sheet – a means of gathering client information – and it was something I could easily master.

What Elleni and I realised as the night went on was that our strength lay in the fact that we belonged to solo and small firms. Elleni was a solo practitioner with one associate; I worked for a small firm of three attorneys, a paralegal, and a legal assistant. We were used to vertical representation, which means handling a client’s problem from the beginning until the resolution. We were used to having people rely on us, thinking fast and on our feet, and dealing with stressed, upset people. And, we were used to intakes.

As well-meaning as all of the assembled attorneys were, the intake sheet was a disaster. There were two parties that were represented: the person possibly being detained (who we would likely not be able to speak to) and their friend or family member waiting for them at the terminal. The questions for each of the two parties were interwoven in such a manner that the conversation did not flow properly, which Elleni and I noticed immediately. It took us mere minutes to reorganise the form and make it our own.

Rather than wait at the attorney tables for people to approach us, Elleni and I decided to walk back and forth between Gates A and B, looking for travelers’ family and friends who fit a certain profile. There are seven countries currently named in the Executive Order, but we knew it was likely that overzealous Customs & Border Patrol agents would overstep their bounds and possibly detain others that looked either Muslim or brown.

“Let’s walk around the airport and profile people,” I remember telling Elleni as I rolled my eyes.

“For justice?”

She laughed as we set off. We looked for people who looked Arab, and were likely waiting for their Arab family members or friends; we looked for South Asians, and we even looked for Hispanics and Latinos.

It is not unusual for Mexican nationals entering the United States on a visa, for example, to be placed in secondary inspections and held for lengthy questioning. A visa, after all, is only a request to be allowed entrance – it is not a guarantee.

There are certain red flags that can trigger Customs & Border Patrol holding a person and ultimately refusing them entry. This can include recent arrests and criminal convictions, illnesses, and mental health concerns, to name a few.

As Elleni and I walked through the airport, we found several families who had been waiting for more than six hours for a family member or a friend coming in from Mexico on a valid visa. We went through our revised checklist, gathering all pertinent information and quickly realising that none of the traditional red flags were indicated.

All the information we gathered was immediately given to the attorneys working by the McDonald’s. It was entered into a database by some attorneys, and then others began the work of reaching out to Customs & Border Patrol.

We patrolled the international gates for several hours, walking over to various sections of seating every now and then to ask, “Has anyone been waiting for more than two hours for family or friends?”

We had immediately learned that this was the most effective way to frame the question; attorneys understood the ramifications of the word ‘detained,’ but many others did not. Waiting for longer than usual, however, was something people understood very well.

Elleni and I coordinated to complete roughly 11 intakes of individuals that had been held for more than five hours. There was one Nigerian green card holder married to a United States citizen whose friends had been waiting for three hours. There were several Hispanic families who had been waiting since noon for their family on a flight from Mexico City. It was well past 7pm by the time we passed their information on to the immigration attorneys.

What was most disturbing to me, however, was the story of five Jordanian minors traveling on valid visas with their citizen stepmother. They had not emerged after de-boarding their flight from Amman, Jordan.

As I patrolled the gates, I noticed an older man sitting in the corner, keeping to himself. He did not engage with us when we walked by several times, asking if anyone had been waiting for long. My intuition told me, however, to approach him and inquire as to how long he had been waiting. That was when I learned that those five children had been held for more than six hours. He was their travel agent and had simply presumed the flight was late.

Trying not to alarm him, I gathered information as efficiently as I could and handed it over to the immigration attorneys leading the operation.

Elleni and I worked diligently, usually step in step, but occasionally separating, against the backdrop of a gathering crowd of protesters.

We took the time to return to the families we’d already spoken to, offering them comfort and limited reassurance. As we were not immigration attorneys, we did not offer specific legal advice. However, our general knowledge of immigration, as well as the procedures in place, was enough to keep the families calm and reassured that a large team of volunteers was working on behalf of their loved ones.

The earnest chants of “This is what America looks like!” certainly helped boost spirits.

When we left, the children from Jordan had still not been released. I was tired, but sleep does not come easily during a Trump administration.

Elleni and I groused that he had been in office for only two weeks and every single one of our weekends had been consumed with protests. We resolved to keep our social calendars light for the next four years so we could be on hand to either demonstrate or offer legal services. We also agreed to learn more about immigration law and to practice drafting petitions for a writ of habeas corpus, one of the uses of which is to challenge the illegal detention in immigration custody.

I scrolled Twitter that night, addicted to the false feeling of productivity that came with absorbing news in real-time. I saw a picture of Rahm Emanuel speaking to the brother of a man removed from O’Hare and sent back to Jordan.

Jordan was not one of the countries named in the Executive Order. I scanned tweets and Facebook messages, looking for anything about the Jordanian children who I had brought to the attention of the rest of the attorney task force.

Finally, I received confirmation from the head of CAIR-Chicago that the children and their stepmother had all been released later that night. Their father in Phoenix was overwhelmed with relief and gratitude.

I forced myself to shut down my phone and head to bed. These fights will continue and expand on multiple fronts. For those of us who have grown used to a life in the trenches, we welcome the challenge. We remain in our element.

Photos and videos by the author.

Are you an immigrant living in America facing difficulties under the Trump administration? Share your story with us at blog@dawn.com

The Ferozepur road, one of Lahore’s arterial thoroughfares, evokes a lot of nostalgia. Starting from the Walled City, connecting several small ancient hamlets on the way, including Ichra, Mozang, Amar Sadhu and Kasur, it leads to Ferozepur in India. Or so it did.

Somewhere along its path, a boundary fence has been constructed. Two of the largest armies in the world, armed to their teeth, stand guard on either side of this fence.

The cities of Lahore and Ferozepur were linked by an ancient bond that several ravages of history – Mongol and Afghan invasions, and British colonialism – could not cut. But this bond was finally ripped apart in 1947 when the two new nation states of India and Pakistan were formed. The Ferozepur road now forlornly runs through Lahore, hastily abandoning its destination at the first sight of armed soldiers, betraying the traveller.

Old Lahore

Located on this road, facing a modern multi-storey building, is the Gulab Devi hospital, which sprawls over an area of 40 acres, an indulgent expanse of space in an increasingly congested city.

For a young citizen, who has only known Pakistan, this name is likely to stand out. After Partition, this name would have been lost, just like the others, when the multi-religious Lahore of the past, with its several temples, gurdwaras, churches, mosques and dargahs, made way for a homogenous city.

Old names, guilty by association with what was seen as an “impure” past were hurriedly jettisoned to keep afloat a new nationalist project. Gulab Devi survived because the hospital is run by a Trust, and one of its conditions is that the hospital’s name cannot be changed.

Constructed in 1934, and inaugurated by M.K. Gandhi, the hospital is named after the mother of Lala Lajpat Rai, the prominent Indian National Congress leader and freedom fighter.

Gulab Devi had died in Lahore due to tuberculosis. Lala Lajpat Rai formed the trust in 1927, and intended to build a hospital in his mother’s memory. Unfortunately the following year, before he could see his dream come true, he died due to a blow to his head at the Lahore Railway Station where he was a leading a procession to protest against the Simon Commission.

The protest against the Simon Commission and the death of Lala Lajpat Rai prompted the Indian National Congress to form a commission to propose constitutional reforms for India.

The Nehru Report of 1928, written by Motilal Nehru, the president of Congress at that time, was a step towards the Congress’s demand for self-rule, or Purna Swaraj, from the British. The report demanded self-government under dominion status within the empire.

The Nehru Report was made possible because of Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement, which was launched in 1920 after his return from South Africa. As part of this movement, Lala Lajpat Rai founded the National College in Lahore to cater to the youth who were now boycotting British colonial institutes.

The road to self-rule

Located a few streets away from the office of the superintendent of police where freedom fighter Bhagat Singh and his comrades assassinated assistant superintendent of police John P Saunders to avenge the death of Lala Lajpat Rai, is the Bradlaugh Hall.

The red brick building is a beautiful amalgamation of colonial and indigenous architectural traditions, but is locked and has fallen into disrepair. This building used to house the National College that Lala Lajpat Rai set up. It is here that Bhagat Singh and his friends received their initial doses of nationalism. During Bhagat Singh’s trial in Lahore, his parents used to receive visitors and sympathisers outside this hall.

Even though Bhagat Singh had parted ways with the Indian National Congress after being disillusioned by what he perceived to be their passive nationalism, the impact of his revolutionary fervour resonated with the younger cadre of the Congress.

Jawaharlal Nehru had been appointed president of the Congress to take over from his father, Motilal Nehru, at the annual session of the Congress in Lahore in December 1929. Riding through the streets of the Lahore on a white horse, Jawaharlal Nehru, who had turned 40 just the previous month, arrived at the historic Congress session to proclaim “purna swaraj’ or complete independence, rejecting his father’s proposal for a new dominion status constitution for India.

The All India Home Rule League and the All India Muslim League too had favoured a dominion status, but leaders like Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Aurobindo and Bipin Chandra Pal argued for a complete separation from British rule. Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose agreed with them.

It was in this session in 1929 at Lahore that the Congress voted for complete independence as against a dominion status for India and passed a resolution fixing the last Sunday of January 1930 – which happened to be January 26 – as the Complete Independence Day.

On the midnight of December 31, 1929, on the eastern bank of the river Ravi, in the shadow of the Badshahi Masjid, Gurdwara Dera Sahib and the Lahore Fort, Jawaharlal Nehru raised the “swaraj” flag that was later adopted as the national flag of India. After Partition and Independence on August 15, 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru saw to it that India’s new constitution took effect on January 26, 1950, thus ensuring that it would not remain just a date in history.

Revisiting history

Not very far from where the Congress session took place, on the other end of the Ravi Road, is Iqbal Park, earlier known as Minto Park. At the centre of this historical park is a tall minaret, Minar-i-Pakistan. It commemorates the Lahore Resolution – that demanded provincial autonomy – which the Muslim League adopted here on March 23, 1940.

Gradually, after the creation of Pakistan, the resolution was appropriated as a demand for Pakistan, and was renamed Pakistan Resolution. Every year on March 23, the country celebrates Pakistan Day.

Every day, thousands of visitors descend upon Minar-i-Pakistan, paying homage to the founders of the country. In popular political discourse, politicians refer to the events of March 23 as a momentous moment in the history of Pakistan. Accolades are showered on Lahore, which is seen as the home of the movement that brought about Pakistan.

Perhaps consciously, or out of ignorance, Nehru’s declaration of independence, Lala Lajpat Rai’s protest against the Simon Commission, and Bhagat Singh’s sacrifice have now been forgotten in a city where these freedom fighters were warmly received once.

As India last week celebrated its Republic Day on January 26, the streets of Lahore carried on their business unaware of the role they once played in this shared history.

This article was originally published on Scroll and has been reproduced with permission.

This blog was originally published on October 29, 2016.

The news first broke when I was in the north of Kashmir in Vijbal, a town of less than a hundred households.

My cousins had invited me for dinner as I was scheduled to leave for New Delhi right after Eid.

One of my friends from Tral, south of Kashmir, informed me through a Whatsapp text: Burhan Wani has been killed.

I didn’t believe him. It was just a rumour, I thought. Half an hour later, the Indian media erupted in celebration, announcing victory.

The party immediately began on Twitter and continued on television. “Burhan Wani elimination BIG NEWS,” tweeted Barkha Dutt of NDTV.

Abhijit Majumdar, the managing editor of Mail Today, chipped in: “with Burhan Wani's killing, Indian forces have eliminated entire gang of Facebook terror poster-boys of #Kashmir one after the other. Salute.”

Cars, trucks, and motorcycles began to honk mindlessly. My aunt worriedly asked her son to check if everything was alright.

Burhan gove shaheed (Burhan has been martyred), I told them.

They looked back at me in shock.

My aunt began to wail.

Ye kusu tawan cxunuth khudayoo (what tragedy did you send upon us, oh God), she lamented.

The heavens opened up at the same time and the sound of rain hitting the tin-roof of the house got louder.

I looked at my cousin, red-faced, eyes welling up, his body shivering.

His phone rang and he finally noticed on the fifth ring. It was my mother calling.

By the next morning, the internet was blocked. People were expecting mobile networks to be shut by the government as well in order to restrict communication in the valley.

People know how the state functions. The Indian state’s oppression is as routinised in war-time as it is in peace-time.

In-depth: The pursuit of Kashmir

People knew that in the coming days, the only way to communicate and find out what was going on would be to travel, on foot, from village to village. They knew that they had to avoid the highways which are constructed to allow smooth movement to Indian military convoys only.

'They know everything'

Rafiabad, the place where I live, is as militarised as any other place in Kashmir. Indian army camps are located every five kilometres from one another, allowing them to bring every village and its people under the army’s view.

The army knows the number of people in each household, including how many males and females, educated and uneducated, where they work, newborns, adults and old.

They have numbered our houses and categorised the localities. They have marked our streets, shops, playgrounds, even the apple orchards.

They know the size of our courtyards and backyards, as well as the the shape of our cowsheds.

They know everything.

As the protests and stone-pelting began, so did the congregational funeral prayers.

People began to count the dead. And the numbers kept rising.

The protest demonstrations kept swelling.

The campaign of killing, blinding, maiming and torturing people continued.

For more: Dispatch from Srinagar: Our nights are becoming longer and darker

The Pakistan bogey

The protests were a sign of the Indian state losing all ground. The divisions that they had constructed — Shia-Sunni, Muslim-non-Muslim, Kashmiri-Ladakhi, Tableeghi-Salafi, majority-minority — to obfuscate the truth went up in smoke as the air was now incensed with songs of freedom.

But in the newsrooms in India, it was the perennial threat that was being accused of fomenting the trouble. Pakistan, they said, was responsible for causing unrest in Kashmir.

Sometimes, one imagines, if Pakistan were to tectonically shift from here to Antarctica, where would the Indian state and its jingoistic media derive their narrative from?

Who will they blame for their own failure and guilt, their own deception and debauchery?

A confrontation

Soon after (dates have lost their significance) the death of Burhan Wani, people of Rafiabad assembled near the Eidgah in Achabal.

The announcement was made through the mosques’ loudspeakers. People from adjacent villages poured in as well. As the numbers kept rising, so did the volume of the slogans, causing panic inside the Indian army camp nearby.

As the protesters neared the army camp, two armoured vehicles blocked the way on one side.

Rest of the road was sealed with barbed wires. The demonstration came to a halt, but the sloganeering did not.

Soon, there was chaos.

Read next: What pellet guns have done to protesters in Kashmir

As stones were hurled at the armoured vehicles, more army men from the camp arrived and started moving toward the protesters with guns and lathis. A few protesters started to turn back.

A direct confrontation with the Indian army, we are told by our elders, should be avoided. But some among the protesters didn’t relent and stood their ground firm.

Several of them were later picked up. All security installations in Kashmir are equipped with high-quality surveillance cameras to keep watch on the people's every movement.

From the footage, they identified the persons who were at the forefront of the march. They knew who these men were. They knew their addresses. They could pick them up from inside their bedrooms.

Inside the camp, they were tortured. One of the boys later told me about how they were made to stand naked, abused, spat on, and beaten with guns, sticks and belts till their bodies bled. They were given death threats and some were even made to jump naked in the river. Yet, after he came out of the prison, he was determined to protest again.

Another boy, in his pre-teens, lying flat in his room, smiled as I entered to see him. He didn’t appear to have been affected by the torture at all.

He was waiting for a bandage to be removed from his back. “I remember the face of the army man who beat me up”, he said, “I won’t spare him”.

He was clearly enraged. He wanted to avenge what was done to him.

It is this anger and this sense of revenge, especially among the youth, which the ‘experts’ on Kashmir amplify and manipulate to present the issue as a problem of inteqaam (revenge) alone.

They also see in the youth a rage informed by religious extremism.

Building a false narrative

For years now, these Kashmir ‘experts’ have dedicated all their energy and resources to maintain control over the Kashmir narrative that comes on TV screens and newspapers.

In April this year, when an Indian army trooper was accused of molesting a teenage female student in Kupwara, a group of reporters were dispatched from New Delhi to report the aftermath in which five protesters were killed, including a woman.

The Kashmiri reporters working for various Indian media organisations, barring a few exceptions, were asked to stand down or take leave of absence or just assist the reporters airdropped from New Delhi.

While the reporters filed contradictory versions of the actual incident, India’s Kashmir ‘experts’ were quick to process the information and construct a narrative which helped the government to systematically shift the focus from the molestation to the protests.

Praveen Swami, one of India’s leading Kashmir ‘experts’, a journalist who has the audacity to tell Kashmiris that he knows more about Kashmir than Kashmiris themselves, tried to historicise the violent protests. For him, “the underlying crisis in Kashmir needs to be read against the slow growth, from the 1920s, of neo-fundamentalist proselytising movements.”

He implied that allegations of sexual violence against an Indian army man do not merit any protests as per secular traditions and only religious movements, like the Jamiat Ahl-i-Hadith and Jamaat-i-Islami, can inspire people to take such a recourse.

Two more ‘experts,’ David Devadas and Aarti Tickoo Singh, whose writings have a clear streak of right-wing bigotry, indulged in victim blaming and in theologising the movement for self-determination in Kashmir.

Also read: Modi has become a prisoner of his own image

Devadas wrote that the different “narratives emphasise that unarmed ‘civilians’ were killed by armed forces, with no reference to the fact that the mobs attacked an army bunker and a camp before the army retaliated”. Four months later, Devadas said that “it still isn't clear what exactly lies at the heart of the current unrest.”

Aarti Tickoo Singh believes that in 2010 “stone pelting phenomenon that led to the death of over 100 youth during clashes with the forces was restricted to urban poor Sunni Muslim youth in Srinagar”. She also cites a study by Indian police officials that “lack of entertainment resources and Saudi-funded religious radicalisation” motivate the youth towards violence.

These ‘experts’ have time and again warned the people of Kashmir about the capabilities of the Indian State: you will be killed if you come out on the streets.

For them, the responsibility of Kashmiris getting killed by an Indian soldier is on the Kashmiris and not on the Indian state.

However, their ideological manipulations have been of little consequence to the people of Kashmir.

Men, women, young and old, come out daily in the streets of Kashmir with the slogan: Hum kya chahtey? Azaadi!

Freedom, self-determination and the right to live in peace are innate to a people. No matter how much violence the Indian state resorts to and no matter how much the country’s media manipulates the narrative surrounding what’s going on in Kashmir, the people of Kashmir will keep coming out on the streets to demand for their rights.

In a police state, we all live on a knife’s edge. And the slightest error in judgment on part of a citizen may have lethal consequences. This ever-present fear is inconsistent with our vision of a free country.

Several things might happen as you drive your Corolla through a police check-post. One of them is death, as we recently found out, following the fatal shooting of a young man named Taimur who failed to stop his vehicle when reportedly flagged down. That is rare, but is in line with the culture of excess that inhabits law enforcement agencies in our country.

You’re driving an ‘Applied For’ vehicle around Islamabad and before you’ve had the chance to soak up the new car smell, you might find yourself being stopped by a police officer at a check-post. You may present all pertinent legal documents, none of which may dissuade the officer into letting you go. An exhausting verbal exchange may ensue, which the officer will attribute to the current ‘security situation’ and the need for them to thoroughly investigate you.

This ‘investigation’ may possibly culminate in a polite request for ‘chai’ as part of your celebration of a new car. At this point, you may decide that Rs200 is a fair price to effectively terminate this interaction and get back to your business, and you may choose to oblige the officer’s request.

On another occasion, you may find yourself being stopped on a highway being asked to present a mythical ‘No Objection Certificate’ that you never knew you required. Your car, with a license plate from Islamabad, may find itself being inexplicably flagged down in Lahore. Why? Ostensibly, you have violated a law that you had never heard of until that day. Again, you see, it’s because of your country’s terrible 'security situation'.

You may have had the misfortune of having a female colleague or friend in the passenger seat, and having a torch light flashed in your face by a police officer six minutes later, investigating your relationship with the “ladies” – always plural, for some reason. You may argue that this does not concern the officer, and the officer may argue back that this is somehow part of his job due to the dire 'security situation'.

When this has happened to you five or six times, even you – a law-abiding citizen – might find yourself cowering behind the steering wheel, and passing through a police check-post like you’re smuggling narcotics. You may even be tempted to ignore the police officer who’s telling you to stop, which we now know, may get you killed.

One may expect this drastic measure should a vehicle attempt to barge its way into the GHQ or the Secretariat. But when this starts happening at an ordinary police check-post – like the two or three you pass every day from home to work in the twin cities – you may end up reevaluating the value of a citizen’s life in Pakistan.

Generally speaking, we’ve been conditioned to direct the blame at ourselves foremost, before directing it at power structures that ought to change their mode of operation. Social media users have been quick to condemn Taimur for his own death, as part of a larger point about the need to obey rules, as if none of them ever ran a red light, or engaged in any other non-violent offence. This does not even address the controversy that, according to Taimur’s family, the CCTV footage does not show his car being flagged down by the police at all.

For the past decade, the authorities have been overplaying the ‘security’ card, steadily steamrolling one civil right after another before our very eyes. The ‘security’ card has been employed ad nauseum to justify the cumbersome bureaucracy and the most frightful corruption. And this has occurred simultaneously in open view of government’s own cavalier attitude toward security like continuing to use fake bomb detectors at airports and other high-value facilities.

In this political environment, it is not only a terrorist who attempts to run through a police check-post. Making the same error in judgment is also a disgruntled citizen who is fed up of police corruption and the relentless loss of personal and civil liberty. And while not stopping when flagged by police is not ideal behaviour, we ought to agree that in a civilised state, this error shouldn’t necessarily lead to death by gunfire.

Lamentably, our response is not to address the bureaucracy, corruption and the sheer despotism, but to have the public simply adapt to these chronic maladies. A good, productive citizen stuck at a check-post ought to blame nothing more than his own kismet, and think only of what he can do to adjust to the reality.

On February 3, Taimur was shot to death by the police who then reportedly fled the scene.

For whose security this police check-post existed, I do not know. But I know it did not keep this 27-year-old Pakistani safe.

Have you been unnecessarily inconvenienced by authorities in your day to day life? Tell us about it at blog@dawn.com

On January 27, US President Donald Trump signed an Executive Order which barred nationals of seven Muslim-majority countries from traveling to the US for 90 days, as well as indefinitely suspending the intake of Syrian refugees.

The controversial move was widely criticised. Most world leaders, large sections of the international media, and the general public voiced their disapproval in unison.

The strongest opposition came from within the US and, within a few days, the courts struck down the Order, at least temporarily.

People in Pakistan were also critical of Trump’s decision, especially since it was suggested that the ban might be extended to Pakistan as well.

But Imran Khan, whose Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf governs Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and is the third-largest party in the National Assembly, had a different take on the issue.

Addressing a party rally, Imran Khan said he “prayed” that the US stops granting visas to Pakistanis so that “we could work for fixing our own country”.

I was not surprised at all. Imran has a habit of saying ludicrous things, which he either has to retract or clarify later.

Time and again, Imran has proven is a reactionary leader. He is keen on riding populist waves and feeds on nationalist rhetoric, all the while ignoring the realities of the country.

His views here are not too different from those of Trump, who proposes the isolationist agenda of 'America First'.

Before making such statements, it would have helped if Imran had checked the facts.

According to the State Bank of Pakistan, the country's foreign exchange reserves were $23.19 billion at the end of 2016. Remittances by expats stood at $19.91 billion, which is roughly 85 percent of the total foreign reserves.

Of these $19.91 billion, the highest contribution came from Pakistan’s living in Saudi Arabia at $5.96 billion. Pakistanis in the US sent around $2.52 billion back to their home country. This amount is higher than the $1.77 billion at which K-Electric was sold to Shanghai Electric.

Travel restrictions on visa and green card holders will not only be a blow to concerned individuals and families, but will also have a crippling effect on the Pakistani economy.

No sane leader would pray for such a situation, let alone a leader who promises to develop Pakistan.

According to Imran Khan, “The day there is a government that decides it has to live and die in Pakistan, it will fix this country. The biggest issue here is the corruption of bigwigs who ... become ministers and loot this country, taking the money abroad.”

Yes, but the bigwigs of corruption do not need visas to stash their money abroad. There are plenty of other ways to send money to foreign bank accounts or offshore companies. If Pakistanis are banned from living and working in the US, it is the lower-middle and middle classes and students who will suffer the most – not the rich and the powerful.

Questioning the loyalty of Pakistanis living in the US is distasteful. Hardworking immigrants deserve to be respected and honoured instead of being demeaned. Their contributions to both the US and Pakistan should be celebrated.

Even if Pakistanis were barred from the US, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they will shift their wealth and families back to Pakistan. They would rather look to move to another Western country, where they will continue to find better opportunities.

Pakistan’s economic ills cannot simply be blamed on the lack of investment in the country. To attract investment from its citizens living abroad, Pakistan needs to create favourable economic and political conditions. Forcing expats to bring their money to Pakistan is no magic solution when the overall situation of the country remains dismal.

During a time of globalisation, we should be looking for Pakistanis to gain international experience. Lack of global exposure for its people will make the country a poorer place in terms of human resources.

We need to accept that Pakistan’s education system is abysmal and the country’s job market doesn't have the absorption capacity. It’s normal that in such a situation, people will move to look for a better life. It’s their right to do so.

Imran has hit another low after his disparaging comments on Pakistani immigrants. His statement drew criticism and shock not only from within Pakistan, but also from overseas Pakistanis. One Pakistani-American attorney said that such a demand from a national leader was beyond comprehension.

In an age where the reputation of a country is measured by how many countries its citizens can enter without visas, we should be striving for Pakistanis to have an easier right of way when it comes to international travel.

Imran should realise that a ban on Pakistanis travelling to any country will only bring further humiliation and shame, not benefits.

Have you been affected by Trump's Muslim ban? Tell us about it at blog@dawn.com

My grandfather Morris wasn’t even 14 years old when he had to flee Kozmyn, a small village in Russia, by himself in 1904. Geopolitics had invaded the young boy’s life. The Czar’s soldiers had come to take him and all the Jewish boys away to fight the Japanese east of Siberia, thousands of miles from the home he knew and loved.

If he had gone with them, he would have never come back. Even if he had somehow managed to survive the Czar’s expansionist war with Japan in East Asia and return home, him and his family would have met the same end as the Jews of Kozmyn a few decades later. They were all brutally murdered by the Nazis and their Ukrainian collaborators.

My grandfather knew what his fate would've been if he didn’t escape, and so he ran in the opposite direction. He kept running until he found refuge in America, the goldeneh medinah (promised land) for Eastern European Jews around the turn of the last century. He never saw his parents again, but he lived and was blessed to start his own family. Refuge in America saved my grandfather.

That’s my story. And that’s why I cannot stand idly by when my government slams its doors on others desperate for refuge in our times.

As a believing Jew, God’s word in the Torah tells me to be kind to strangers and I take the Torah to heart. Ideally, people everywhere should know the heart of the stranger. Every one of our hearts should feel the burdens and pain of others. All of us should stand up for the oppressed even if we ourselves haven't had to face insecurity, exclusion or worse.

However, it seems to be human nature to do the opposite. So many of us close our eyes and pretend we just don’t see the suffering of others. But I simply cannot close my eyes.

I know my own family’s and my people’s historical experience, and it's echoing in what's happening to others today. I imagine my grandfather as 14-year-old Morris from Kozmyn and I think of 14-year-old Muhammad from Kobane, whose home was bombed, lives in a refugee camp, and now needs medical treatment in America – but is being kept out either through outright bans or by other forms of restrictions.

As the Torah tells me, I cannot stand idly by. I must stand strong in militant solidarity to protect him and thousands upon thousands of others. I know the heart of the stranger, for we have been strangers – more times than we can remember.

Besides being born a Jew, I had the good fortune to come into this world 65 years ago with all the rights and responsibilities of an American citizen. This gives me particular opportunities and, consequently, obligations to act.

When the singular intricacies of the arcane US electoral system bizarrely places the levers of state power into the hands of an unconscionable madman, I'm privileged to be able to respond as an American. And, because I can, I must – until this dark storm passes.

Along with millions of other Americans, I'm doing what I can to resist. Acting together in thousands of different ways, we'll turn back the onslaught of chaos erupting all around us.

In the past two weeks, I’ve marched in protests with hundreds of thousands in the streets. I've written and called my members of Congress. I deleted the Uber app when its CEO exploited the plight of refugees stranded at JFK airport in New York City to make a few more bucks.

And, I made a special point of ordering a Starbucks cappuccino for a stranger on the street when its CEO announced that he'll hire 10,000 refugees to work at his stores in the next two years. I’m tweeting, writing and protesting.

Yet, protest isn't enough. I'm committing myself to more long-term engagement on a grassroots level in cleaning up the Democratic Party. We need winning candidates in the future who'll inspire voters to reverse the unparalleled assault on freedoms and civil liberties in America.

I've decided to run in an internal Democratic Party election in March so we can replace the establishment wing of the party that imposed the nomination of Hillary Clinton upon us, a nomination which failed and brought this unprecedented turmoil.

But at the same time, effective political action, vitally important as it is, is not enough. As a believer and a religious person, I can do more than politics. And, because I can do more, I must.

My own soul’s connection with God gives me a deep, heartfelt connection with religious people of all kinds. I know I'm one with all others on a far deeper level than shared politics. I resonate deeply with others when God fills their hearts and moves them toward compassionate action.

I feel that especially with my Muslim brothers and sisters. It's a connection that surprises other Americans and Jews. I know that I can walk into a masjid anywhere and pray together with others, whose souls are yearning to open the channels of love and righteous action.

I can bend my knees and bow my head to the floor, submitting my physical presence in this world, shoulder to shoulder with many brothers of different mothers, whether they were born in Karachi or California, in Peshawar or Pennsylvania.

A few nights ago, I walked into the masjid in my neighbourhood in Vancouver, Canada, where I've been living for the past 20 years. In response to the murder of six Canadian Muslims at prayer in their masjid in Quebec City, hundreds gathered in our local mosque, the Masjid al-Jamia, founded by Pakistani immigrants more than 50 years ago. We opened our hearts to each other and to the One above us. We prayed, simply stood and sat still together in love and solidarity in space that was safe for everyone.

With the blessing of the imam and trustees of the masjid, I brought my shofar – a ram’s horn that issues a call known to Jews across the world. Our Jewish religious tradition has wielded the shofar for 3,000 years to raise a cry of alarm, wake the slumbering, and alert us in times of danger.

Most importantly, the wordless cry calls us to attention and militant resistance to the dangers attacking our communities, whether internal or external. Hearing the shofar, we look inwardly to clear any fog in our minds and see clearly what we must do to respond.

The shofar also calls us to remember the promise that one day in the future – may it not be distant – we will be called to live with each other everywhere in a world filled with universal peace and love.

Until that time, I must do what I can for all those in need, just as my grandfather Morris was all those years ago.

Have you ever participated in inter-faith solidarity? Tell us about it at blog@dawn.com

From a Pakistani TV soap character

Dear … sob sob … Sartaj Trump …

Please …sob sob … sartaj, don’t put a travel ban on us. Please don’t behave like my mother-in-law … sob sob … even though, I think it is my fault, all my fault … sob sob.

Dear sartaj sir, my husband is having an affair and sob sob … well, I think it is my fault, all my fault. Ban me, just me. Not him … sob sob.

As I write this, tears are rolling down my sunken-pale cheeks … sob sob. But then, tears roll down my cheeks even when I am ordering pizza or just passing the ketchup on the dinner table. Sob sob … always rolling down, always, always … sob sob … my fault, my fault, sartaj, just mine.

Ban me, but not the men from Yemen … just the women. They deserve it. Just like I do. Sob … sob.

Dear, Saddar sartaj I … I … sob sob … I … I understand why you are doing this. Men know best. You are a man thus you know best. Best man. Sartaj man … sob sob.

Tears are rolling down my boney cheeks thinking about what evil people did to good people of United Men of America. The horror, the pain, the barbarity of the Bowling Green Massacre! Sob sob Must be the evil refugee women. It’s always the women.

Ban them, deport them, sartaj. But not the men. They will repopulate Bowling Green with more men. Cute little men. With nappies and goo-goo sounds. And then they will grow up and beat and cheat stupid refugee women. They deserve it. The only good woman is a sobbing woman!

Yours in tears, sobs & hiccups,

Saleema … sob sob.

From a Pakistani TV talk show anchor

Dear Mr Trump (dramatic music)

It is surprising that you have not uttered a single word on Panama Leaks. Why? Indeed, you are a better person than that liberal-fascist Obama, but it is important that you condemn corruption. In Pakistan. On my channel.

I like your style. It’s just like mine, even though I believe I foam in the mouth a lot more quickly than you do. But you are getting there.

Sir, Panama Leaks is a major international issue. In Pakistan. On my channel.

Yet, you have said nothing about it. Why? Are you trying to defend your asset in Islamabad?

We know our PM is a US stooge. He’s an Indian stooge as well. So, logically, you would like to protect him. But, sir, let me warn you, he is also a Chinese stooge and an Iranian stooge. He is being hypnotised by a very dangerous man Najam Sethi, who is a member of a secret illuminati Manchurian think-tank called Apas Ki Baat. He is the one who planned the Bowling Green Massacre. I have proof of this. Check my tweets.

So, if you want to put a travel ban on Pakistan, put it on our PM first.

You must rage foam-in-the-mouth about the corrupt mafia of Pakistan. You must call us the most corrupt country in the world. Sir, all I am trying to do is set a positive image of Pakistan.

Anyway, I’ll be back after this commercial break.

Zalima Coca-Cola pila dey …

Did you see that? The hold Jews have in Pakistan? Yes, they pay for TV shows like mine, but I never ever use their products. Never. *Burp … excuse me.*

So, Mr President, when are you going to give a statement on Panama Leaks? Or will you send a letter to defend our corrupt PM, like that Qatari prince did?

However, if you are planning to send a letter, please send one for my boss too, the owner of the TV channel I work for. He is being attacked by a diabolical Yemeni liberal-fascist conspiracy! I’m sure you can understand and empathise with that.

Rest assured, if you do send a letter in the defence of my boss, then my channel will hail your Muslim travel ban. We will support all of your polices, and even dye our hair orange.

Until then, I am sending you cuttings on the corruption of our PM from the most popular, credible and influential newspaper in the world: Roznama Rona (Daily Whining). In Pakistan. On my channel.

Yours fellow foaming-in-the-mouth chum,

Sohail Jan (dramatic music).

From a ‘Liberal’ Pakistani:

Dear President,

Even though I am opposed to oppose your policies, I understand and even support your stand against radical Muslims. I believe your travel ban is a good move, even though I can’t stand your other moves. I am mostly politically correct in my thinking, but I am willing to change that for this.

However, Mr President, keep in mind that there are good folks like me in Pakistan too. We are only a handful, but we can help you identify radical Muslims. But for this, we need to be in the US. In other words, by all means ban Pakistanis, but not us.

If you agree, then, who knows, we might also decide to support some other policies of yours which we are opposing. Or should be opposing. Should we? Kindly guide.

I totally agree that radical Muslims are a menace. However, dear President, though you may let loose your racist pooches on them, but you’ll be needing liberals like me as well. A liberal pooch will not be trampled by the media like a racist pooch would. Think about it.

I can be of great service to your cause because I can rationalise your travel ban by highlighting the dangers of serving halal food in the economy class of a plane. And I believe, this is exactly what caused the Bowling Green Massacre. This and falafel! I plan to read a paper on this at a university on my next trip to the US.

Down with terrorist Muslims (disguised as refugees). Ban them all. But please, Mr President, save the whales.

Thank you.

Yours selectively,

Hamid Sheikh (aka Hammy)

From a reactionary Pakistani troll

Deer Trump,

Hails from bastion of Muslim faith in Asia!! Want to inform you that you will be surprise to know that thousands of Pakistanis like me, in factual fact, millions and billions patriot Pakistani faithfuls hail your ban!!!

Surprise?? Hahaha. Let me explaining. If you put ban on travel of Pakistanis to America, this way there will be no drain brain. All brains will remain in Pakistan. Drain, brain, remain. Poetry! Hahaha.

We have finest brains in whole wide earth. But most of fine brains are in heads of traitors and liberal fascists. So I urge you to put ban on Pakistani. Because then they remain in Pakistan and not be able to drain to US. And when they remain in Pakistan and not drain to US, we can smash their heads, pull out brain and put brain in heads of true Pakistani patriots and faithfuls, making them jeaniuses.

Trump, we know you hates us. We fine with that. We want you to hate us. In factual fact tell us what else can we do to make you hates us more and more?! The more and more you hates us the more and more we get strong more and more we able to stop drain brain and more and more smash heads. Jeanius plan, right?

This will do wonders for bastion of faith and patriots. For exemplary, look at me. Of course you can’t look at me because I am writing letter. Hahahaha.

But see how well I write. Remember poetry in upper sentence? This because I once smash head of poet and put his brain in my head.

I wanted to smash head of another liberal fascist but he run away to US. Why I wanted to smash?

Because when I put fine brain in my head, he laugh. I ask, why you laugh, you traitor? He said ‘brain go in head, not in knee.’ What that means? Not poetry at all. Keep him.

Yours surprise ally,

@ShaukatPakJan007_666

Letter from Adnan Sami Khan

Dear Mr President,

First of all, I want to clarify that I am an ex-Pakistani. Please, bear this in mind, when you read this letter. I am now a full-fledged citizen of India and no more the miserable Pakistani that I once was.

I am writing to you to congratulate you on your fantastic victory in this year’s election; and, more so, on your brave, bold and visionary decision to ban travelers from seven Muslim countries. However, I must confess, I was rather surprised and shocked to note that Pakistan’s name wasn’t on the list.

Being a former Pakistani, I can tell you with certainty, Pakistan is a terrorist state. It has always been a terrorist state. Every Pakistani is a terrorist. This is not to suggest that I too was a terrorist when I was a Pakistani. I was kept in that country against my will and was fed lots of beef dishes.

Truth is, I tried to escape from Pakistan the moment I was born. But, alas, I was caught by a terrorist nurse who then tortured me by lifting me from my tiny feet and slapping me across the backside. Can you imagine the horror and the humiliation?

Well, I was forcibly beefed up by toxic terrorist meat, but never did I let go of my dream of one day escape and settle in the only true country in the region: India.

You see, Mr President, all our ancestors, yours including, came from India. This was told to me by one of the greatest scientists of India, Dr H Gobin Chandrasekhar. Yes, the same guy who first discovered and proved that ancient Indians were using nuclear-powered vacuum-cleaners more than 10,000 years ago.

I also want to thank you for planning a fruitful working relationship with our Prime Minister, the great and mighty Narendra Modi. He has promised me that after India annihilates Pakistan with its brilliant strategic strikes, he will personally punish that cruel nurse who tortured me when I was just a few minutes old. Terrorist witch!

Mr President, I urge you to put Pakistan’s name on the ban list. Pakistani travelers will destroy your great country like they destroyed me. My backside still hurts, you know.

Yours,

Adnan Sami (aka Indiana Jones)

Letter from Tahir Shah

Dear Mister Trumpet,

Greetings from ann-gel country of mankind. My heart beated loudly when an ann-gel tell me that United Kingdom of America might keep my beloved Pakistan name on a travel band list. Mister Trumpet, don’t do that.

We are peaceful country, Mr Tambourine, lonely for youuuu, like an ann-gel, our heart is like a rooosse, mankind’s owwwn …

I remembers, first time when I travel to United Kingdom of America city of New Zealand, and my jet plane land on runaway of Tom F. Kidney Airport, I was greeted by powdery white womens and cute, snowy childrens. There was peace and love and harmony and joyful singings of two countries’ national anthems. It felt like teen spirit. Mr Tom, don’t band.

Dearful President, band list mirror terrible hate between mankinds of two humankinds. After all, within every humankind is an ann-gel. All one has to do is look inside his throat in the belly deep bellow to finds him. Only then will you understand what I am sayings. Lonely for youuuu, like an ann-gel, our heart is like a rooosse, mankind’s owwwn …

My strings of the heart weep loudly when I hear about Bowling Alley Massacre. Dear President Toblerone, it wasn’t ann-gels of mankind country. It wasn’t mankinds of Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Iran, Syria, Iraq, Babylon or Aladdin. But, dearest Mr Chairman of the Board, they may be also peoples of Ethiopia, Guatemala or even planet Pluto. But ann-gel in my belly bellow tells me, why blame one mankind or another humankind for bum blasts?

All have ann-gels and devils. But why punish innocent peaceful ann-gels? Mr Toblerone, don’t band. Or you will become alone. Like a mermaid.

Yours eye-to-eye,

Tahir Shah

BS: Keep following in mind, Mr Tim: Don’t be like lonely mermaid. All mankind are ann-gels hugging lovely peoples at United Nations Council. Piece.

Disclaimer: This article is categorised as satire.

From inside a straw hut she had built, Meeran pulled out a small, woven basket and opened the lid covered in a swatch of azure blue fabric. With quick, nimble fingers she nudged the coiled cobra sleeping in the folds of a dusty pale cloth. The four-foot-long snake rose up, and, displeased at being awakened, began to sway, spreading its hood. Its eyes were level with Meeran’s steady gaze.

I was in Sobharo Shah, a small village 50 kilometres from Mithi, the capital of the Tharparkar district in Sindh. Sobharo Shah is one of the many small settlements in the vast desert where Meeran and her nomadic Jogi tribe live.

The Jogis make a living working the land during harvest season, earning a tidy sum in the process. During the rest of the year though, they trek by foot in the Tharparkar desert, performing snake shows and selling handicrafts. They can be identified by the quilted bags slung on their shoulders, in which they carry cobras and the snake charmer’s flute, a been.

As an anthropologist from Tharparkar who has worked with the Jogis, I had heard about a female snake charmer – the first female jogi or jogan, a fearless woman who had caught some of the finest cobras. My search for her had begun in Mithi.

“The jogan lives in the village by the tube well,” said the locals I met by the roadside, as I drove along the endless sand dunes of Tharparkar with my photographer. It was wintertime, and the temperatures during the day were a comfortable 25 degrees Celsius. The nights were cooler.

From the beginning

Amid a cluster of small huts made of mud and straw, we found Meeran, 50, tending to her two goats and cow. She was friendly. A smile broke out on her face, as we came closer.

She laid down a rilli, a handmade patchwork quilt, that was much too small for all of us, so we ended up sitting on the sand. In the winter chill, the grains felt biting cold on the palms of my hands. Meeran seemed perfectly at ease.

Locals walked past us, wrapped in black shawls shot through with glowing coloured thread. Meeran stood out among them – she was dressed simply in an ajrak print ghagra and a top called a polka. Around her neck was a beaded necklace, and on her finger was a dull gold ring. She lit a cigarette and called to her daughter to bring tea. Smiling, she began her story.

“My husband was a Jogi, but he was afraid to touch the cobras,” said Meeran. “Whenever he ventured into the desert to catch snakes, he would take me along.”

Upon spotting a burrow, her husband would lure out the cobra, using the techniques the Jogis have perfected over generations. When the snake would surface out of the pit, he would pin its head down with a stick – and then call his wife. Meeran would reach over and grab the cobra with her bare hands and help place it in a basket.

After her husband died in 2007 from a heart attack, Meeran decided to continue catching snakes. But her first chance came two years later.

Meeran was working in the cotton fields with her daughter when a snake slithered past the daughter’s foot. “All the workers ran away from the field,” Meeran told me. Terrified, her daughter kept exhorting Meeran to get away. Meeran had another idea: “I wanted to keep the cobra.”

Breaking a branch from the nearest tree, Meeran followed the snake’s trail. Snakes are at an advantage in the sand, which allows them to move faster and disappear easily into the shifting earth. But there was no sand here, only a river nearby and the stony ground. Meeran soon caught up with the cobra.

Pinning its head to the ground with the branch, she lifted it with her hands. Her daughter screamed and begged her to drop the serpent. Other workers stood around stunned. Meeran took her quilt bag and, placing the cobra inside, hung the satchel from a tree branch.

She then calmly resumed her work in the field. Later, she took the cobra home and kept it in the basket that once belonged to her husband.

Meeran’s fearlessness was evident on the day we met.

The cobra in the basket was a recent catch and easily provoked. It shared the basket with some gems, trinkets and a small smooth stone called a mann.

The mann, the Jogis believe, has powers to heal. It is formed when the sand accumulating in the belly of the snake mixes with its poison. Snake bites are often treated by placing the mann on the wound, which “sucks the poison out of the body”.

Meeran slowly began to push the cobra back down into the basket. There was a second, younger snake in the quilt bag, she told us. “If the basket is left open, the cobra will eat the younger snake.”

Everything in the basket was for sale, other than the cobra and the mann, Meeran said, as she closed the lid, the cobra retreating into the basket.

I had spent years following the Jogis, writing about their culture and lives. But there was still much about their rituals and beliefs that remained mysterious.

On Meeran’s forehead, for instance, was a tattoo of a celestial body, which she said was the moon. To my eyes, it appeared like a star. On each of Meeran’s eyebrows was a tattooed line. She would not tell me their meaning, other than saying that the heavens were an inextricable part of the Jogis’ belief system.

Life had not been easy for Meeran. She had seven daughters and one son. Two of her daughters – both married within the community – had been abandoned by their husbands, a common occurrence among the Jogis.

There was no ostensible reason for the abandonment, said Meeran. “There are a lot of problems in our homes. But we seldom go to the police. We try and solve the issues amongst ourselves.” Meeran’s daughters had moved back in with their mother.

As we were chatting, her youngest daughter, a 20-year-old, came to sit by her side. I asked the young woman if she had ever tried to catch a snake. “No,” she replied. “Even my brother cannot catch snakes. It is very dangerous.” Meeran smiled.

It was this past fall that Meeran became really famous. She had moved to Nagarparkar, near River Hakra in Tharparkar district. She was busy setting up her straw home when a cobra appeared. There were many Jogis present, but no one had a stick to pin the snake down. It was a large-sized serpent, more than five feet long. The Jogis there decided it was dangerous and futile to catch it. Meeran disagreed.

She asked a Jogi to play the been before the cobra. The snake paused. No one dared approach it. Meeran crawled up stealthily from behind and caught the cobra by its head with her hands. “I felt immense pride that day, being a woman amongst all the snake catchers. I felt I had proven myself to the community.”

The women of the Jogi tribe mostly tend to crops and the home. At times, they go out begging. Catching and training snakes was the men’s domain.

The harvest season in Tharparkar was coming to an end. The Jogis were going to migrate again soon. Meeran’s family would join the caravan, taking along their goats and cow.

Along the way, the Jogis would look out for snakes. Meeran was hoping to catch a big cobra for herself.

“The cobra is our identity,” Meeran said, with a smile, taking a deep puff of her cigarette.

This article was originally published on Scroll and has been reproduced with permission.

Last month, North America witnessed instances of blatant Islamophobia and religious and racial hatred.

Not long after the new American president Donald Trump announced a visa ban on seven Muslim-majority countries and a hold on the intake of Syrian refugees, a mosque in Quebec City, Canada, was attacked by a shooter that killed half a dozen worshippers.

Trump's ban has since been made non-functional by a court and the Quebec shooter apprehended, but the shock doesn't subside so easily.

The following is a selection of reactions by Dawn.com's readers in Canada and the United States after what happened in their respective countries.

"Inshallah this madness will be stopped"

"I am Canadian, Jewish, born in Egypt, raised in Montreal and married to a Protestant from Scotland. Our children are proud to be enriched by so many different cultures.

I, like many Jews, decry the horrible terrorist attack on the mosque in Quebec City which claimed the lives and well being of so many, including the sense of security and peace of mind of the community.

Like many of my generation, my parents fled persecution in Nasser’s Egypt, a country which my parents loved and where they had felt welcome. The Cairo synagogue where my parents were to be married was burned to the ground. Fortunately, it was empty at the time. By comparison to the annihilation of our European brethren at the hands of Hitler and his Nazi murderers, our journey was relatively easy.

Once in Quebec, suspicion and intolerance of the ‘other’ amongst a small group of racist pure laine [those of 'pure' ancestry] was present. In those days, when the Catholic church still held sway, we were not allowed to attend French schools although we were French speaking. Sal Juif (dirty jew) and swastikas were part of our experience. On the whole, however, Canada was and is a great and welcoming country.

Sadly, the former government of Quebec, Marine Le Pen in France, Trump in the US and others have fanned the flames of hatred against Muslims. Terrorism perpetrated by Al Qaeda, IS, Boko Haram, Assad and others towards fellow Muslims primarily, but also towards others, has contributed to the creation of a very hostile environment for law-abiding Muslims in our country and elsewhere.

Inshallah, this madness will be stopped.

"These policies and speech do not represent us"

"I live in California and the current political climate has made things very uncertain for Muslims and Pakistanis. I follow Pakistani media and although the media in Pakistan portrays as if everything is going south, I would like to share what my neighbours just sent me:"

"I worry about tomorrow"

"Last semester, my biggest worry was what grade I would get in my next assignment. This time around, I worry about whether I am even going to be here tomorrow. It scares and saddens me to know that so many others just like me have been denied the opportunity to live the dreams they worked so hard to achieve."

"I am angry!"

“I am angry! My husband and I discussed moving back to Pakistan and we are both grateful to have that option. This entire thing just shows how ridiculous people were who said not to take Trump seriously.”

"I feel really unsafe"

"I am terrified because despite hearing about Islamophobia, this is the first time I feel that I am personally targeted. There are people who have worked really hard to build their lives here and they are not allowed to come home. For the first time since moving to the US, I feel really unsafe and it feels as if I can’t plan my future."

"These policies have heightened my concerns about my future"

"As a Muslim student studying in the United States, I believe Trump’s discriminatory policies regarding the Muslim community are very disturbing. These policies have heightened my concerns about my safety and future in the country."

"It makes no sense"

"It makes no sense. The choice of countries for this ban, the time duration – nothing makes sense. But I don’t feel any less unsafe than I did when I first moved here. I never expected a warm welcome being Pakistani and Muslim. I would just like to see how Trump’s foreign policy shapes up now. I feel horrible for the people who have been detained at airports and who find themselves suddenly belonging nowhere."

"I am inspired by how people have responded"

"I am frustrated by how the ideals an entire country claims to embody can be forgotten, and such blatant discrimination can be made lawful overnight. However, I am also very inspired by how the people of New York have responded. They stood up even though they were not directly affected by this policy. I am frustrated, but at the same time I want to express my gratitude for getting to live in a city with a strong sense of community and responsibility.”

"I am stunned"

"I am not concerned or scared for myself, but I am stunned by the way people are being treated across the country – people who had proper visas. I am also concerned for those Pakistanis who are looking for jobs here."

"We are living in a different America now"

"Seeing the collapse of liberal America right in front of my eyes has been heart-wrenching. President Trump was sworn into office on a Friday and I saw a police officer stationed outside the local mosque during the Friday prayers. This was only the second time during my stay that there had to be an officer present during the prayers. The first time was in late 2016 when the mosque was shot at in the middle of the night. The ensuing outpouring of love from the local community didn't let the incident get to us. We shrugged it off as an act of a deranged individual. But seeing the officer outside the mosque on inauguration day for no apparent threat gave me a much-needed dose of reality. It was then that I realised that things aren't going to be the same anymore. We were living in a different America now."

"The Executive Order meant to create division but it created unity"

"It is true that every action has a reaction, but sometimes, actions bear unwanted reactions. Trump's Executive Order meant to create division but it created unity. The long-term consequences of this order are yet to be established, but it is clear that currently it has created harmony and support in favour of Muslims. American people are seeing the tolerant aspect of Muslims. This is in direct contradiction of what the media has been portraying about Islam and Muslims."