A person suffering from autism stands in front of the camera and makes us witness the scars of the whipping and electrocution on his chest, legs and arms. His eyes are swollen, his cheeks black and blue, his lips split, yet he continues to smile. He is happy to be filmed and to soak up the attention.
Arts & Letters
Among the most travelled Hajj routes over the last five centuries are those between India and Mecca. The details in this poem are based on conversation with an Indian friend who described the Hajj his father and grandfather made in 1939.
Four poems from writer and performer Sabrina Mahfouz.
Crossing the dense opaque haze of three thousand years appears the figure of a woman whose name was Akhit Jadoo.
Alona Frankel is talking about ‘the most horrible event of my life’. A much-loved Israeli children’s writer, with a late-blooming career as an autobiographer, she survived the Lvov ghetto in Poland. One of a handful of Jews who escaped transportation to the death camps, Frankel came as a child to the new state in 1949. She sits, genial and youthful, in the conference hall at Mishkenot Sha’ananim just outside the old city of Jerusalem.
Zehra has not written much for many days Although during those days she has seen everything But if she writes, what should she write? And if she thinks, what should she think? Thought has dimmed a little, her hand trembles a little Zehra has not written much for many days She is not so naive… Read more »
Each moment is the first moment. I have seen this day many times before. At night the moon’s face on my face.
Like all poets of the ghazal, Mirza Asadullah Khan (1797-1869) is best known by his takhallus, Ghalib, the pen-name with which he signed his ghazals. He was born in Agra, moved to Delhi at an early age, and but for an absence of three years during which he visited Calcutta, he never left Delhi again, not even during the great rebellion of 1857.
Atia Jilani is a self-taught calligrapher, a painter and a writer living in the village of Mohammad Abad. She is the first Asian woman to inscribe the entire Qur’an in the elegant calligraphic style of Naskh, despite never attending an art school.
Kiratpur: a city hundreds, hundreds and hundreds of miles away from Islamabad. A small, modest city – from what I hear – in the Bijnur district of UP, India, where people gladly drink goat’s milk and eat only khaalis ghee and paneer.