AUGUST
Our PEACE art day Pakistani’s and us.
Pakistan, officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, is a country in South Asia. It is the world’s fifth-most populous country, with a population exceeding 225.2 million, and has the world’s second-largest Muslim population. Pakistan is the 33rd-largest country by area, spanning 881,913 square kilometres.
The Islamic Republic of Pakistan was born in 1947 in South Asia, when a section of Muslims broke from the Hindu-majority in British India to rule their own homeland. Located in the ancient Indus Valley, settlements in the region among the Khyber Pass, Himalayas and Arabian Sea are some of the oldest in the world and most heavily traveled in history.
Two Pakistanis have won the Nobel Peace Prize: the late Abdus Salam, a theoretical physicist who in 1979 shared the Nobel Prize in physics for his contribution to electroweak unification theory, and Malala Yousafzai, a woman’s education activist who in 2014 shared it with Kailash Satyarthi of India. Yousafzai was 17 when she was awarded the Nobel, making her the youngest-ever laureate.
The name Pakistan derives from two words, “Pak,” which is Persian for holy, clean or pure, and “istan” derives from the Hindi word “isthan,” which means a place.
I was invited to walk along side a family closely for three years that was coming here from Pakistan in 2015 December. It was one of the most beautiful times of my life. I learned so much. What a gift .
I’ve read books in this pile previously, but think they are important to mention this month.
The rest are new and I can’t wait to begin.
It’s going to be a great month in reading world.
The Dancing Girls of Lahore inhabit the Diamond District in the shadow of a great mosque. The 21st century goes on outside the walls, this ancient quarter, but scarcely registers within. Though their trade can be described with accuracy as prostitution, the dancing girls have an illustrious history: beloved by sultans, their sophisticated art encompassed the best of Mughal culture. The modern day Bollywood aesthetic, with its love of gaudy spectacle, music, and dance, is their distant legacy. But the life of the pampered courtesan is not the one now being lived by Maha and her three girls. What they do is forbidden by Islam, though tolerated; but they are, unclean, and Maha’s daughters, like her, are born into the business and will not leave it.
Sociologist Louise Brown spent four years in the most intimate study of the family life of one Lahori courtesan. Beautifully understated, it turns a novelist’s eye on a true story that beggars the imagination. Maha, at fourteen a classically trained dancer of exquisite grace, had her virginity sold to the Sultan of Dubai; when her own daughter Nena comes of age and Maha cannot bring in the money she once did, she faces a terrible decision as the agents of the Sultan come calling once more.
I very much enjoyed all the reading and rereading this month. The Dancing Girls of Lahore being my favorite.
