Description
Did you know that after the Quaid’s demise, Fatima Jinnah and Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan submitted an affidavit at the court saying that he was a Shia. Did you know that Allama Iqbal was opposed to the imposition of hudood punishment, that Ghalib received a stipend from the British for two villages of his inheritance to his dying day and that he changed his takhallus back to Asad during his 18-month stay in Calcutta, that Maulana Muhammad Ali Jauhar defended the Ahmadis in Afghanistan and that his elder brother Gauhar was an Ahmedi, that Borlaug saved Pakistan from famine by inventing a new wheat seed in 1968, that Ganga Ram was actually the true father of Lahore by building most of the landmark structures of the city, that Ghulam Ahmad Parwez greatly resented the August 11 speech of his beloved leader, the Quaid, because he thought non-Muslims could not be equal citizens in Pakistan, that the son of the great essay-writer Patras married the daughter of another great essay-writer Falakpaima, that the great translator of the Quran, Abdullah Yusauf Ali, was found dead in an obscure clinic in London, that Annemarie Schimmel was actually a scholar in Turkish, that the paper on which Daud Rehbar was rejected in Pakistan in 1953 actually contained nothing offensive, that K.K. Aziz was reading the Hamoodur Rehman Commission’s preparatory works when his house was raided by General Zia, that the Quaid’s mausoleum was contracted to an Indian architect, Yahya Merchant, on false pretenses through a manipulation of Miss Fatima Jinnah, that Kemal Attaturk kept the children of Khalida Adeeb Khanum as hostages after exiling her to Paris, that Osama bin Landen and Mulla Umar first met at the Banuri mosque in Karachi, that Pakistan’s first president was the last scion of Mir Jafar, the traitor who allegedly betrayed Siraj al-Daula of Bengal to East India Company, that more important Pakistanis were married to foreigners than you had imagined, and that far too many of the key personalities in Pakistan’s history hailed from a small district of Punjab, Jullundhar?
About the Author
Khaled Ahmed remained the Consulting Editor at The Friday Times and Daily Times for over a decade after earlier editing The Frontier Post and serving as Joint Editor of The Nation. He was in the Pakistan Foreign Service from 1969 to 1978 and served in Moscow and Prague. As a journalist, he has participated in track-two diplomacy with India and is a founder-member of the Neemrana Dialogue. He is the author of several acclaimed books.
0
0
