Hind Shoufani: Unsanctioned Writing from the Middle East
We are bound by some social norms. In this region it is easy to get in trouble for feisty opinions, especially on civil marriage, religious sectarianism, atheism, premarital sex, homosexuality, and other hot topics. It would be really great to pretend that each of us are past worrying about publicly speaking about these issues, but the truth is we’re not. It’s not 100% safe. Nonetheless, we tried to be as honest as possible, and as under the radar as possible.
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Pakistan, The Villain
When you paint an entire nation as a villain, a strange phenomenon happens: It becomes easier to kill its people. When you paint them as evil and label its citizens as others, you can convince yourself that you are good. This is the trap that Hitchens, Botham, and Bigelow fell into when they contributed to the narrative upholding the myth about Pakistan’s villainous nature. This ongoing narrative allows drone attacksto continue in the northern areas of the country. These drones kill terrorists, surely, but they also kill innocent men, women, and children. And though it’s easy to think of killing them as a videogame, or to characterize them as “bugsplats,” it’s not as easy to think of the villains that live in the “good” countries, where peace and prosperity paints everyone with the brush of the righteous, in the blood of the innocent.
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The Wolf Addresses the Non-compliant Lamb Pt. 2
“By God’s will, I shall keep those devils and atheists and liberals and nationals and anyone else we don’t know about yet away from you. They have no loyalty to God. I will not allow them to sully the purity of your world, but if they do, you will receive your reward in the afterlife. However, as long as I am by your side, those devils will not succeed.”
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Bina Shah: Theater of the Repressed
Today, Pakistan is a much freer nation, and its cultural life has been limping back to normality, but its history of cultural repression has had terrible effects. The almost twenty-year absence of the arts in Pakistan … has directly contributed to the growing lack of tolerance for minorities, women, and anyone else perceived as “the other” in the country.
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Yuan Tengfei: A Free Spirit in Darkness
If you were to attend one of Yuan Tengfei’s history lectures at Beijing’s Haidian Teachers Training College, you might think that you’re in the United States, Taiwan, or Hong Kong, where freedom of speech and research are guaranteed. For example, Yuan might say: “During the first 20 years or so of the People’s Republic of China the Red Terror cost more than 20 million innocent lives” or “The Mao Mausoleum in Beijing should change its name to the Holocaust Museum, for there lies a man whose hands are stained with blood.”
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