ambainny

Hair has always held a special importance in the life of most Sikhs, you are either a full Sikh with an uncut head of hair, or you are a Mouna, or someone who has cut their hair. My whole family went from being full Sikhs to all being clean shaven. To even trim hair was against Sikh values. When my uncle, cut his hair after a trip abroad, his parents did not speak to him for some time. A friend in school’s brother had cut his hair, and my friend wept like her world had fallen apart, and she was so ashamed. My earliest memories of hair, were of my thick unruly hair, that never sat still. Until twelve, I had one plait that was thick but not long. At twelve my plait was unceremoniously cut off and I was taken to Habib the hairdresser, who proceeded to chop it even further, until it was a boy cut. The only variation in hair styles that I had, were either a center parting or a side parting, or one plait or two, before twelve. My mother or maid made my plait most of the time. After washing ...

Naguib Mahfouz died today. Here is a comprehensive list of his work and his ideas. Naguib Mahfouz is considered one of the foremost writers in modern Arabic literature. Born in the al-Jamaliyya district of Cairo, Egypt, on December 11, 1911, he was the youngest of seven children and lived there until the age of six (or twelve, depending on biographer). He began his writing career at the age of 17 He published his first novel in 1939 (The Games of Fate), and since that date has written thirty-two novels and thirteen collections of short stories. In his old age he has maintained his prolific output, producing a novel every year. The novel genre, which can be traced back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe, has no prototypes in classical Arabic literature. Although this abounded in all kinds of narrative, none of them could be described as we understand the term "novel" today. Arab scholars usually attribute the first serious attempt at writing a novel in Arab...

NYT has a shocking story in Italy, where a Pakistani father slit the throat of his daughter and buried her in his front lawn. The trigger was the gruesome killing on Aug. 11 of Hina Saleem, a 20-year-old woman whose family moved here from Pakistan and who was found buried, with her throat slit, in the garden of her family home in a small town about 12 miles north of Brescia. The tragedy ballooned into a cause célèbre after media reports alleged that Ms. Saleem had been killed because her traditionalist Muslim father objected to her Western lifestyle. She smoked and wore revealing, low-slung jeans like many young women. News reports said she had been living with an Italian man. Her body was found after her boyfriend reported her missing . I am glad that the mother has squarely blamed her husband for her daughters needless death, and did not blame her murder as a cultural crime. [On Thursday, Ms. Saleem’s mother, Bushra Bakum, dismissed notions that religion had played a role in the ki...