Pakistan

On August 14-15 1947, after a few hundred years in India the British left behind the jewel in the crown of Empire. The Raj abruptly ended, but the struggle for India’s freedom came at a price. The creation of the Islamic state of Pakistan, carved from undivided India or partition, as it became known, resulted in one of the greatest convulsions in human history. Millions of Muslims from Hindu-majority India proceeded towards Muslim-majority Pakistan, while Sikhs and Hindus made the opposing journey. Viceroy Mountbatten’s hasty transfer of power - a 72-day plan brought forward by 10 months unleashed an unbridled orgy of bloodletting between Muslims on one side, Hindus and Sikhs on the other.

Incidents of ‘Islamophobia’ are really getting out of hand in Britain. In fact there has been such a wave of attacks that it’s amazing that politicians and commentators across the political spectrum, (not to mention all those supposed ‘anti-fascist’ groups) aren’t grand-standing like crazy. Perhaps their problem is that this wave of attacks does not consist of people writing nasty and mean things on Twitter, but of Muslims killing other Muslims and still other Muslims extolling such killings. It’s only a couple of weeks since a Sunni Muslim from Birmingham called Tanveer Ahmed was sentenced to prison for murdering an Ahmadiyya Muslim shopkeeper from Glasgow called Asad Shah.

Imagine if correspondents in late 1944 had reported the Battle of the Bulge, but without explaining that it was a turning point in the second world war. Or what if finance reporters had told the story of the AIG meltdown in 2008 without adding that it raised questions about derivatives and sub-prime mortgages that could augur a vast financial implosion? Most people would say that journalists had failed to provide the proper context to understand the news. Yet that’s routinely what media outlets do when it comes to outbreaks of anti-Christian persecution around the world, which is why the global war on Christians remains the greatest story never told of the early 21st century.

Pakistan society intended Seema Aziz to be a wife and mother. Her father arranged for her to get married at a young age, and by her early thirties she had a comfortable life as a Lahore housewife, married to a chemical engineer. Then she took charge of her own fate. In the late 1970s, well before the era of jihad, Pakistan was flooded with western products. People began wearing jeans and T-shirts, leading Seema to conclude that there was a market for high-quality Pakistani clothes produced locally. She opened her first shop in 1985, when she was 34, in Lahore’s ancient cloth market. Her family told her they were ashamed because she had gone into business, but her instincts were vindicated: the clothes flew off the shelves.