Daily Times —
Zafrullah Khan’s contributions to Pakistan — especially as its advocate before the Boundary Commission — were praised by Jinnah himself
Before I come to the main gist of what I have to say this week, let me bring to the attention of the reader my articles “Safdar Mahmood’s War on Sanity” (Daily Times, October 21, 2013) and “A rose by another name” (Daily Times, November 4, 2013). I have nothing personally against Dr Safdar Mahmood, Mr Orya Maqbool Jan or Mr Ansar Abbasi any more than I have anything personal against the renowned and well-respected academic Dr Ishtiaq Ahmed. My ideas are determined by my unit of analysis, i.e. the state of Pakistan. Logically, this analysis sometimes clashes with both the Islamists who have a pan-Islamic extraterritorial focus and the liberal ones like Dr Ahmed who have their own views.
Dr Ahmed recently wrote an eight-part series under the onerous title “Splitting India” in an ostensibly liberal weekly, The Friday Times. Unfortunately, this series was fraught with historical inaccuracies, some of which Dr Ahmed himself reluctantly admitted to and then went on to say that these inadvertent misstatements were because he was currently based in Lahore, while his books were in Stockholm. The only problem is that these were not inadvertent mistakes of fact but claims that otherwise nullified his entire