Abro

  Reading a Province by Its Shrines Good evening. Before I show you a single map, I want you to picture something. Picture the Indus at dusk — a broad, brown, restless god of a river, sliding south through a land that receives almost no rain. Now picture, strung along its banks like beads on a thread, the domes and cupolas and whitewashed tombs of the men and women whom Sindh decided to call holy. That thread of the sacred, running from the northern gate at Kashmore down to the tidal creeks below Thatta, is the subject of today’s article. And today, we are going to read it quantitatively — as data. The evidence in front of us is a database of 624 documented religious sites spread across all 30 districts of modern Sindh: shrines and tombs, temples and mosques, churches, gurdwaras, stupas, a Parsi fire-temple, and a synagogue. The dataset was compiled from encyclopaedic and news coverage, heritage archives, devotional websites, and district profiles. Every site is geo-located; ...

  A TALE OF TWO SCHOOLCHILDREN Let me begin with a thought experiment. Picture two children sitting in classrooms, roughly the same age, on either side of the Wagah Border. Both children are opening a history textbook. Both textbooks have a chapter on Akbar. And both — I want you to hold this image in your mind — are learning about something called Din-i-Ilahi . The Pakistani child reads that Akbar was a misguided emperor who invented a heretical religion, who abandoned the faith of Islam, and who serves as a cautionary tale about what happens when a Muslim ruler loses his moorings. The Indian child reads that Akbar was a visionary emperor who founded a grand syncretic tradition, who celebrated religious harmony, and who serves as a glorious ancestor-figure prefiguring Indian secularism [i] . Same emperor. Same set of historical events. Completely opposite conclusions. How is this possible? That, my friends, is precisely the question this article is designed to a...