April 14, 2002 Welcome to a generous selection of articles from DAWN's Weekly Books & Authors. This page is updated every Sunday. For current issue Click here Depicting beauty DURING the Umayyad caliphate (40-133 AH/661-750 AD), the Islamic element in the discussions was supplied by the Holy Quran alone as canonical compilation of the Hadis came two hundred years later. Therefore they forbade images in houses of worship... EXCERPTS: Breaking the silence RAPE has occurred in virtually all cultures and times. It has been most prevalent in the context of enslavement, mob violence or the social disruption brought about by war. Islam views rape as a violent crime against the victim, against society and against religious.... ARTICLES: What about the madressahs? WHILE pleading his case in a televized speech on April 5 for extending his stay at the helm of affairs, President Pervez Musharraf pointed to his government’s move to regulate madressah education in the country. Admittedly, the authorities have begun looking into this issue which should be treated on a priority basis. But one cannot help... ARTICLES: A dislocated treasure SITUATED in an over-crowded narrow lane of Peshawar, Malick Nawaroz Market houses an unusual bookstore — the only one of its kind. Offering a rare collection of books on Afghanistan, the... ARTICLES: Grand dame of American media SHE is 81, and has spent about 59 years working as a journalist. We were lucky to be in Fresno, when Helen Thomas talked at the California State University about her work in Washington and the presidents she had covered. Her talk was one.... ARTICLES: The female text THE Women’s Library opened recently, a warm, welcoming, well-appointed space. As a result of a L4.2 million lottery grant, the country’s biggest collection of books, periodicals and artefacts relating to women’s... AUTHOR: Stranger than fiction THE French journalist Kenize Mourad has led a truly extraordinary life, first of all as the lost daughter of an Ottoman princess and a Talukdar of Oudh, the Raja of Kutwara.... AUTHOR: Poet, critic, academic PROF Alay Ahmed Suroor, poet, writer, scholar and teacher, was the moving spirit behind the promotion of Urdu in India, just as Molvi Abdul Haq was in Pakistan. Suroor dedicated a... SYNDICATED: Levi: no stone unturned WALTER Benjamin called suicide a uniquely modern act of moral valour, a reclamation of our imperilled autonomy, and he killed himself to prove his point. Why, then, if self-slaughter evinces integrity... SYNDICATED: The witch report ROY Porter ends his short history of madness with a teasing question: ‘Is Folly jingling its bells again?’ More people ‘are said to be suffering — indeed claiming to be suffering — from a proliferation of psychiatric syndromes, in a “victim culture” in which benefits may appear to lie in buying into psychiatric paradigms’.... REVIEW: A decisive battle RAM Gopal’s How the British occupied Bengal is probably the most comprehensive account yet of this turning point in world history. It covers the battles of Plassey and Buxar and their... REVIEW: Neighbourhood terrorist IS your nice neighbour on the quiet tree-lined suburban boulevard a terrorist mastermind? That is essentially the question that controversial journalist Steven Emerson asks his readers in his new book American jihad: the terrorists living among us. Utilizing his almost two decades of experience in national security, intelligence and counter-terrorism... REVIEW: Politicization of language DR TARIQ Rahman, Professor at the Quaid-i-Azam university, Islamabad, has earned respect and fame as a serious scholar. His book Language and politic in Pakistan became a classic on the subject.... REVIEW: Lives so highly charged BANI Basu is one of the foremost modern Bengali novelists. Her Antaarghat, of which the book under review is a translation, won India’s Tarashankar Award in the early nineties. It is... REVIEW: Inside view of Stalin’s Russia THE book Beria my father should interest the readers primarily for the inside view it gives of Stalin’s regime — specially its responses to the events in the Soviet Union and... REVIEW: Fords, Minis, Beetles &.... IT must be challenging to bring out an encyclopaedia in book form in this computer age where reference is easily accessible from CDs and the innumerable sources available on the Internet,... REVIEW: Leaving home DOOR KI AWAZ is a collection of fourteen short stories by Feroze Mookerjee, which are mostly tales of people who leave their country for distant shores. However, the stories are not... REVIEW: A pioneering work in lexicography IN the field of communication, the ‘word’ has been defined as “the tyrannical abstract symbol of knowledge”. In simpler terms, it means that every word carries a meaning, an idea and an action. But one word might have a number of meanings and connotations. It is this multiplicity of ideas attached to one word that gave...

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