October 3, 2004
Welcome to a generous selection of articles from DAWN's Weekly Books & Authors.
This page is updated every Sunday.
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The lost scientific tradition
 A curious situation arose decades ago when historians of science, interested primarily in the early history of western science, perceived Islamic science solely as an agent for the transmission of superior Greek science to eager but still ignorant Europeans in the Middle Ages....
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EXCERPTS: Snow on the roof of the world
 THE Siachen glacier is in a valley in the Karakoram range of Ladakh, at its northernmost tip. It is 76km long. (Another estimate puts the length at 72km.) Either way it is one of the longest in the world, arguably the biggest glacier outside the tundra. It is between two and eight km wide....
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ARTICLE: Cry of the soul
 THE Athens Olympics was billed as having returned to the land of its birth, and we saw the film “Troy” which rekindled memories of Homer and his Illiad. So this month...
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ARTICLE: All about myself
 “IN the month of Ramazan, in the year 899 (June 1494) in the province of Fergana, in my 12th year, I became king.” And so began Baburnama, a frank narrative, 510...
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Reading for self-improvement
 “I love to read books that delve into political, legal and social issues,” states Aasim Tiwana, “I just have to pick up a book and start going through its pages to get down to some serious reading — and for me, that is whenever I have a minute of spare time....
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AUTHOR: Iconoclast or sublime?
 NOON Meem Rashed died as he had lived, denouncing conventional religion, rejecting all established norms and totally indifferent to the controversy his cremation aroused....
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REVIEW: Yesterday, today and tomorrow’s world
 FAR too small for the naked eye to see, under the microscope lies a bizarre world inhabited by creatures of every shape and form. Most of them are harmless. On the...
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REVIEW: Napoleon’s lessons for dictators
 THE 50 years at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th constitute an extraordinary period in world history. Historian Paul Johnson has traced “the birth of...
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REVIEW: Prostitution by another name
 DEVADASIS, as the name suggests, are ‘servants of god’. Married to a deity before puberty, a large number of them, many of whom live in temples, become sexual servants to the...
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REVIEW: Pyrrhic victory in Iraq
 THIS book seeks to put in perspective the US invasion of Iraq while comparing the two Gulf wars the United States has waged against an unequal adversary since the 1990s....
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REVIEW: Across the colour divide
 UNMISTAKABLY Thalassa Ali tantalizes her readers from the first page. A Beggar at the Gate is in fact a continuation of the adventures of her heroine, Mariana Givens, from her first...
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REVIEW: Plum on target
 THE facts, briefly, are these: Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (two unremarkable British prime ministers in one name) was born in 1881 and died in 1975. In that time he edited a newspaper...
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REVIEW: Too big, too small
 THE local government system in the subcontinent is as old as the arrival of the Aryans. They introduced it in the form of the panchayat or village council mainly for the...
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REVIEW: Some soul-searching
 DR MANZOOR Ahmed’s book Islam: Chand Fikri Masail raises some pertinent questions about the lack of dynamism in Islamic thought today and its consequent effects on Muslim societies, particularly our own....
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