ATP Wins Brass Crescent Award for Best South Asian Blog

Owais Mughal and Adil Najam

We are honored to learn that All Things Pakistan has been named the Best South Asian Blog in the Seventh Annual Brass Crescent Awards 2010 | 1431. We are grateful for the recognition which comes just a few months after Pakistaniat was named Pakistan’s Best Current Affairs Blog at the First Pakistan Blog Awards. We are as humbled by these recognitions as we have been at being honored in the Top Ten Pakistani Blogs lists that Light Within releases each year (2009, 2008, 2007, 2006).

We are thankful for this recognition, even as we underscore that our greatest recognition comes daily in the form of readers who take out the time to visit, to comment, to converse with us, to read what we write, to suggest what we should write, to gripe about, and sometimes even to appreciate what we are trying to do here. Beyond all other, they remain our inspiration and our motivation. Beyond all other, we are thankful to our readers.

Honored and humbled as we are, we should also say that in this particular case we are also genuinely surprised. Importantly, because in this case we did not even know that we had been nominated, let alone that there was voting going on for this award. But also because even though the judges of the Brass Crescent deem us to be amongst “the best of the Muslim blogosphere” our own image of ATP and of its aspirations is much less ambitious – to focus only on Pakistan, but on all Pakistan and all Pakistanis. That, we realize, is an aspiration that is at once limited but also expansive within that limitation. After all, we call ourselves All Things Pakistan. So, we are humbled that what we do is found worthy of recognition beyond the very parochial focus that has and continues to inspire and motivate this blog.

The Brass Crescent Awards were established in 2004 and two years ago it introduced the new category of “Best South Asian Blog”; we stand in very good company: TeethMaestro and IndianMuslims were the winners in the previous two years.

We thank those who have voted for us, and even more we thank our readers for having given us the camaraderie and the encouragement that has enabled us to keep going for over four years now (here, here, here, here).