Izaz Haque

With following travelogue we are starting a new series to revisit how travel used to be in the years gone by. Izaz Haque’s father Sheikh Inamul Haque was an employee of North Western Railway (now Pakistan Railway). He wrote a manuscript about his railway travels from Quetta to the plains of Punjab in mid 1920s. The manuscript never made it to a book form but Izaz Saheb has been kind enough to share his father’s unpublished work with us.

The most persistent and vivid of my childhood memories is the one that relates to our annual exodus from the bitter cold of Quetta, which made our skin crack and bleed from the dry cold influx of air from the Pamir Plateau, commonly known as Kandhari wind, to the the Princely State of Kapurthala in the relatively balmy, plains of the Punjab.

Adil Najam

In both Faisalabad and Dera Ismail Khan, religious zealots turned Eid Milad-un-Nabi celebrations violent leaving at least seven dead and more than thirty injured. The irony, and sheer lunacy, of this criminal violence is that there are those amongst us who are so convinced that they and they alone are the “best” Muslims of all, that they and they alone know what “true” Islam is, that they are willing and ready to attack – and even kill – even those who profess the very same faith as them. And all in the name of “saving Islam” … from other Muslims!

(News photos of the violence in Faisalabad that left property destroyed and burnt, including the charred remains of a copy of the Holy Quran inside seen inside a house which was attacked by a religious mob during the clashes)

Owais Mughal and Adil Najam

Today was the 12th of Rabi-ul-Awal in Pakistan and Eid Milad-un-Nabi – marking the birth anniversary of Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him) – was celebrated across the country. ATP offers Eid Milad-un-Nabi greetings to all its Muslim readers. As pictorial special, we share these photographs from Dawn and APP of the different ways in which Pakistan prepared for the celebrations today.