This age-old buffalo fight is organised on the occasion of the harvest festival "Bhogali Bihu" in Assam. AFP photo
Ulemas target Godrejs for hosting Rushdie
Mumbai, January 16
The All India Ulema Council, an organisation which claims to represent India's Muslims, said the Godrej family of industrialists should apologise to the community for association with writer Salman Rushdie. No proposal for religion-based reservation: Arjun Singh
New Delhi, January 16
The Centre today said there was no proposal before it to provide reservation on the basis of religion. English, Hindi words to simplify Urdu
New Delhi, January 16
Urdu learners can now heave a sigh of relief as the Union government has decided to replace difficult words in the language with simplified terms.

Who is afraid of Disneyfication? A response to Sonja Hegasy

Ahdaf Soueif did not initially welcome the translation of her novel In the Eye of Sun from English to Arabic (the state-owned literary weekly Akhbar al-Adab did attempt a translation – never easy in the case of an 800-page book). In a public lecture, Soueif declared that only she herself would be truly faithful to the text, but that she would rather write a new novel. This is understandable.

If Soueif had been a victim of the parochialism of Egyptian intellectuals she would not have been invited to the Higher Council on Culture’s conference on the Arab novel in 1998, at which she thanked the council Chairman Gaber al-Asfour for acknowledging her work as belonging to the Arab novel. Soueif’s The Map of Love has been translated into Arabic, and her work Zinat al-Hayat has been published by al-Haya’a al-’Amma lil kitab, the official government press.

SYRIA AND SYRIAN-CONTROLLED LEBANON

The book blamed Hafez al-Asad, then minister of defense, for the military defeat at the hands of Israeli forces in June 1967. After Brayez's sentence expired in August 1985, his family lost contact with him and his whereabouts were unknown for several years. In November 1991, Middle East Watch received reports that he was being held in the general wing of al-Mezze prison in Damascus.



New political prisoners in 1991 include four members of the Workers Revolutionary Party and twenty-nine from the Arab Socialist Union Party (ASU). They were arrested even though the parties themselves are legal, apparently because they had distributed leaflets criticizing the Baath Party's monopoly of power. Among the ASU members arrested were Ahmed al-Khatib, a lawyer; his son, Tha'ir; and Najib al-Derdem, also a jurist.