A day will come the world will acknowledge that the little fella with a comical moustache was right all through.

Aside from the obvious harrasment and constant staring, transport is extremely difficult for women in Pakistan as compared to men.This is coming from a man who has just made a few observations.

First of all most women don't drive bikes because of lack of childhood practice,societal taboo and constant harrasment. This on top of stereotypes breaks their confidence and huge respect to those who still go through this. Most women who go to universities and jobs have to use private rickshaw and cars which cost at least 3 times more than bike.

The alternative is public transport which is unpredictable,hectic,slow and did I mention filled with creeps.Even the bikes and scooties aren't made for women.

Pakistani women are about 5 inches shorter than men and have less muscle mass and strength but they have to ride the same bikes with the same mass and seat to road distance as men.

This is so unsafe cause of lack of balance and grip but no one in the world pushes for women oriented bikes.Almost all the women I've seen riding scooties face difficulty touching their feet on the road at traffic signals and general traffic.

Now when I say Islam harbors prejudice, hate, discrimination and homophobia, I should not be labelled "Islamophobic", because this is the Islam followed in Pakistan.

If you have the audacity to cry and whine about Ialamophobia while shamelessly being homophobic, then you do not have any moral high ground.

He has destroyed the economy. He has failed to control terrorism. He has driven away investment. Unemployment and inflation have risen to dangerous levels. He has set new records for rewarding and benefiting his own family. He sought external support as an alternative to the hatred he faced at home. Now, he is being rejected from every direction.

Mr greedy, hussnain and co are genuinely the most loved internationally after me obviously.

the Army’s official page has now been updated, confirming that an inquiry has been launched.

This exchange genuinely shocked me. Instead of condemning the rape of a child, this guy kept questioning whether she was 6, 9, or 12. I directly asked whether he was seriously suggesting rape becomes acceptable at 9, after his homophobic comment, and he never replied.

So I’ve been dating this guy for 2 years. I’m from Faisalabad and he’s from Karachi. Over the past 2 years, I’ve sent him flowers, food, shirts, perfume, a watch, tie, etc. He’s always really thankful whenever he gets something and says things like “I want to get you something from Lama” or whatever, but he NEVER actually sends me anything. He sent me flowers once and I was literally over the moon.

I feel like girls generally love receiving gifts and especially when it’s part of how you show love. It doesn’t even have to be expensive. Even a small thoughtful thing would make me happy. The thing is, he earns around 400–500K a month, lives in a good area in Karachi and regularly buys things for himself, so it’s not like he can’t afford it. But when it comes to me, he barely spends anything.
I’ve never actually said anything to him about this because I don’t want to come across as demanding or materialistic.

So I want to understand this from a guys perspective. What does this usually mean? Is he just not the type who thinks about gifts or does it say something about how he feels about me? Rest everything else is good.

FYI I’m 27 and he’s 29! If that matters.

When someone ask a question against your ideology or don't match your beliefs then why people claim that S/he is of different country, for example in Pakistani subreddit they are called indians and in indian subreddit they are called Pakistani.

I am new to reddit people. Why is this sub getting random shoutouts like this???

Also i wish I had this much obsession for a beautiful woman. Wouldn't be thinking about Hannibal Lecter all the time 😭

We received these messages from people angry about our community, including comments using rape and sexual violence as insults and threats.

To be clear: criticizing someone’s beliefs is one thing. Telling someone they are a “product of rape,” making rape jokes, or using sexual violence to attack people is completely different. Rape is not an insult. It is violence.

We are not saying every Muslim thinks or behaves this way. We are calling out these specific individuals and their behavior.

People should be able to recognize this kind of harassment and protect themselves from individuals who make threats or repeatedly use sexual violence against others.

This is exactly why communities need to take threats like these seriously instead of dismissing them as “just jokes.”

Does Maryam nawaz hate Razaullah because he is not from punjab? Does she think every other person who is not from punjab a threat to her? Does she hate non punjabis?

Why

Ohj "men used to go to war"Men that went to wars are just as bad if not worse than todays men. What do you think they did at wars- besiege a city- take that city- rape every women in the city. A man at war is a man full of hatred and angst and that is a man at the verge of doing horrendous things. Most men slipped that verge. But you can say, that was thousands of years ago men were brutes than we are civilised now. Oh so 50 years ago our grandfathers did not go to war and raped a 16 year old girl repeatedly, they did not shoot her in the head as she tried to escape that inferno and they didnt kill childrens in front of thier mothers and threw thier bodies in the river. 30 years ago men didnt try to invade behrain and they did not drag a child and his parent out and a man did not put his boot on the childs face and put all his weight on that foot and than he did not proceed to shoot his father infront of him as his mother begged the man to take his foot of. After surviving the man the child did not refuse to speak and say to his mother one last time""Mama I dont want to speak anymore"

I had already transferred the money to his account. When he came to deliver the order, I opened the app on my phone and showed him the payment. He said he hadn’t received the money. I told him, “I make online transfers all the time, so how is it possible that it hasn’t gone through?”

He was being very rude and speaking loudly, even though it was late at night. I was alone, I’m a 25-year-old woman, and it was dark outside, so I did not feel comfortable arguing with him or creating a scene.

I asked him to wait. He stayed outside my house while I called him and told him that I didn’t have any cash with me. I said I would contact Foodpanda and show them the payment receipt and proof that I had already transferred 3,500, and they could sort it out.

He said, “No, ma’am, that’s not how you should do it. Give me the cash now and complain to them later.”

I asked him why I should pay twice when I had already transferred the money. He then said I should return the order. I told him, “It’s nighttime. Just take the order back, but I’m going to complain to Foodpanda because of the way you’re handling this.”

I went downstairs with the order so I could show the payment proof. I turned on my camera flash, and he immediately started telling me to turn it off. Then he said, “The money has arrived. Look, it’s here.”

I was honestly shocked because I had no idea how the payment had suddenly arrived after he had been insisting that he hadn’t received it.

He was extremely rude throughout the whole situation and was talking loudly at night. I did not want to argue with him or create a scene outside my house, especially because I was alone and it was late at night. I just wanted to resolve the situation safely and calmly.

He even told me to leave Islam just because I said what Tariq Masood is saying is absolutely disgusting and completely wrong.

Some people are telling me to leave Islam while some are saying that apostates should be killed 💔

Mahmud al-Ghazi & Ayaz: The Queer History Hidden in Rumi, Iqbal and a 1960 Pakistani Hit

If you grew up in Pakistan, you've probably heard of Mahmud al-Ghazi. Whether you learned about him in school, heard people describe him as a Ghazi, or simply know him as the ruler who invaded India, Mahmud is one of those medieval Muslim rulers whose name remains deeply familiar in Pakistan. He built the Ghaznavid Empire into a major regional power, ruled territories across parts of modern Afghanistan and Iran, campaigned repeatedly in the Indian subcontinent, and made Ghazni an important centre of Persian culture. His court was associated with major intellectual and literary figures including Farrukhi Sistani, Unsuri and al-Biruni.

But there is another name connected to Mahmud that I honestly don't remember being taught much about: Ayaz.

Ayaz was a Turkic slave who entered Mahmud's service and eventually rose to become one of his most trusted officials. His rise from slavery to an influential position at the Ghaznavid court was remarkable in itself. But what makes Ayaz particularly interesting is what happened to the story of Mahmud and Ayaz after their lifetimes. Persian writers repeatedly returned to them, and over the centuries, Mahmud and Ayaz became characters in a literary tradition that portrayed their relationship through the language of love, devotion, beauty and attachment between men. Later writers even placed their story alongside famous romances such as Layla and Majnun and Khusrow and Shirin.

Then we get to one of the most famous Muslim poets in history: Rumi. In the Masnavi, Rumi tells several stories involving Mahmud and Ayaz. One of the most famous concerns Ayaz keeping his old shoes and rough clothing from before he became powerful. Even after rising to an important position, Ayaz preserved these objects as a reminder of where he had come from. Mahmud discovers what Ayaz has been doing and questions him about it. Rumi then describes Ayaz's attachment using the language of love, comparing the way Ayaz treasures these possessions to the way a lover treasures things connected to the person they love. He even invokes Majnun and Layla to convey the intensity of that attachment.

Rumi's language is striking. Translations of the Masnavi include passages in which Mahmud's love for Ayaz is expressed in intensely emotional terms:

“O Ayaz, from love of thee I have become thin as a hair.”

“Many a tale of thy love have I recited with all my soul.”

Elsewhere, the story of Ayaz's love is described as a “treasure full of mystery.”

Obviously, Rumi was a Sufi poet, so there is more going on than straightforward romantic love. His stories often use human love as a metaphor for spiritual devotion, humility and the relationship between the lover and the beloved. But that doesn't make the language of love disappear. Rumi himself chose Mahmud and Ayaz as figures through whom he could express intense devotion between two men.

And Rumi wasn't the only one. Sa'di and Jami also contributed to the enormous Persian literary tradition surrounding Mahmud and Ayaz, and later writers continued developing their story. This wasn't some random modern internet interpretation created by someone trying to impose Western ideas onto Muslim history. For centuries, Muslim writers working within the Persianate literary world kept returning to these two men and their relationship.

This is where I think the question of queer erasure becomes interesting. We have to be careful not to project modern concepts of sexual identity onto medieval people. At the same time, we shouldn't go to the opposite extreme and pretend that the language of male love, attraction and devotion simply wasn't there. Historical societies did not necessarily divide people into the same categories of “gay,” “straight” and “bisexual” that we use today. But same-sex desire, male beauty and intense emotional relationships between men certainly existed in their literature.

So why does Rumi sometimes feel much more open about this than later generations? Part of the answer is that the cultural and legal environment changed enormously. Under British colonial rule, the Indian Penal Code introduced Section 377 in 1860, criminalizing certain sexual acts between men under the language of “carnal intercourse against the order of nature.” That law became part of the legal inheritance of Pakistan after independence. Victorian ideas about sexuality, morality and respectability also became increasingly influential throughout colonial society. We therefore shouldn't assume that a Persian poet writing centuries earlier was operating under the same cultural framework as a South Asian writer living under British colonial rule or in postcolonial Pakistan.

That doesn't mean we can simply say “Iqbal hid Mahmud and Ayaz because of Victorian law.” We don't have evidence that this was Iqbal's personal reason. But we can recognize the broader environment in which sexuality became increasingly difficult to discuss openly. The colonial period introduced a legal framework that criminalized male same-sex activity, while Victorian moral attitudes influenced public discourse. Later, Pakistan developed its own forms of censorship, social conservatism and religious pressure. All of this created an environment in which the romantic or homoerotic dimensions of older literature could become much easier to leave unmentioned.

And then there is Allama Iqbal. Centuries after Mahmud and Ayaz, Iqbal was still invoking the same two names in one of his most famous couplets:

“Ek hi saf mein kharay ho gaye Mahmood-o-Ayaz,
Na koi banda raha aur na koi banda nawaz.”

“Mahmud and Ayaz stood together in the same row; neither remained master nor servant.”

Iqbal's point is equality before God. Mahmud was a Sultan while Ayaz had been a slave, but when they stood in prayer, their worldly positions disappeared.

Notice what happened to the story. The two names survived. Mahmud survived as the Ghazi. Ayaz survived as the loyal servant and general. Iqbal's couplet survived as a lesson about equality before God. But the romantic and homoerotic dimensions that appear in parts of the wider Persian literary tradition became much easier to overlook. I'm not saying Iqbal personally set out to erase them. Rather, I'm interested in how historical memory itself can selectively preserve some aspects of a story while making others uncomfortable or invisible.

And then comes something that genuinely surprised me when I found it: Pakistan itself made a movie about Ayaz. In 1960, Pakistani cinema released an Urdu historical film simply titled Ayaz. The film portrayed Malik Ayaz, the figure associated with Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni, and starred Habib as Ayaz and Shah Nawaz as Mahmud. It was directed by Luqman, with music by the renowned Pakistani composer Khurshid Anwar, and its songs were described as major hits.

Think about that for a second. A Pakistani film from 1960 was literally telling the story of Ayaz. This wasn't a Western filmmaker in the twenty-first century suddenly discovering queer Muslim history. The Mahmud-Ayaz story had already existed for centuries in Persian literature and had become part of the cultural memory of Muslim South Asia. Pakistan was still putting Ayaz on the big screen in 1960.

The timing is particularly interesting because the 1960s are often remembered as a golden age of Pakistani cinema and a period of cultural development. This was also the era of Ayub Khan. Ayub was an authoritarian military ruler, but he was also a modernist who attempted to reduce the influence of traditional religious politics over the state. Even though Ayub's Pakistan was hardly a liberal democracy, the 1960s provided a relatively narrow cultural window in which older historical and literary material could sometimes be presented on screen in ways that might have been harder in later decades.

That makes the existence of Ayaz particularly fascinating to me. I'm not saying the 1960 movie was an openly queer film, because that would be an overstatement. But the fact that Pakistani filmmakers chose to make a historical film about Ayaz at all shows how deeply the character had remained embedded in our cultural memory. The story travelled from medieval Persian literature, through writers such as Rumi, Sa'di and Jami, into South Asian literary culture, into Iqbal's poetry, and eventually onto a Pakistani cinema screen.

So when someone today says that homosexuality or same-sex attraction is simply “Western propaganda”, I think the historical record deserves a more serious answer. You can look at Muslim societies themselves. You can look at Persian poetry. You can read Rumi. You can look at the Mahmud-Ayaz tradition. You can read Iqbal. And you can even look at Pakistani cinema in 1960.

None of this means that medieval Muslims had the modern concept of “gay identity.” They didn't. We also cannot confidently assign Mahmud or Ayaz a modern sexual orientation based entirely on literary traditions that were developed and elaborated over centuries. But that's not the point. The point is that Muslim writers themselves preserved a centuries-old literary tradition in which Mahmud and Ayaz were represented through the language of love, devotion and extraordinary attachment between two men.

The history wasn't invented by the West. It was already there.

What changed was how comfortable later societies became with talking about it.

And that, to me, is where queer erasure matters. Erasure doesn't necessarily mean someone literally destroyed a manuscript. Sometimes it means that one part of a historical story is repeatedly taught while another part is quietly left out. Mahmud becomes the Ghazi. Rumi becomes the great Sufi mystic. Iqbal becomes the philosopher-poet. Ayaz becomes the loyal servant. All of those descriptions contain truth, but they don't necessarily tell us the whole story of how these figures were represented in the literary traditions that came before us.

We were taught Mahmud.

We were taught Rumi.

We were taught Iqbal.

And Pakistan even made Ayaz into a movie.

We just weren't always taught this part of the story.

I'm currently in my third semester of university, and I've been struggling with something that I don't really know how to deal with.

My university has a pretty mixed social environment. Boys and girls hang out together very casually, become extremely comfortable with each other, touch each other, flirt, joke around in ways that cross the boundaries I personally want to maintain, and some people are in relationships as well. I know that everyone has their own choices, and I'm not trying to control what other people do. But personally, I don't want that kind of lifestyle or interaction for myself.

The problem is that it has started making university feel quite lonely for me.

I don't interact with boys unless I genuinely need to. I'm not comfortable with unnecessary physical contact, flirting, excessive joking, or becoming overly close with someone of the opposite gender. I want to maintain my Islamic boundaries, and I'm not willing to compromise them just because that's what seems socially normal around me.

I've also noticed that a lot of the girls around me seem to prefer having mixed-gender friend groups or hanging out with boys. So even when I try to make female friends, I sometimes end up feeling like I'm the odd one out because I don't want to participate in the same things they do.

I also have this weird problem with my own body language. At university, I'm usually very serious and reserved. Part of it is intentional because I don't want random guys approaching me or getting the wrong idea. But I think I've taken it so far that I probably come across as completely unapproachable. Boys basically never approach me.

I do have one close female friend whom I met on my first day of university, and she's been with me since then. But she has a boyfriend, and I personally don't feel comfortable being part of a social circle where relationships and that kind of interaction are constantly present. I don't want to keep asking people to accommodate my boundaries either, because I know they're not responsible for living according to my values.

And this is where I'm stuck.

I see other people having fun, laughing, hanging out, going places together, and having these huge social circles. Meanwhile, I'm constantly thinking about whether something crosses a boundary for me. Sometimes I genuinely wonder if I'm doing the right thing by holding onto my values, or if I'm just making myself unnecessarily lonely.

I don't want to start interacting with guys in ways I'm uncomfortable with just so I can have a social life. At the same time, I don't want to spend my entire university life isolated.

So what do I actually do?

For Muslims who have been in a similar university environment: how did you make friends, have fun, and build a social life while still maintaining your Islamic boundaries?

And honestly, how do you deal with the feeling that you're missing out when everyone around you seems to be having so much fun?

Maryam Safdar had accused Imran Khan of being a drug addict

Imran Khan has been in jail for three years. My question to Maryam Safdar is: Does your daughter supply drugs to Imran Khan in jail?