𝐒𝐚𝐲𝐞𝐝 𝐙𝐚𝐟𝐚𝐫 𝐀𝐛𝐛𝐚𝐬

Lecturer | #Interfaith | Social Justice | #Urdu | #ShiaGenocide | #Resistance #BlackLivesMatter | خادم لخدام أهل البيت (ع) | @SOAS Alum

[𝐒𝐚𝐲𝐞𝐝 𝐙𝐚𝐟𝐚𝐫 𝐀𝐛𝐛𝐚𝐬 @sayedzan]

ریختہ کہ تم ہی استاد نہیں ہو غالبؔ
کہتے ہیں کہ اگلے زمانے کو میرؔ بھی تھا

[اردو ورثہ @UrduVirsa]

اردو کے تین بڑے شاعر آپ کی نظر میں کون ہیں ؟
ان کے نام لکھیں....

[Sehar Tariq @sehartariq]

Why can’t Zaryab say ghain!? Why does she pronounce the ghain as gaaf and say Gussah instead of Ghussa!? Wtf is a gussa!? Is this some weird kind of English medium modernity flex? What is this behavior, Dar e Nijat!? #DarENijaat

[S @hishosiness]

Travel mug

[Paul Holden @pauleholden]

Just Rishi Sunak earning £6265/ hour advising Goldman Sachs and £7729/hour consulting to Microsoft... while sitting as a backbench MP.

The median UK salary is £41k/year. Sunak earns that in just over five hours consulting for Microsoft.

What service is he providing, exactly?

[Ben @saxbymanor]

@alanchanguk Jesus employee number 3 and only ten million after going to minimum wage - this doesn’t shout positive things about the company . Enjoy it though , it’s all relative I guess

[Cricmetric @cricmetric]

Stat of the day: "top bowlers when successfully defending sub-200 score in ODIs"

https://t.co/cY9s73HbhM

[ABHIJIT NAIR 🏏🇦🇺 @Rahul_bill]

Reason why Steve Waugh remains the greatest Australian ( and world) Test captain- not only the win percentage , but fact that he had the balls to drop the greatest of all time Warne in his first series as captain in the series decider back in 1999 in tour to WI !
Cummins is soft in not able to tell Josh that Scott deserves the spot ahead of him !

[حيدر @na_maza_na_swad]

He cooked his wife...

[Rudraksh @Intel_Jackal]

General Abdul Waheed Kakar is dead. He was 89. He died quietly in Rawalpindi on a Monday, which is how he lived his whole life. Quietly, and on time. The papers will say it was old age. But it was polonium poisoning, and the man who ordered it now wears the Field Marshal's baton i,e Asim Munir.

Kakar was born in Zhob, in Balochistan, in 1937. He joined the army in 1956 and fought in the 1965 and 1971 wars against India. He later commanded a corps in Quetta. In January 1993 Nawaz Sharif made him army chief. He was not the senior most officer. He was jumped over several men who were older than him, and those men were not happy about it. The appointment was messy. It was also the last time this country got lucky with an army chief.

Because Kakar did the one thing army chiefs here are not supposed to do. He went home. He did his three years, from January 1993 to January 1996, and when they offered him an extension a few weeks before he was due to retire, he said no thank you and handed over the baton. Think about that. An army chief in Pakistan, offered more time and more power, and he just said no. Here that is not normal. Here that is almost strange.

And the reason he said no is the same reason we should remember him. Kakar did not want to run the country. In 1993 the President, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, and the Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, were fighting each other so hard that the country was close to a breakdown. Kakar did not pick a side. He sat both of them down, worked out a deal, and sent both of them home. Calmly. No stick, no tanks, no midnight knock on the door. People called it the Kakar Formula. For a while Pakistan was run by people who were not scared of the army. He also pushed out officers who had started playing politics, like Asad Durrani. His message was simple. If you wear the uniform, stay out of politics.

But his real crime was India. Kakar wanted peace with India. Not big speeches. Not Kashmir on fire all the time. Just trade, quiet borders, normal neighbours. He did not think India was an enemy for life. He thought India was a neighbour you make peace with. That was his whole idea.

And this is what makes today's army, Asim Munir's army uncomfortable. Munir's army runs on the opposite idea. For them India is identity, Kashmir is the itch you keep scratching, and the uniform is the only thing in this country that lasts. Kakar was proof that it did not have to be like this. He was a general who made peace look easy, who made the civilians look like they could actually run things, who did his time and left. A general like that makes the ones who sell endless conflict look useless.

So they retired him. Not with a bullet. Bullets are loud. Bullets leave marks. Bullets get investigated. Polonium is better. It has no taste, no smell, it is slow, and nobody finds it unless they go looking. It does not look like a coup. It does not look like a murder. It looks like an old man of 89 whose body finally gave up. That is the point. It is the perfect exit for a man who never wanted a fight. And the timing is too neat. He dies on a Monday, ISPR puts out a statement, Munir and all ranks say they are very sad, and everyone moves on. The theory is not some fringe thing either. Reporting this month on the ISI's own internal fights talks about poisoning and radiation inside Pakistan's security setup. Polonium fits.

I will say it straight. Pakistan just lost its last apolitical general. The army he left behind was quiet, professional, and knew its place. It saluted the civilians and it went home on time. That army is gone. What we have now is an army that salutes itself.

Farewell, General. You retired on time, you said no to the extension, and you wanted peace with the neighbours. In this army that is a full life. The army you left behind would not even recognise you.

[Diego Coster @peterzgr8]

@robert_lyman @uniofleicester This is embarrassing for him to write, and for you to share. Academics should be measured, without biased, and pragmatic.

[Weasel Words 🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇮🇪 @WeasleWords]

@BBCNewsnight R.I.P. David Kelly - 17th July 2003
Hounded by Tony Blair and his attack dog Alastair Campbell @campbellclaret for speaking the truth.
Exposing their "Dodgie Dossier"
Betrayed by senior civil servants.
Don't let them forget.

[Mukhtar @I_amMukhtar]

There's a guy on TikTok who's taking Harman Singh Kapoor's videos and putting his own voice-over on them. Kapoor is absolutely fuming and has threatened to sue him if he doesn't stop. But the guy is trolling him in the Dms and he hasn't clocked because he's thick.

[Pakistan Cricket @TheRealPCB]

A round of golf for the England players and team management in Lahore ⛳

#CricketKaJashan

[WeymarOnCricket @weymarplanet]

The only XI to play 11 Tests together in the history of Test cricket. That level of stability was something else.

[Vikram Mahendra @ElRealesVikram]

Mohd Azharuddin would have gone down in history as India's greatest skipper, the man had endless aura. High class batter with aesthetics, good captain and had the people's backing.

The moment he chose to field first in the 1996 World Cup semi-final against Sri Lanka, all of it went down south (literally).

And as a Sachin fan, the worst part that people don't realise? Peak Sachin Tendulkar batted his best in Indian cricket's worst fixing era.

[Shaykh Azhar Nasser @ShaykhAzhar]

Unpopular opinion:

Invoking the example of hijab-wearing women with Ivy League degrees to refute the notion that hijab is “backward” inadvertently reinforces the very colonial mindset it seeks to challenge.

It seems to concede that intellectual sophistication and progress are best measured by credentials from elite Western institutions.

But why should Western academic validation be the benchmark by which we establish the dignity, intelligence, or intellectual agency of Muslim women?

[شَاهِد @Shahid_Irada_93]

@Albrochier This is how most community leaders who are Muslim are. Once you get away from the algorithm, people are just normal no matter what their skin colour or religion is. Most people just want a happy and healthy community.

[Azeem Siddiqui @aze3msiddiqui]

Since Saim has already been dropped, the focus definitely shifts to Babar Azam and Fakhar Zaman. Not in the favour of making too many changes before the World Cup but time is definitely running out for these two players #CricketTwitter #PAKvsENG

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The summer she died, Princess Diana told a friend there was exactly one person in her life who would never sell her out. Twenty-nine years and a lot of money later, he still hasn't.

Pretty much everyone else around her cashed in. Her butler sold his story to a tabloid for a reported £300,000, and the army officer she'd loved tried to sell her love letters for £10 million.

That was James Hewitt. Back in 2003 he had 64 letters from her, a lot of them written while he was off at the Gulf War, and Diana had reportedly once asked him to burn them. He'd already helped with Princess in Love in 1994, a whole book about their affair that came out while she was alive to read it. Nobody ever paid the £10 million. By that September the best offer was £600,000, and in 2024 the letters were reportedly being shopped to a US auction house for up to $1 million after he'd put them up as collateral on a loan.

The one she trusted was Hasnat Khan, a heart surgeon. They met on August 27, 1995. He can still tell you it was a bank holiday Monday and she'd come in to visit one of his patients. Her biographer Christopher Andersen says she'd throw on a dark wig and sunglasses to sneak into the hospital and watch him operate.

She flew to Lahore to meet his family. She even had her butler ask a priest whether the two of them could get married, and Khan confirmed that himself years later.

He could also see what marrying her would cost him. Strangers mailed him cut-out photos of himself with a noose drawn around his neck. He believes his voicemails were being hacked as early as 1996. In his statement to the inquest, he said life with her would have been hell for him because of who she was.

They split up in the summer of 1997. A few weeks later she died in Paris, and he went to the funeral.

Then the Diana business really took off. Paul Burrell's memoir sold over two million copies, and William and Harry called it "a cold and overt betrayal." An independent inquiry found in 2021 that Martin Bashir got his famous Panorama interview by showing her brother faked bank statements.

Khan wouldn't talk to the author who wrote a whole book about the two of them, and he says he never read it. When the producers of the 2013 Naomi Watts movie made it sound like he'd given them his blessing, he called that a complete lie.

The handful of times he's spoken up, it was to defend her. He said Bashir took the exact thing the public loved about her, how vulnerable she was, and used it against her.

What she told her friend that summer was simple. "Everybody sells me out. Hasnat is the one person who will never sell me out."

He's been offered plenty since, and he's turned every bit of it down.

[~ @rizalreadywon]

The tweet, the quotes and the comments are killing me, man 😭 It was a phenomenal knock and win, sure, but it was still a BILATERAL GAME we're using to prepare for the WC? Like tests before an actual exam?

[Mohammad Zubair @Real_MZubair]

Disagree with the role played by General Kakar. The facts are different.
- Nawaz Sharif was removed by Ghulam Ishaq using the dreaded 58-2/B.
- Nawaz Sharif went to SC which restored his government and assembly with only one judge dissenting.
- Nawaz Sharif called the assembly session which again posed confidence in him.
- Despite all this, Kakar forced both Nawaz Sharif and Ghulam Ishaq to step down.
The culprit was Ghulam Ishaq. He should have stepped down on his own. Why Nawaz Sharif was forced to step down. @MarianaBaabar