Shifting Sands of Culture In the spring of circa 1850, two wanderers quietly slipped into a small mud house in a village of Kutch, India, to witness the birth of a baby boy. They had promised a newlywed couple that they would return in a year to conduct a bay’ah… More⇢

Irrelevance of Futurism In 1890, with a deep sense of trepidation, Karmali boarded a dhow at the Indian port city of Porbandar. The dhow that would be heaved by monsoon winds across the Indian Ocean to the Island of Zanzibar. Parting was not only hard for him, but for both… More⇢

Beyond the Frontier Dressed in khaki shorts and a white cotton shirt, Hussein hesitantly stepped on mainland Tanganyika. He was only 12. His dad always told him to face fear with faith in himself and in God. “A confident face brings success,” he always told Hussein. With this thought in… More⇢

Religion, Science, and Superstition Defining Modernism Hussein wore a woolen suit on the day of his wedding in 1937. He was probably sweating in the new colonial fashion trend. Fatma was wearing a long dress donned with a pacheri or large cotton scarf. The British culture was already making inroads… More⇢

Tradition Versus Modernism The landscape under British Colony of Tanganyika was undergoing many transformations in 1950s. Dodoma, being its less populated central region, the pace was slower but discernible. These transformations contributed significantly to Hussein’s identity formation. His children, being exposed to these changes, acted as windows letting the light… More⇢

Meaningless Political Language Before Hussein closed the duka in the evening, one day in June, circa 1957, he called out to Fatma and asked her if she could make pilau. Fatma’s rice dish was aromatic due to cardamom, cinnamon, black pepper, herbs, and other spices and was always irresistible. Especially… More⇢

Redefining Self Perception Hussein, like most Ismailis, had four portraits hanging on the focal wall of the living room. One of them was that of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, a main architect in the carving of Muslim majority provinces to form Pakistan. The demarcation of boundaries was drawn in the boardroom… More⇢

Culmination of Self Existence When Hussein and Fatma stepped on Canadian soil in 1976, they were dazzled with the brilliance of an advanced civilization with brightly lit highways and bridges, high-rise buildings, and smoothly moving traffic. Hussein did not let awe and fear intentionally slip in his psyche. His third… More⇢

Hussein’s life story in defining his own identity is a glimpse into understanding pluralism or diversity. Hussein, like most people, did not make history. But rather it was history that made him. He conditionally interacted with the changing outside world using the ideas he inherited from the past. He was… More⇢