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Manzu Islam (1951-ongoing)

Syed Manzurul Islam is a British-Bangladeshi writer who was born in Boalia, Kishoreganj on 9 November 1953. He fought as a freedom fighter in the 1971 War of Liberation under Major M.A Jalil in Sector 9, and moved to the UK after liberation. After earning his PhD from the University of Gloucestershire, he became a reader there and his first book, The Ethics of Travel from Marco Polo to Kafka , was published by Manchester University Press in 1966. He also worked as a Racial Harassment Officer in East London during the “Paki Bashing” epidemic in the 70s and 80s. Islam’s fiction is mainly about Bengali settlers in the United Kingdom. Both The Mapmakers of Spitalfields (1998), a collection of short stories, and his novel Burrow (2004). are about legal and illegal Bengali. Although Monica Ali made Brick Lane famous through her eponymous novel in 2003, Islam was already writing about Bengali immigrants. As Ekran Kabir notes, Islam was the �

/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=27859 SAID. Islam and I [Ich und der Islam]. 2005.

Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976)

Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976) is the National Poet of Bangladesh. Variously known as the Soldier Poet and the Rebel Poet, he was also a journalist, a playwright, and a song writer with themes ranging from nature to devotional hymns, both Muslim and Hindus, from love to socialism. His earliest published writings were fiction rather than poetry, and even his early published poems did not suggest that, one day, he would appear on the literary scene of Bengal like a dhumketu or comet –the name he used for his biweekly journal. Nazrul’s creative life was short, lasting from 1920 to 1942, when he lost his power of speech. However, it was a prolific one: in these twenty years he wrote over 500 poems, about 3000 songs, a number of short stories and three novellas. Kazi Nazrul Islam was born in an impoverished, hardly literate household in the last years of the nineteenth century in the village of Churulia in the district of Bardhaman in West Bengal. His date of birth is

Syed Manzoorul Islam (1951-ongoing)

/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=39262 Islam, Manzu. Song of Our Swampland. 2010.

Manzu Islam is an expatriate Bangladeshi writer who has been living in the United Kingdom since the mid-1970s. Song of Our Swampland (2010) is Islam’s second novel, written against the backdrop of the Liberation War of Bangladesh. The novel is about the atrocities committed during the war, including the killing of unarmed people, abductions and rapes, the destruction of shanties and the demolition of villages. A few Bengalis and Biharis – the generic name given to migrants from eastern parts of India during the Partition of 1947 – collaborated with the Pakistani military. All Biharis got a bad name after Bangladesh independence and, in the novel, Islam questions the prejudice against Biharis through the character of Kulsum. He also focuses on the many unanswered questions and unfulfilled dreams of the nation four decades after independence. Perhaps to suggest the failures following independence and the suppression of free speech, he creates characters with deform

/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=34602 Ben Jelloun, Tahar. Islam Explained [L’Islam expliqué aux enfants]. 2002.

Political Economy (1740 to 1860)

Political economy is the theory of wealth and of how wealth is created and shared out in society. Its key concepts are production, distribution, exchange, and consumption. The word “economy”, originally spelt “oeconomy”, derives from oikos , a household, and nomos , law. The oikonomos in ancient Greece is one who manages and sets the laws of the household. In Homer's Odyssey Odysseus's real identity is inseparable from his status as ruler of his oikos in Ithaca, with its house, land, slaves, cattle and stored produce. The term économie politique , first coined by the philosophes of the French Enlightenment, included the earlier meaning of state economic policy or the “art of managing the resources of a people and its government” (Adam Smith). It also included th

/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=13342 Aristotle. Politics. -340.

/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=7582 Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Revolt of Islam. 1818.

Appearing in January 1818, The Revolt of Islam was a significantly revised and re-issued version of Laon and Cythna; or The Revolution of the Golden City , which Shelley had composed between the spring and early autumn 1817 and Charles Ollier had first published in December 1817 and, then, fearing prosecution, quickly withdrawn from publication. The judicious changes made to Laon and Cythna , before its re-issue as The Revolt of Islam , included altering specific phrases that pertained to the subject of religion and the precise nature of the relationship between the male and female protagonists of the poem (explicitly brother and sister in the original version), as well as the removal of the Preface’s final paragraph, in which Shelley questioned the moral sensibilities of his readership by suggesting that some ‘actions’, such as incest, ‘were only crimes of convention’(1). In respect of the implied incestuous relationship, Shelley had intended his

/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=39285 Islam, Kazi Nazrul. The Rebel [Bidrohi]. 1921.

“Bidrohi” [The Rebel] is Kazi Nazrul Islam’s most famous poem, resulting in his soubriquet “Bidrohi Kabi” or “The Rebel Poet”. Before writing this poem, Nazrul was generally thought of as “The Soldier Poet”. Proud of his army rank, in some of his early poems he added his rank before his name: Havildar Kazi Nazrul Islam (See Murshid, 62 and 94). In “Bidrohi”, the poet calls for the destruction of oppression, injustice and violence, so that the rebel, tired of battle, can rest in peace. Nazrul’s early poems such as “Shat-el-Arab”, “Kheya-Parer Tarani” [The Ferry Boat], and “Bajichhe Damama” [The War Drum Resounds] reveal a Pan-Islamist ideal. While Nazrul was writing these poems, he was asked to compose a poem on the goddess Durga for the Puja issue of a magazine. Nazrul had been familiar with Hindu mythology since his days with the leto [a form of theatrical performance] groups. He obliged by writing “Agamoni” [The Arrival], celebrating