Latest news with #Hazara
The Sun
12-05-2025
- Business
- The Sun
Hazara Attires eyes 45% jump in sales this year
PETALING JAYA: Hazara Attires Sdn Bhd, the company behind the Hazara Boutique brand, is eyeing a 45% jump in sales this year, banking on its heritage craftsmanship and brand expansion. Hazara Boutique creative director Amani Hazara said the brand is pursuing a niche strategy centred on preserving traditional tambour beading as it expands its footprint in Malaysia's fashion scene – beginning with a new flagship boutique in Plaza Shah Alam. 'With the opening of our new store and a strategic push into new markets, we anticipate strong momentum. We are expecting a 45% increase in sales compared to last year. While the exact figures will depend on market conditions, we're confident this will be a major step forward in our growth journey,' she told SunBiz in an email interview. The brand recently collaborated with Habib Jewels for the launch of its Raya 2025 collection, Scintillate, where models showcased Hazara's designs paired with Habib's jewellery. 'We saw an opportunity to bring our strengths together. Fashion and jewellery naturally complement each other, and the collaboration allowed us to present a cohesive and elegant festive look,' Amani said. She said the brand is open to further collaborations, especially with partners that share its values of quality, craftsmanship, and customer experience. The new Plaza Shah Alam outlet marks Hazara's third major retail move, after starting in Ampang Park and later relocating to SACC Mall. On evolving consumer trends, she noted a rising demand for quality, individuality and sustainability in fashion. 'While sustainability is not yet a core part of our approach, we recognise its growing importance and will continue to explore how we can align with these evolving expectations while staying true to our brand identity,' said Amani. Looking ahead, Hazara Boutique plans to play a greater role in revitalising Malaysia's beading industry, particularly tambour beading, which she said is fading due to a decline in skilled artisans. 'We want to bring it back, not just as an aesthetic detail, but as a craft to be preserved and passed down,' she said.
The Hindu
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
Matthew Spangler talks about his most celebrated adaptation, The Kite Runner
'For you, a thousand times over.' These words from Khaled Hosseini's acclaimed novel The Kite Runner became symbolic of the friendship between Amir, a privileged Pashtun, and his servant Hassan, a Hazara boy. Set against the backdrop when the rise of the Taliban regime (dominated by Sunnis) in Afghanistan led to the persecution of the Hazara population (Shia Muslims). The books explores the themes of friendship, betrayal, guilt, and redemption through the protagonist Amir. Now a celebrated stage adaption by Matthew Spangler, The Kite Runner was recently staged by Arena Theatre Productions under the direction of Tahera S. For longtime fans and newcomers, the production drew a standing ovation and left many in the audience teary-eyed by the powerful narration on stage. What made it even more special was Spangler's presence, who was equally moved seeing his adaption on stage. Spangler's adaption of The Kite Runner has been in production for 20 years now being played in theatres worldwide. Spangler is also a professor of performance studies at San José State University in California, where he teaches courses on how refugees and asylum seekers and other immigrants are represented in plays. Talking about the challenges of adapting an epic into a play, Spangler says, 'With this book, the challenge is length, if you read it aloud, it takes almost 15 hours, while the pay is just over two hours. How do you condense a 15-hour long story to two hours? People who love the book come to the play and say, 'Oh, you didn't leave anything out,' when I might have left 13 out of the 15 parts out.' Even though the play was previously showcased in Mumbai few years back, this was Spangler's first time watching it on stage in India, 'The audience here listen carefully… They are emersed in the story as it unfolds, which I feel was really beautiful.' Theatre plays an important role in cross-cultural understanding and empathy building, Spangler says. 'Amir comes from a very specific background, and life experiences; growing up in Afghanistan and coming to the United States as a refugee, he comes from a Muslim culture; but he is not practicing as you can see from the play. As an adult he wants to do the right thing for the boy (Hassan's son Sohrab). At the end, you understand him at more emotional level.' There has always been a production of The Kite Runner, somewhere over the past 20 years, Spangler says. 'I have seen this play staged in different countries including London, Canada, or Russia. It is just so unique for a writer to be able to see your play in different contexts and settings.' Counting Samuel Beckett's works as his greatest inspiration, Spangler says, 'I did my PhD and my Master's degree in Irish theatre, and it has been a great influence on my work.' The Kite Runner will be staged on May 4 at 3.30pm and 7.30pm at Ranga Shankara. Tickets are available at the venue and online.
Telegraph
19-04-2025
- General
- Telegraph
This memoir from an ex-Taliban fighter is astonishing
'When I was 16, I wanted to become a suicide bomber for the Taliban in Afghanistan.' This must be the strongest opening sentence of any memoir of the 21st century, and the following 300 pages do not disappoint. Delusions of Paradise is the story of how and why Maiwand Banayee was brainwashed into believing that the rewards of martyrdom were preferable to life on earth. Banayee was born in a slum in western Kabul in 1980, the year the Soviet Union invaded his country. He does not know the date of his birthday, but he was named after a pivotal battle that took place during the second Anglo-Afghan war in 1880. 'Maiwand is a heavy name,' his father told him. 'You must live up to it.' A less burdensome name might have made his inner life a little easier. The conditions of his childhood were medieval. Through the frozen winter of 1991, he shared a single blanket with three of his sisters. A fourth sister had developed a malignant lump on her forehead that soon covered her right eye and extended down her cheek. Eating into her brain, it left her paralysed. Bed-bound and doubly incontinent, she could not leave the house. 'God is a gangster,' cursed Banayee's father, an atheist, a communist and now his daughter's carer. Then, when Banayee was 12, the mujahideen took over the country, bringing famine and a civil war that reduced Kabul, once the Paris of Central Asia, to ashes. Banayee, who belonged to the Pashtun tribe, grew up to be bookish and sensitive in a culture obsessed with masculinity. Ali, the boy next door, was a Hazara, and the local bully; Banayee became his principal victim. For years, Banayee was kicked, beaten, spat at, pelted with mud and sewage, called a 'sissy' and a 'faggot'. His failure to defend himself, despite taking lessons in martial arts, led to taunts from his father and elder brother; an elderly aunt even mocked him, making him eat whole chilli peppers in order to prove he wasn't 'a girl'. Once, while Ali and his gang tried to choke him, Banayee's trousers fell down. In Afghan culture, a 'pantsing' is – short of rape – the ultimate humiliation. The incident brought shame on his entire family and became a trauma from which he could not recover. Aged 14, Banayee fled with his mother and younger sisters over the border to the Shamshatoo refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, where Osama bin Laden recruited his soldiers. 'This world is nothing but a mirage,' he was taught by his mullah in the mud-hut that passed as a school. 'A home that perishes is not a real home. A life that falls to death is not a real life.' Because anything seemed better than real life, these words 'sent a pleasant hum through my blood'. Dying a hero was the only thing worth living for. As a martyr, Banayee looked forward to an eternal youth spent partying in palaces with 72 big-bosomed virgins whose beauty would increase each time they had sex. With his hormones running wild, this was the closest he came to imagining a relationship with a woman. The closest he came to being in the Taliban was when, as a madrasa (student) Talib, he spent two weeks with a group of soldiers in Maidan Shar, a city in central Afghanistan. Parading around with a gun on his shoulder, he 'felt that the world was at my feet'. Banayee initially embraced everything the mullahs told him: the earth was flat, for example, and male sperm was produced between the ribs and the backbone. But his mind was instinctively scientific, he had a tendency to 'overthink', and he had not, like his fellow pupils, been raised on tales of miracles. His secular doubts soon overcame his religious fervour. By the time he was 22, he decided that instead of joining the Taliban, whose violence now sickened him, he would train as a doctor in Europe. He therefore paid a team of people-smugglers $5,000 to get him out of Afghanistan. 'It all happened so fast,' Banayee says of his escape to the UK, and it does in the book as well: it's covered in two swift paragraphs, and we learn little about the journey besides the fact that he was imprisoned for three months in Lahore for travelling on a false passport, released only when his smugglers paid a bribe. Other writers would have described their adventures in detail, but Banayee's focus throughout is his internal hell. Barely aware of the outside world, he is haunted not by the corpses of his neighbours killed by the mujahideen, the men's castrated penises stuffed into their mouths, or the Taliban's weekly decapitations. It is the memory of Ali that he cannot expel. After working as a pizza cutter in Cardiff, Banayee was granted asylum in Ireland, where he learned English, married an Irishwoman, had a daughter, opened his own surgery treating back pain (which he still runs today), and wrote this vivid and courageous book. His privileged new life is something to celebrate, but 'life was not about what you had. It was about what you felt.' The marriage failed after 14 years because Banayee found intimacy too difficult. 'Fourteen years dripped away,' as he puts it in one of his startling images, 'like slow-melting ice.' Delusions of Paradise is described by its publisher as 'inspirational', but there is little to lift the soul in this tale of traumatised obsession. What began as a generalised description of the brainwashing of thousands of impoverished Afghani teenagers turns into the magnificent and deeply personal story of one man's ongoing struggle to find meaning in suffering, against all odds.
The Guardian
11-04-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Australia election 2025 live: Albanese and Dutton gear up for campaign launches; judge resigns from Hong Kong court
Show key events only Please turn on JavaScript to use this feature Good morning and welcome to our live blog of the election campaign as we enter day 16. I'm Martin Farrer, bringing you some of the best of the overnight stories and then it will be Nino Bucci with the main action. Although we're more than two weeks in, this weekend will see the two major parties officially launch their election campaigns – expected tomorrow. Anthony Albanese will be in Perth and we'll be there with him to bring you the latest, while Peter Dutton will make his announcement in western Sydney. We're looking at what's gone wrong with the Coalition campaign this morning, specifically of course how Peter Dutton has gone from leading Anthony Albanese in the polls to trailing. Veteran Canberra observer Malcolm Farr is on the case. And we also have an essay by Paul Daley about the prime minister and how 3 May will define his legacy. We have an exclusive news story about how the Liberal candidate for Bruce co-authored a parliamentary submission suggesting the Hazara community in Afghanistan was not persecuted on the basis of its ethnicity, contradicting the Australian government and drawing rebuke from international human rights groups. More coming up. An Australian judge has become the latest foreigner to resign from Hong Kong's highest court before the end of his term on Friday as a security crackdown fans international criticism of a perceived erosion of the rule of law in the financial hub. More to come. Share
The Guardian
11-04-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Liberal candidate co-authored inquiry submission suggesting Hazaras not persecuted for ethnicity in Afghanistan
The Liberal candidate for Bruce co-authored a parliamentary submission suggesting the Hazara community in Afghanistan was not persecuted on the basis of its ethnicity, contradicting the Australian government and drawing rebuke from international human rights groups. Zahid Safi co-authored a submission to a 2021 parliamentary inquiry into Australia's involvement in the Afghanistan war, which incorrectly cited a Human Rights Watch (HRW) report to allege Hazara 'warlords' had 'cut the breasts of women' and watched 'live delivery of pregnant women' during the early 1990s. The 2005 HRW report does not mention these acts. The allegations led members of the Hazara community, which has a significant presence in the electorate of Bruce, to lodge their own dissenting submissions to the inquiry, alleging the claims relied on 'racist tropes' and sought to erase the 'well-documented persecution of an entire ethnic group'. Sign up for the Afternoon Update: Election 2025 email newsletter Safi did not directly comment on those allegations when contacted by Guardian Australia, instead stating he was 'a staunch advocate for freedom of religion or belief for all individuals worldwide'. 'As someone who fled the country because of war, I know everyone under the Taliban suffered, and my advocacy for human rights is shaped by those experiences,' Safi said. The Senate submission co-authored by Safi said, in reference to conflict in Afghanistan, 'that victims of war are not based on ethnicity'. 'The victims of war are targeted based on ideology,' the joint submission said. 'This means, whoever opposes the Taliban and their ideology, is perceived as the Taliban's enemy. Therefore, their perceived animosity is not based on ethnic division.' A 2022 briefing paper on Afghanistan, prepared by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, states the Hazara community are an ethnic group that represents an estimated 10-20% of the country's population. It states the Hazara face 'a high risk of harassment and violence (…) on the basis of their ethnicity and sectarian affiliation'. The department notes the Hazara community has been historically persecuted, noting it was subjected to 'the worst single recorded massacre in the country's recent history' in August 1998, when the Taliban, a predominantly Pashtun organisation, 'massacred at least 2,000 Hazaras'. The submission co-authored by Safi also expressed frustration that other ethnic groups from Afghanistan had allegedly been 'sidelined' by the Australian government and media, due to an alleged prioritisation of the Hazara community. 'Pashtuns have had the most casualties compared to others and this needs to be acknowledged by the Australian government as the 20 years' war existed mostly in the Pashtun provinces,' the submission stated. Thousands of Hazaras who fled Afghanistan after persecution from the Taliban in the 1990s settled in Melbourne's south-eastern suburbs, within the federal electorate of Bruce. The electorate is also home to other Afghan ethnic groups. Safi said: 'A full and fair reading of my submission makes clear that I advocated for every single living individual at risk from the national atrocity and humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan under the Taliban.' Guardian Australia has spoken to other co-authors of the report who stand by its claims. Bruce is held by the incumbent Labor MP, Julian Hill. A margin of 6.6% at the 2022 election has been reduced to 5.3% after a redistribution. . Sign up to Afternoon Update: Election 2025 Our Australian afternoon update breaks down the key election campaign stories of the day, telling you what's happening and why it matters after newsletter promotion The submission has been criticised by HRW's Afghanistan researcher, Fereshta Abbasi, who accused the authors of misrepresenting a report by the organisation to imply brutal violence in Kabul between 1992 and 1995 was conducted exclusively by Hazaras. 'Among these atrocities were those carried out by ethnically Pashtun militia forces and ethnically Hazara militia forces against civilians of these respective ethnic groups, in tit-for-tat kidnappings, rapes and killings,' Abbasi said. 'Attributing them exclusively towards Hazaras is misleading. It is our finding that these attacks were in fact based on ethnicity – in that the victims were targeted because of their ethnicity.' A dissenting submission made by members of the Hazara community, who asked for the Senate to withhold their names, said the submission co-authored by Safi had 'the effect of amplifying racist tropes'. 'It highlights the actions of a few actors in a past civil war, drawing attention to ethnicity to imply the guilt of entire ethnic groups, or to imply that people who belong to ethnic groups other than Pashtun are violent in nature,' the dissenting submission said. A separate dissenting report by two academics specialising in Afghanistan at La Trobe University and Deakin University, along with solicitors and PhD candidates, accused the submission of containing 'a series of factually incorrect statements and racist prejudices'. 'Instead of acknowledging the historical and current persecution of the Hazaras, and the significant risks faced by Hazaras in Afghanistan under the Taliban regime; the authors deliberately blame the Hazaras for the general violence and human rights abuses that were perpetrated during several phases of the war in Afghanistan,' the academics and lawyers said.
