Whenever I offer a comment to any article posted on the Ismaili Mail website I like to record it on my blogsite. These are 2 comments I made recently relating to my recent trip to China:
1)easynash - May 16, 2007
I was on vacation in China when your site reached the 200,000 mark. Belated heartiest congratulations! Its interesting but I did have access to a computer in Beijing, Shanghai as well as the Silk Road cities of Urumqi, Kashgar, Turpan, Dunhuang and Xian but was not allowed access to the Ismaili Mail website. I did see all your new postings because they are mailed to my gmail account but could not get access to the actual website. Perhaps(and this is just a guess) the pointy-headed Attila the Han bureaucrats at Communist Party Central in Beijing have cut off access to your site because it is so popular and might give some undesirable ideas to Muslims in China. Nevertheless it was a fabulous visit and I will be blogging extensively about our trip on my blogsite(my wife kept a very detailed daily diary). Cheers.
Ismaili Mail replied:
ismailimail - May 16, 2007
Hi nash, glad to see you around, looking forward to your travelogue from China. Yes, the wordpress.com domain has recently been blocked in China. Google’s blogspot has been banned in Pakistan for sometime as well. Seems these governments are quick in blocking the undesirable contents and there seems to be nothing much people can do about it. But people always find the ways to get around and getting blog contents via email is one easy way.
2)In response to the following post by Ismaili Mail,
http://ismailimail.wordpress.com/?s=Najam+Abbas&searchbutton=go%21
I gave the following comment:
easynash - May 18, 2007
Its interesting that you have made 2 recent posts on the subject of mountains and mountain societies: this one dated May 1st 2007 and the one below, dated May 9th 2007. As you know I just returned from a trip to the Chinese(eastern) side of these mountain ranges, the western sides of which exist the following countries, stated in sequential order from north to south and making up the western border of the vast country of China: Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India:
http://ismailimail.wordpress.com/2007/05/09/rakaposhi-mountain-range-internship-research-with-akdn-in-gilgit-pakistan/
All of these mountain ranges radiate outwards from the Pamir Knot along the border of Tajikistan and China. In the eyes of God they are just one vast mountain range but in the eyes of man they have different names: Tien Shan in China, Altai along Mongolia and bits of Russia, Tien Shan in Kazakhstan and Kyrgistan; Pamirs, Hindu Kush, Karakorum along the borders of Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, Kunlun along the northern border with Nepal, the southern border with India of which is made up by the Himalaya mountain range.
Seeing these tall, craggy. snow-capped mountains from the western Xinjiang Province on the Chinese side forces one to catch ones breath as I am sure they also do when they are seen from the Central Asian side(I am reminded of a series of pictures from the post ‘The Road To Hunza’ by Ali Khurshid on this website, some of which depict these breathtaking mountains).
This series of mountain ranges, the tallest in the world at the moment and growing taller still, began to sprout upwards from the ground within the past 200 million years when the subcontinent of India, which was initially perched along the African border near Madagascar, South and East Africa, moved up the Indian Ocean and slammed(in slow motion) into the vast underbelly of Asia, where it exists today. This impact caused, and is still causing today, these vast mountain ranges to be created and pushed upwards, some almost 6 miles tall. At the same time this process began, on the other side of the world, there was no Atlantic Ocean and the continents of Europe and Africa were grinding up against the continents of North and South America and had already created and pushed upwards the Apalachian chain of mountains on the eastern seaboard of North America, mostly in eastern Pennsylvania. This impact of whole continents against one another was so strong that the Appalachian mountain chain was once even taller than the Himalayas, Pamirs, Karakorums, Hindu Kush and Tien Shans are today.
I am currently mulling over a series of posts for my blogsite called the China Series and will talk in more detail about this and other topics, including the Rock Cycle in Nature, evidence of a most dynamic “universe in which we live, move and have our being”(Aga Khan III).
easynash
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation:Aga Khan 4.
The God of the Quran is the One whose Ayats(Signs) are the Universe in which we live, move and have our being:Aga Khan 3
