What kind of a vile, senseless propaganda is this?
[quote]
Pakistan before the Jamat Islami's Pan-Islamist show down and 9-star fraud, was a dynamic scene for the art and literature. Paintings, sculptures, prose, and poetry were the source of new thinking. Then the curse of religion fell upon this hapless country and the intellectual minds died their premature deaths.
[/quote]
I am no fan of Jamaat i Islami or any other religious parties but what you are saying is just stupid. Does Islam stop people from art. I think you are wrong. You have not heard about the magnificent art in the Muslim era? You have not heard of calligraphy, sufi music, architecture of alhamra, the Morrish Spain, India, Iran, Egypt, baghdad, samarkand, Bukhara? I am sure you did but you are adament that art has to be the way West defines it for you.
Islam is beautiful and Allah loves beauty. However, beauty within the guidelines of Islam. Not how you define it. Arts do not die just by not making sculptures. There are a thousand ways of expressing it in a decent manner.
And yes, its not the curse of the religion, but the curse of a dictator and one man show. Its also the ineptness of the so called "intellectual class" that was not able to show the way.