FunAsiA Director Moody Akhtar’s Mother, Mrs. Naushaba Akhtar, Passes Away Funeral Tomorrow After Friday Prayers Dallas: With deep sorrow, it is announced that Mrs. Naushaba Akhtar, mother of FunAsiA Marketing Director and renowned radio anchor Moody Akhtar, passed away peacefully on November 27 at 12:17 AM. إِنَّا لِلّٰهِ وَإِنَّا إِلَيْهِ رَاجِعُونَ۔ Funeral Details – Friday, November 28: Namaz-e-Janazah: 2:15 PM after the second Friday prayer at IACC Plano Masjid, 6401 Independence Parkway, Plano, TX 75023 Burial: 3:30 PM at Restland Richardson (Muslim Section), 13005 Greenville Ave, Dallas, TX 75243 Prayers are requested for the departed soul and for strength for…
Author: Raja Zahid Khanzada
Dallas–Fort Worth Open Mic: A Free Musical Evening in Carrollton on November 29 By Raja Zahid Akhtar Khanzada Dallas: The pulse of music in Dallas–Fort Worth is set to quicken once again as the city prepares for an evening where an open mic becomes more than a stage. It becomes an invitation, to turn one’s voice into light. Shaks Entertainment is hosting a special musical event on November 29 at 5 p.m. at the Rising Performance Hall in Carrollton, offering aspiring singers not only a chance to perform but also the encouragement that comes with winning first, second, and third-place…
https://youtu.be/ttqdb_-lWoM?si=ozG-2GZqJgR28CRz Music Reborn From Ashes: The Unstoppable Return of Two Voices Honey Singh and Ali Haider By Raja Zahid Akhtar Khanzada There are moments in music when a comeback is not merely a performance but a proclamation. One such moment arrived when Honey Singh emerged through a cloud of smoke on the IIFA stage, and another when Ali Haider stepped into the lights at the HUM Awards in Houston after years of silence. These were not simple returns. These were declarations that true artists do not die; they simply fall quiet for a while. Fame may fade, the world may…
Democracy’s Quiet Test: Mamdani’s Rise, Trump’s Shift, and Texas’s Politics of Fear By: Raja Zahid Akhtar Khanzada On a cold Washington afternoon, the lights inside the Oval Office glowed with an unusual stillness, as if history itself were quietly turning a fragile page. These were the same walls that had absorbed decades of whispers from capitalists, lobbyists and the old American establishment, yet today they had opened themselves to welcome a man whom these very forces once tried to keep outside their circle. But democracy has a way of breaking its own boundaries. Every so often, it elevates an unexpected…
https://youtu.be/inzcl-wNIeo?si=pMi5t4oDdP5Y9Zvk When Arrogance Forged in Metal Fell Upon the Sand: The Silent Death of Tejas at the Dubai Air Show By Raja Zahid Akhtar Khanzada When Pride Turned to Metal and Fell Upon the Sand: The Silent Death of Tejas in Dubai By Raja Zahid Akhtar Khanzada In Dubai’s sky today, a moment seemed to freeze, as if the noisy world suddenly fell silent. On a sunlit runway, when the Indian fighter jet Tejas dipped toward the earth during its final arc, time itself appeared to pause, exhausted. Within seconds, flames leapt upward, smoke curled into the air, and years…
Camels, Jets, Oil and the Muslim World’s Lost “No” By Raja Zahid Akhtar Khanzada When the final light flickered across the minarets of the Ottoman Caliphate, British cartographers in distant European capitals bent over their drafting tables, slicing an empire into fragments. Arabia, Syria, Iraq, Palestine—each pulled apart like veins torn from a living body. Nationalist slogans, secret agreements and whispers of revolt formed a tightening fence around Istanbul’s heart, slowly draining the authority that had anchored a vast Muslim world. Stories about intrigue and violence inside the imperial harem made for popular folklore, but history tells a quieter truth.…
A Turning Page in Bangladesh and the Inevitable Reckoning of Power By Raja Zahid Akhtar Khanzada Time never rests on a single face. Power, no matter how tall its walls or how wide its corridors, never casts the same shadow forever. The bond between human beings and authority is like the soil that shifts the moment the first line of rain touches it. Yet the rulers of our region continue to forget that the earth may endure injustices for centuries but it never absolves them. Sooner or later, it settles every debt owed by the oppressed. The dramatic verdict announced…
The Twenty-Seventh Amendment: A Nation Between Light and Shadow By Raja Zahid Akhtar Khanzada I opened my eyes in a Pakistan held tight under General Zia ul Haq’s martial law. In those years a newspaper page almost never reached the reader intact; sentences vanished into the censor’s scissors. Teachers and students disappeared into jails. Peaceful rallies were treated as crimes. For my generation, democracy was not an abstract system from a civics book. It was the sting of a whip on someone’s back, the taste of tear gas and the knowledge that a wrong slogan could cost you your future.…
The 27th Amendment — The Other Side of the Picture and the Naked Truth of Power ! By Raja Zahid Akhtar Khanzada Politics in Pakistan has never followed a straight line. It has always resembled an old, winding footpath where every step uncovers a hidden cry, a forgotten lament, or a buried secret struggling to breathe. A few days ago, I wrote a column titled: “A Dream with Bhutto and Benazir: The Protest of Souls Against the Mutilation of the Constitution.” The column split the landscape in two. To critics of the government, it was a mirror of truth. To…
A Dream of Bhutto and Benazir — The Souls of Democracy Rise in Protest on a Broken Constitution By Raja Zahid Akhtar Khanzada In the stillness of night, a strange rift tore open, as if someone had split the curtain of time and placed me in a realm untouched by day or night. From afar, a dim light trembled closer, until suddenly, two familiar faces—long lost to history, emerged before me. One carried the same glint of confidence, the same ironclad smile—Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. The other, wrapped in a white shawl, bore a radiant face, dignified and gentle, yet bruised…
