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This essay examines the fall of Constantinople in 1453 as a critical juncture for the playing out of Chrisitan-Muslim relations. Particularly, this historical moment demonstrates the significant theological schism between Orthodox and Latin Christianity that overshadowed the external threat posed by the Ottomans. The fall marked the end of the Eastern Roman Empire and highlighted the deep-rooted theological tensions within Christianity, tensions that were so profound that many Orthodox Christians preferred Ottoman rule over submission to the Latin Church. This preference stemmed from a desire to maintain theological autonomy and avoid the doctrinal compromises required by the Latin Church. The essay critically assesses the contemporary scholarship on Christian Islamophobia, arguing that it often overlooks the internal Christian divisions and portrays Christianity as a monolithic entity united against Islam. By focusing on the diverse Christian attitudes towards the Ottomans, particularly the Orthodox perspective, the essay demonstrates that the fear of theological compromise with the Latins was considered a worse fate than Muslim conquest. This analysis challenges the prevailing narratives in Islamophobia literature by highlighting the necessity of acknowledging intra-Christian tensions to fully understand the historical dynamics of Christianity and Islamophobia. Through an exploration of various Christian responses to the Ottoman threat and the subsequent establishment of the millet system, the essay advocates for a more nuanced portrayal of Christianity's internal divisions and their impact on the construction of Christian identity and attitudes towards Islam.

This article contributes twofold to the international discussion on 'gated communities as a living choice'. First, this study constructs a 'living choice' framework based on the physical, social, and economic characteristics of gated communities as established by the four key researchers. Next, the framework is applied to analyze the reasons for living within gated communities in Karachi, Pakistan. A cross-comparison of two gated communities employs post-occupancy household survey questionnaires from residents, and qualitative interviews with real estate developers, and community managers. The findings ascertain that security and lifestyle are the main values associated with living in gated communities in Karachi.

AbstractNGOs often portray commercial sex workers, injecting drug users, transgender people (hijrae), and homosexual men as quasi‐legal persons who are locked in a policing‐criminality relationship with the state, and who therefore need them to mediate this relationship. By advancing such portrayals, NGOs in Pakistan's HIV prevention sector capitalize upon the presumed cultural difference of the so‐called risk groups of HIV. They appropriate stigma against these groups as a strategy to access funds and to fortify their own position as brokers in the unstable donor‐dominated funding landscape of HIV prevention. In doing so, the NGO leaders and members end up stabilizing stigma and reinforcing its attendant inequalities in the socially conservative environment of Pakistan. The discriminatory legal framework that criminalizes sex outside marriage and non‐therapeutic use of drugs goes unchallenged by NGOs, despite their apparent support for universal human rights, partly because the status quo stabilizes these organizations' position as brokers between state and donor agencies and the so‐called risk groups of HIV.

This paper takes a "state-in society" approach to understand the evolution of Pakistan's COVID-19 response, which was laid claim to and contested by multiple agencies within and adjacent to the state, and by multiple levels of government. The capacity of the health system of Pakistan was already overstretched by the needs of its population but in recent years it has been hamstrung by ongoing protests by the medical community concerning the privatisation of public sector hospitals, to which were added protests over the lack of PPE in the public sector. These resulted in frequent closures of out-patient departments at major hospitals. When the government announced a relief package to mitigate effects of COVID, traders and big businesses lobbied the government to obtain the lion's share in the form of concessions such as loan deferments and tax refunds. The unconditional cash grants programme was hyped about by the government but the cash for the poor could not be disbursed effectively due to the absence of local governments at the grass-root level. As an appropriate response to the pandemic, especially in relation to the lockdown policies, was contested and negotiated among multiple actors in the Pakistani state and society, the Pakistan military emerged as a dominant force in this "field of power". In this paper, I present an account of Pakistan's response to COVID-19 as it evolved in 2020 and discuss the implications of this response for democratic culture in Pakistan. (Pac Aff / GIGA)