If all the trees in the earth were pens, and if the sea eked out by the seven seas more were ink, the Words of Allah could not be written out unto their end. Allah is All mighty, All wise. (Qur’an 31:27)

And say not of those slain in way of Allah, “They are dead”; they are living, but you are not aware. (Qur’an 2:154)

Those who struggle for Us - We shall guide them on Our paths, and Allah is with those who do what is beautiful. (29:69)

A series of lectures by Allama Jawwad Naqvi on defining the revolutionary unity (inqlabi wahdat) that Muslims need to counter imperialist attempts to divide and rule.

These talks were held in Sialkot (Punjab, Pakistan) and also attended by the ulema of Ahl’ul-Sunna.

Tafarqa Meeras E Yazidiyat

Inqlab E Islami Sarchasma E Wahdat

Beyond Dubai’s shimmering skyscrapers lies Sonapur, a crowded and rundown camp for Asian labourers toiling on the city’s monumental projects.

The native of Pakistan’s impoverished southeastern Sindh province has been in Dubai for 13 months trying to squeeze a living from odd construction jobs to support his wife and daughter and elderly parents back home.

He earns 4 dirhams (1.10 dollars) an hour.

If he’s lucky, he can make about one thousand dirhams (274 dollars, 227 euros) a month, out of which he has to spend 342 dirhams on food and rent and pay back the fees charged by the recruiting agency that brought him to Dubai and arranged for his work permit.

Those fees can be as high as 12,000 dirhams.

Hussein is working on a road construction project but has not been paid for more than a month.

Dubai and its neighbouring Gulf emirates have posted economic growth in recent years that would embarrass China, but what wasn’t mentioned during OzFest is the invisible worker army whose endless toil is so essential to Dubai’s massive boom, not least turning a polo ground into an unlikely venue for Aussie rules sur-les-sands.

They mostly live in a slum called Sonapur, hidden in the dunes between Dubai and Sharjah. Without Sonapur, Dubai’s architectural bling, its spas and tax-free splendour likely wouldn’t exist. It is a Middle Eastern Soweto, where as many as 500,000 foreign labourers, mostly illiterates from the impoverished rural villages of the sub-continent, who build Dubai are housed in some of the most depressing conditions I’ve seen. It is a Hogarthian dystopia that should shame Dubaians, if they knew much about it. Or cared.

Sonapur is one of the biggest communities in the booming United Arab Emirates but it doesn’t seem to officially exist. It isn’t found on official maps, road signs or even Wikipedia. Its wretched sprawl of countless filthy dormitories is concealed in desert dunes, an anonymous slum hidden from the Dubaians whose apartments its residents built. The best way to find Sonapur is to follow one of the myriad worker buses that shuttle between the many building sites. Some 90 minutes later you’ll be deposited in a heaving sandswept plain of utilitarian four-storey dormitories sprawled as far as the eye can see, punctuated by the occasional store selling ghee, naan and curry powders. Dubai gleams with world-class infrastructure but Sonapur didn’t get much of it. Many of its roads are gravel and sand with few footpaths. Open sewers are common. There’s none of the grass Dubai’s luxury developments specialise in claiming from the desert.