Fatima's Archives

I visited Javed Manzil, or Allama Iqbal Museum, as it is also called, in October this year during a trip to Lahore. The museum used to be the house of the renown Poet of the East; Allama Muhammad Iqbal.  The place was constructed a few years before Iqbal's death, and he constructed it on his own expense. However, he dedicated the house to his son, Javed Iqbal, thus calling it Javed Manzil. Since he had given the house to his son, and he had to live in it as well, he actually paid his son the rent for the four rooms he occupied in the house. A few years after Iqbal’s death, the Government of Pakistan bought the house from Javed Iqbal to turn it into a museum. The museum was opened for the public in 1984. Once inside the museum, a guide showed us around and told us lots of things about the house. In one corner, Iqbal’s prayer mat was laid out the way it used to be during his life. Hanging above it were some verses of his poetry. Many of the rooms of his house had been tur...

This is a review about a Museum I had written when I was on a trip to Muscat. It was a cool and windy day on 12 th January, 2014. We had decided to visit a Children’s Museum in Muscat. My sister, Zainab, had read about it on the Internet and everyone was eager too visit it. We had woken up at around 9:15, and by the time the whole family was out the main door, it was 11:43. We walked to Al Qurum Park, which is not very far where we were staying. Al Qurum Park is a huge and beautiful, well-maintained natural park. We went inside and started walking straight forward. One end of the park opens towards the Children’s Museum. It took us around 35 minutes to reach the museum which was a dome shaped building. The walk was long and tiring, but once inside the museum, we could realize that the long walk was worth it. In the museum, we were greeted by Arab women. Baba bought tickets for us all, and then we started looking at the experiments. The museum was a Science one. The ac...