Reading Faisal Devji’s Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam, 280 Pages, 2025, that traces how Islam ceased to function as a political actor, why the Muselmann reveals the truth of our age, and what forms of Muslim agency may emerge once ideology dissolves and ethical life returns to the centre.
For almost a…
A short film opens a long-buried chapter of postwar Britain, where music became argument, Nation Records became counter-infrastructure, and Aki Nawaz refused to let multiculturalism settle into décor.
Britain has begun to look and sound like its own archive. The recent 'United the Kingdom' march, fronted by Tommy Robinson and swelling beyond 110,000, was…
A girl in a cotton field, a bungalow set alight, a nation in exile that still insists on seeing itself. In Cotton Queen, Suzannah Mirghani turns Sudan’s most familiar landscape into a site of refusal, memory, and fragile futurity.
Cotton in Sudan has always worn a mask. At dawn, a field looks harmless enough: wisps…
Iqbal's Dream
The mosque in Cordoba stands symmetrical, linear — like the progression of History in the Imam's khutba on Friday. The dreamlike Spain glorious still home to the righteous pours out of his dream and the ink flows onto the page placed on the desk (….) The unleveled still broken road gaping at every…
Zohran Mamdani’s election isn’t just a win for the left, it’s a generational revolt against rhetorical politics, moral evasiveness, and the exhaustion of governance by performance.
History rarely announces its turning points. It can arrive as spectacle or as slow erosion, as collapse or quiet reordering. The election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New…
The mountains, as a symbol of guerrilla resistance against the riyasat of Pakistan, have played a crucial part in the politics and life of Balochistan. “To take to the mountains” is a euphemism for starting or joining a guerrilla war. There have been at least six significant “takings to the mountains” since 1948. The first was that…
"I am cold and I think / I will never feel warm again."
— Forugh Farrokhzad's poem Another Birth (Tavalodi Digar, 1964).
Premiered in Competition this Fall at the 30th Busan International Film Festival (BIFF), Isabelle Kalandar's debut feature Another Birth marked the arrival of a filmmaker whose vision is at once intimate and elemental.…
Most geniuses have one masterwork for which they are famous. For Che and Fidel, that work was surely the Cuban Revolution and its international humanism, just as it was for Lenin, the Russian. For CLR James, we can list "The Black Jacobins” as an extraordinary work of genius, as well as the underground Marxist group…
“Peace is the coded continuation of war by other means.”
—Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), p. 15.
It was wall-to-wall Trump.
Donald Trump’s Peace 2025 summit in Sharm el-Sheikh resembled a television production more than a peace…