In the context of the Israeli offence in Gaza, there is a loud hue and cry all across the world, condemning the attack. That Israel chooses the holy month of Ramadan for this offence renders its act even more barbaric, which makes the indifferent ‘onlookers’ both in the east and in the west complicit in […]
In an interview, outlining the salient features of the Islamic decoloniality project, Dr Syed Mustafa Ali calls out the matrix of colonial power which operates an insidious epistemology inflecting our ways of seeing and thinking. Syed Ali contributes to the robust academic-activist enterprise of decoloniality with his original idea of Islamic decoloniality. Syed Ali teaches […]
Economist on the June 14th issue carried a story on “My Stealthy Freedom”, a social media campaign launched by an expat Iranian living in London. The campaign aims to ruffle the feather of religious orthodoxy by uploading in social media sites, including Facebook, images of women who don’t want to put on Hijab. According to […]
To watch Almanya : Willkommen in Deutschland is quite fitting in this time. In translation, it is ‘welcome to Germany.’ We wake up every morning to the gory news reports about Syria and the nightmarish reveries of people dying in droves. Juxtaposed with this is Pope Francis’ benevolent appeal to Christendom to open its gates for refugees […]
A critical appraisal of Anurag Kashyap’s Black Friday (2007) in the aftermath of Yaqoob Memon’s execution for his alleged involvement in the Bombay blasts, which the film purports to narrate. An adaptation of the book by author/journalist S. Hussain Zaidi, Black Friday, released in 2007 took three years to see the light of day. It […]
I have had occasions to reflect on the fate of what we can now call a post-national cinema, a proposition not so outlandish in the heightened age of transnational globalisation. The idea is based on a conception of national cinemas, or any other national cultural movement, as predicated on national traumas. The leading Iranian film-maker […]
A week before he departed, I Amazonned Umberto Eco’s Prague Cemetery. Was it a mere coincidence or was it a premonition that the author is soon destined for a cemetery? I have never loved Eco as a novelist. I loved his prose, however. His Misreadings is not only a fun to read but it provokes […]
WRY HUMOUR. In one word or two, that’s what Anees Salim’s VANITY BAGH is. The tongue-in-cheek humour permeates every sentence and every word of the book. The book is in the form of a narrative or rather monologue by Imran Jabbari, an accused in the 11/11 serial blasts and sentenced for sixteen years in […]
Conveying somber mood over his non-participation this year, MUHAMMED NOUSHAD remembers the 30th Sharjah International Book Fair and the encounters he had with the people and books during the fair, as the event this year has ended three days ago. In a November midnight in 2011, Ali Ahsan and I landed in Sharjah Airport, […]
Dr Syed Mustafa Ali contributes to the robust academic-activist enterprise of decoloniality with his original ideas on Islamic decoloniality. Syed Ali teaches at The Open University in Milton Keynes (UK) as a member of the Faculty of Mathematics, Computing and Technology. The project of Islamic decoloniality he pioneered exposes various lacunae in leading decolonial projects […]
I have been witness to a conversation passed off between two train passengers who so shrewdly modulated their voice as to be overheard. Here is my attempt not to be fictitious in its reproduction. A: your Ramadan fasting is around the corner. And you are going to starve us Hindoos, aren’t you? B: why starve […]
Once a Sufi was asked why he wore blue robe. He replied: “The Prophet left us three things: poverty, knowledge and sword. The sword was taken by kings, who misused it; knowledge was chosen by scholars, who were satisfied with merely teaching it; poverty was chosen by dervishes, who made it a means of enriching […]
A week before he departed, I Amazonned Umberto Eco’s Prague Cemetery. Was it a mere coincidence or was it a premonition that the author is soon destined for a cemetery? I have never loved Eco as a novelist. I loved his prose, however. His Misreadings is not only a fun to read but it provokes […]
‘Committed’ and ‘multi-pronged.’ The adjectives fit well with Dr Farid Esack, his oeuvre, and academic as well as activist engagements. He published Quran, Liberation and Pluralism in 1997; the work was noted for its academic solemnity as well as earnestness to take the message of the divine text to all it matters. In 1999, his […]
What have Muslims ever done for America? If your sole source of information were Donald Trump, you’d think that the answer was not much – apart from murdering its citizens and trying to destroy its values. The Republican presidential hopeful has called for a halt to Muslims entering the US until American authorities “can figure out” […]
Compassion, even on the human plane, is not just a sentiment, it is an existential quality. This existential quality presupposes a concrete sense of participation in the suffering of others, as is expressed by the etymology of the word: com-passion means to ‘suffer with’ another. The metaphysics of tawhīd finds its most appropriate ethical expression […]
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Mercan Dede says he’s like a vagabond reed flute
DJ Arkın Allen, aka Mercan Dede, is back in the limelight with a new album following a six-year break since his last studio release. Released this month via Onearth Records, “Dünya” (Earth) is the newest offering from the 47-year-old musician, born Arkın Ilıcalı in 1966 in Bursa, and known in Turkey and around the world […]
Muslimgauze: Beyond the Hypnotic Sufi Gimmick
Why am I not blessed with the kinda music which Bryn Jones dished out under the banner Muslimgauze? This is the question one can’t help asking in a climate of fear and victimhood. Next month 15 years will have been over since the passing away of Jones. We listen to politics trumpeted. But once in […]
There are no billboards on the streets. For the last four years, a week or so before the new season of Coke Studio is launched, most of the important billboards in major Pakistani cities are taken up by snazzy advertisements announcing the featured artists of the season. It’s the biggest annual ad campaign for any […]
West and Islam: Beyond Conflicts and Resolutions
In what appeared to have been uploaded four years ago, a YouTube video has Sheikh Hamza Yusuf, adored in the west as a traditional Islamic scholar with deep moorings in modern streams of thought and knowledge, having friendly chat with a motley group of scholars who straddled the diversity camouflaged in the binary expression Islam and West. […]
The Idea of Islam Today: Towards Non-Orientalist Genealogies
This is a transcribed speech of Talal Asad delivered at the American University of Beirut as part of an international symposium in honor of Talal Asad held by Arts and humanities initiative at the University. Tonight I will take up the concept of tradition and explore it in a more straightforward and elaborated manner. I […]
Imperial Continuity: Palestine, Iraq and US foreign Policy
Here Edward Said talks about the sheer violation of human rights with ‘the establishment of by force of a Jewish state on a land that was populated by the Arabs. This process began in the early 19th century culminated with the war between the Arabs and Jews in 1947, in which the Arabs lost. It […]
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