Articles
‘Mystical is Hardly a Retreat from Political’
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 […]
Towards an Islamic Decoloniality
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 […]
Eco: The Ego Buster
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 […]
‘I am fascinated by the question of what God’s problem with poor people is’
‘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 […]
A ‘Bagful’ of Tear-Wiping Humor
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 […]
The Muslims who Shaped America – From BrainSurgeons to Rappers
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” […]
Loving Compassion in Islam and Buddhism: Rahma and Karunā
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 […]
Lives suddenly in transit
It’s Saturday. The sun is out. It has been out for a day or two now, but today’s sun feels different. It’s brighter, warmer. It feels like a promise. Some of the streets are dry — they’re dull and grey, the way we like it, and not black and shiny, the way they’ve been for […]
Anthropology of Compassion
Ibn Arabi, as most of us know, has commonly been called Shaikhul Akbar, the greatest teacher. The main reason for this is that he explained in unprecedented detail and at the highest level of discourse all implications of the Islamic world view. The result was the vast synthesis of learning covering all basic fields of […]
Tipu Sultan and his ‘Indian Dream’
A lot has been said of Tipu Sultan. Why does the so-called-debate pop up every third week of November? The newspapers in Karnataka and the rest of India have been filled with stories of the Mysorean ruler, trying to place him in an India that is increasingly gripped by frequent doses of ‘Ultra Nationalism’. The […]
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