New Internationalist, 18 January 2021 We live in an age when self-identification is all the rage. And yet, for many years, there has been a storm growing in sound and fury about the use of the label ‘Black’ by racialized minorities in the UK. It is a Very British Debate which even our US … Continue reading
New Humanist, 2nd October 2020 Nearly 30 years after the destruction of the mosque by Hindu fanatics, the court judgment confirms fears for India’s future. A special court in India has acquitted all senior figures in the ruling party of their role in the Babri mosque demolition. While the world’s attention was fixated on the Trump / … Continue reading
14 July 2020, New Humanist The inclusion of eco-activists in the Prevent counter-terrorism programme is only the tip of the iceberg. Prevent, the British government’s principal counter-terrorism programme, has come under sustained criticism ever since New Labour introduced it in response to 9/11. Critics have pointed to its disproportionate focus on Muslims and the stigmatisation … Continue reading
The Independent, 21 June 2020 Women come to us when their family and elders have not only failed to remedy the situation but reinforced it. Furthermore, communities cannot be held accountable in the same way as the state The killing of Rayshard Brooks by police in America happened less than three weeks after that of George Floyd. With jaw-dropping … Continue reading
Published in the New Humanist, 16 April 2020 If lockdown has deepened our empathy with the predicament of inmates in our jails, it has also released innovative means of protest on behalf of political prisoners locked up in brutal conditions. On 14th April, the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain organised a self-declared first: a three-hour online … Continue reading
New Humanist, 2nd March 2020 The Citizenship Amendment Act is only part of President Modi’s assault on the secular underpinnings of the Indian constitution. Walls – physical, digital, bureaucratic – are going up all over the world, dividing citizen from citizen. The very notion of citizenship is being questioned and restricted. India is no exception but the … Continue reading
On 9 October, Turkey began a military invasion on northern Syria to attack the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). It’s an open secret that Turkey has been waiting in the wings for an opportunity to annihilate the Kurdish autonomous region Rojava in northeastern Syria, ever since it was established in 2012 while Assad’s attention was … Continue reading
The focus of this book is Pakistan but I was struck by the similarity of the ideological battles being fought between secular and Islamic feminists in Pakistan and in Britain. Of course, the contexts are very different. Secular spaces are much narrower and more dangerous places to inhabit in Pakistan – as anyone following the … Continue reading
My debate on pacifism with Tim Gee. ‘Pacifism is an ideal to which one should aspire but as a strategy it is mostly inadequate in dismantling the very systems that harm us – capitalism, patriarchy, racism.’ I cite #Rojava v ISIS to make the case.
Geetu* is fragile, a tiny birdlike creature who could be broken if she were hugged too fiercely. Except she was broken not by love but by a man who would sweep her into his arms and throw her on the bed or on the floor or against furniture in a fit of rage. She … Continue reading
