On the 14th of March 2024, as part of his role as Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, Michael Gove’s new definition of extremism was released. Ostensibly the new definition is being posited as ‘guidance’ for a ‘common-sense’ approach to tackling extremism.

Patrick Wolfe’s Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology has been one of the most persuasive theoretical interventions for understanding settler colonialism. With the latest phase in Israel’s genocidal project against the Palestinians in Gaza and displacement and Apartheid in the West Bank, Israel as a settler colonial project is being reemphasized in the public sphere.

The conviction that the sharīʿa has been slain by modernity could be read as the resuscitation of the early classical debate on the sharīʿa’s fatigue. Yet it marks both a continuation and a departure from that debate’s original form. In its modern form, the question of the sharīʿa’s fatigue or death is entertained not by its jurists, but by historians trained in Western institutions.

According to a wide range of analysts, Pakistan’s parliamentary elections scheduled for 8th February 2024, will be the most rigged election in the country’s history. The reason for this is the state authorities’ steely determination to thwart the anticipated victory of former PM Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party, leading by a wide margin in several major opinion polls commanding over 60% support.

Various initiatives have been undertaken to counter the problematics of colonization, modernity and knowledge production, furthermore to disentangle these legacies of the West still prevailing towards Islam, Muslims, and the whole world. Among the initiatives, Islamisation of Knowledge and Critical Muslim Studies are discussed here in conversation with one another, with reference to Malaysia.

According to Sherman A. Jackson (2005) Black Orientalism, “…seeks to cast the Arab/Muslim world as a precursor to and then an imitator of the West in the latter’s history of anti-blackness.” (pp.99-100) Crucially, however, he goes on to state that “[s]ubstantively speaking, Black Orientalism is a thoroughly Blackamerican enterprise, an overtly ideological endeavor with far from objective methods or innocent aims [emphasis added]”, and it has three ‘typologies’, viz. (1) Nationalist, (2) Academic, and (3) Religious (p.100).