In 2004, Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety reshaped feminist debates on agency and secularism, challenging entrenched assumptions and sparking sharp critique. Often perceived as overtly anti-Western and critical of dominant feminist paradigms, Mahmood’s work questioned the universal applicability of liberal ideals and the imperialist undertones embedded in the saviour mentality of human rights and feminist endeavours. Twenty years on, the text remains a cornerstone for interrogating secular norms and the intersections of religion, politics, and feminism.

On top of a rock in a desert valley about 400km outside of Medina sits a rather curious sculpture. Najma (2020) is cross-legged, her palms placed on her knees facing up to the sky (in what new age yoga practitioners would recognise as the ‘lotus’ pose), her eyes closed in meditation. She glows an electric blue colour…

This blog post features the conference proceedings of the 3rd International Conference of Critical Muslim Studies on ‘ReOrienting the (Global) South’. The conference was hosted by the Centre for Ethnic and Racism Studies (CERS) between 24th-26th June 2024 at the University of Leeds.

It seems unbelievable that more than eleven months of the ongoing genocide in Gaza have passed, with thousands of Palestinians killed, injured and displaced. In January 2024, South Africa’s presentation to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) underlined the extraordinary circumstance that external knowledge of a genocide and its occurrence are both happening together in real-time in front of the world’s eyes. Yet, despite this, there is also an ongoing and concerted whitewashing, censorship and denial of the genocide by most western countries and the shared silence in their national media and political arenas. How do we make sense of this gap between those who see the violence, with its historic and ongoing presence every day, and those who do not, and in fact, actively deny it?

The Islamophobic pogrom in Britain occurs in the midst of an ongoing genocidal assault on Gaza. Since October 7th, the British establishment has described pro-Palestinian, anti-genocide protests as “hate marches,” condemning them as antisemitic while continuing to support genocide by a colonial-racial settler regime, offering it military and diplomatic backing.

While the subject of normalisation with the Zionist ethnostate surfaces periodically in Pakistan, its resurrection in the wake of Trump’s orb-lit visit to Saudi Arabia in 2107, has manifested a new energy. Secular, pro-Zionist liberals eager to overturn Pakistan’s non-recognition of Israel rejoiced at Trump’s initiation of a process that would culminate in the Abraham Accords of 2020.