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, from the ultramarine pigment added to her aluminium shell, and her head is loosely wrapped in the same colour blue scarf so that only her heavy fringe is visible. The Santa Monica-based artist who made her, Lita Albuquerque, saw her installation as “historic”, referring not simply to the fact that the figure was installed but “that it is accepted”. Much of the coverage of Najma has adopted this same positioning of Albuquerque and the other artists who created works to be exhibited as part of the inaugural Desert X AlUla festival. Clichés about Islam forbidding figurative art “especially of women” and outlawing it as idolatrous were repeated ad nauseam, as many rushed to present Najma as a ground-breaking first and evidence of a new “revolutionary spirit”.

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.

The terrible spectacle of Muslim sites, viz. a home, a shop, a mosque, besieged by a motley crew of police personnel and civil servants like the ruthless army of the past times, ready with their JCB bulldozers—a metaphor for the battering rams of the imperial armies of yore, sums up the Indian state’s relationship with the Indian Muslims.