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.

On the 10th April 2024, three children under the age of 10 were killed as they travelled with their families to visit relatives for Eid ul-Fitr. Another young child later died as a result of the injuries she sustained in this same attack. Their murder provoked almost no outcry in the Western media. It was justified by many commentators on grounds of their lineage: the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) had killed them, the story went, because they were the grandchildren of Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas (an organisation proscribed by the UK government, among others). For many commentators in the so-called West, these extra-judicial killings (which also included several other members of Haniyeh’s family) constituted a small-scale victory over the discursively established category of violence referred to under the moniker ‘terrorism’. Outside of Westernese frameworks, however, many asked a simple – if controversial – question: could the murder of a four-year-old girl really constitute the annihilation of a terror threat?

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.