History reminds us that, like literature and art, football can embody a people’s struggle for freedom. At rare moments, twenty-two players on a football pitch become the living symbol of a nation’s liberation. Reflecting on his years as a goalkeeper, Albert Camus observed: “What I know most surely about morality and the duty of man, I owe to sport.”

Recalling the Caliphate by Salman Sayyid deserves to be regarded as one of the most significant works written in recent years on Islamism, decolonization, Western-centrism, and Muslim subjectivity. For Sayyid does not merely discuss the idea of the caliphate or the political trajectory of Islamism in this book; rather he seeks to understand, at a much deeper level, the ways in which the modern world order has rendered Muslims ahistorical and nameless, and yet how Muslims continue, despite everything, to exist as a visible global subject.

“From the perspective of the still-prevailing Western-centric hegemonic project, the continued existence of Islam in one form or another, regardless of whether it possesses any political success, is itself a failure, a scandal.” Salman Sayyid makes this observation in his book Recalling the Caliphate.

We are at a point where all the wealth and property we have accumulated suddenly lose all meaning, or rather, where they finally reveal their true meaning.
Remember what we were saying only a few months ago about Syrians and refugees who knocked on our doors:
“Are we obligated to take care of them? Why should we bear their burden while our own children are hungry? Because of the Syrians, we can no longer even walk the streets of Aksaray,” and so on.

The relationship established with the Qur’an lies at the very center of what it means to become and remain a Muslim. For every Muslim, the Qur’an is not simply a text among texts; it is a message revealed personally from God and directed specifically to oneself. For this reason, questions concerning the understanding of the Qur’an are approached on a completely different level from the way they are approached by those who read it without belief.

World cricket is in crisis because a sport that once claimed a shared global purpose has been hollowed out from within, rather than through any decline in talent or public interest. What is presented as an international game is now structured around the power, profit and priorities of a single nation, reducing the rest of the cricketing world to spectators in their own sport.