I set out to answer what often seems like a simple question: how is working with Muslim young people the same as, similar to, and unlike working with other young people? I found the answer leads us to dig where we stand.

When confronted with the question of who speaks for Islam, public debate routinely devolves into a search for authentic representation: Which scholar, movement, or state institution holds the true mandate of the faith? Yet, twenty-five years after the launch of the global “War on Terror,” framing the issue as an internal theological dispute fundamentally misdiagnoses the problem. The core conflict is not theological, but epistemological and political.

The second Critical Muslim Studies Summer Programme on “Decolonisations and Emancipations” took place in Ankara, Türkiye, from July 17 to July 22. The Summer Programme was a critically rigorous, challenging and ultimately exhilarating experience. Over six days, there were 16 faculty-led sessions and four sessions built around student presentations and discussions.

Twenty-five years after 11 September 2001, the Global War on Terror (GWOT) appears, at first sight, to belong to another political moment. The occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq no longer organise Western political discourse in quite the same way and the language of a singular global “war on terror” has receded, while the genocide in Gaza, the resurgence of the far right and new geopolitical crises appear to have displaced it.

In India, a dissenter can be a cockroach. But can they be a Muslim? Read this critique of sanctified dissent, enabler culture, and the racialised distribution of risk in modern India.

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.”