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.

It is a real pleasure to celebrate the launch of Friendships in the Square. From the moment you encounter the title, you are drawn into a world that feels at once intimate and expansive. It gestures towards a particular geography—Trafalgar Square, Russell Square, the squares of Bloomsbury and beyond—but also towards a set of relationships, encounters, and solidarities that unfolded within and around those spaces. The title invites us to imagine not only where these friendships took place, but what they made possible: new forms of belonging, new political imaginaries, and new ways of being Muslim in this country long before such questions became part of our contemporary vocabulary.