In death we transition to an unknown dimension. Perhaps an afterlife, perhaps reincarnation, perhaps the void of nothingness, depending on our ideological and spiritual convictions. But in life too, we are in continual transition.
Samia Rahman
The email dropped innocuously into the Muslim Institute’s info account. Hopeful for an exciting event invitation or notification of a fascinating new publication just out, I opened it. But quickly realised this was not some generic semi-spam, but an incendiary provocation by a right-wing journalist with Islamophobic form.
An agonising feature of writing is the knowledge that, particularly in our digital age, once a piece of work is ‘out there’, there is no taking it back.
If shame as an emotion transcends the physical body, body politics invite us to consider which bodies are unthinkingly included or excluded in what we might regard as the polity.
In March 2021, the market town of Batley in West Yorkshire found itself splashed across UK national news headlines. A teacher at the secondary grammar school had, as part of a lesson on free speech, allegedly shown his class a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammad.
Growing up in an environment as sober as you could get, I was terrified of drunk people.
It was at the Muslim Institute Winter Gathering on 12 December 2020, regrettably virtual by necessity but still wonderfully vibrant, that writer Medina Whiteman pondered the impact on the creative process of the interminable endlessness of lockdown.
Do any of us know where we’re heading? It seems futile to contemplate destinations, physical or existential, when the world is on stuttered pause.
Samia Rahman reviews “A Histry of Islam in 21 Women” by Hossein Kamaly.
Waking up on 23 March 2020 to a surreal new reality, it felt like we were in a scene from a film: let’s call it Locked Down in London. Except this was not a disturbing nightmare or one of those apocalyptic TV serials. This was really happening.