The self-fashioning of Muslims in the Balkans as more secular, more tolerant and more moderate than the other Islams out there, but particularly in the Middle East, has been something I have struggled to understand in the last four years despite having been exposed to it all my life.

Feminism is for everybody. Not because it questions gender and sexism but because of the way it does so. It is both a set of theories and methods of transformation borne of the desire for justice, a desire it happens to share with Islam.

Over more than a year, Fatimah Ashrif, a Muslim, and Julian Bond, a Christian, met to read scripture with friends from different faiths. Here, they reflect on the experience.

Most South Asian families have one. An Auntie Ji, who is not really a member of the family, but everyone’s Auntie. On the Subcontinent, they serve as marriage brokers and go-betweens, and keep the neighbourhood well-oiled with gossip. Amongst the Asian diaspora in Britain, the universal Auntie Ji performed an additional function: she served as a local moral guardian who kept a beady eye on the young.

Poems by Perzada Salman.

The 1930s were marked by tragedies that to this day strike terror and grief in the hearts of descendants of those few who lived to tell their tale. Political repression, collectivisation, dispossession and forced relocation to Siberia was the norm. ‘Death journeys’ were the cruel destiny for millions of residents of the multinational country called USSR.

The ties of family relationships, origin, culture and heritage bind us into power vortexes that equally dispossess in our age of anxiety. Everything that we took for granted has been turned on its head. But how did we get to this point?