It was blurry. She could make out only shapes and figures. The tension in the air was palpable and she had the distinct feeling that all eyes were upon her. An entire life had been building up to this occasion, and now it was time. ‘Here, take this,’ said a voice she recognised and yet didn’t know.

In June 2011, Global Ikhwan established the Obedient Wives Club (OWC). The group promised sex lessons to help wives ‘serve their husbands better than…first-class prostitute[s]’ to protect marriages and curb social ills. Its vice-president, Dr Rohaya Mohamad, said a religious wife should also possess good sexual prowess and go beyond being a traditional ‘good wife or good cook’. But why were these sex lessons needed?

In the ‘Gardens of Peace’ cemetery in Ilford, the graves appear to have come off a production line. Rows of identical mounds of earth crowned with a simple stone slab stretch obediently as far as the eye can see. They resemble some kind of chant, or repeat binary code; they are like insistent questions to which you always get the same answer.

A few days before my eventual release, I put pen to paper for the last time within the walls of Evin Prison, and on a little torn-off piece of a Kleenex box, wrote an aphorism: ‘A philosopher puts himself in danger because of his thoughts; for his philosophy is like a tightrope on which he walks, with the world threatening deep below.’ My ideas had landed me in this prison. To get out I would have to convince my captors that I regretted having these thoughts. No other lifeline remained.

My silent question directed at the mute Sphinx was evoked by my recent visit to the Dachau concentration camp memorial site: Why did you fail to guard the entrance of our medical school in the years leading up to the Third Reich?

So much has been written about Iraq in the last two decades that it isn’t easy to remember the time when Saddam Hussein ruled unchallenged, supported by Western governments viscerally alarmed at Khomeini’s Iran – and when very little was really known in England about Ba’athist Iraq.

The massacre at Karbala is a central event in Islamic history. Its significance can be judged by the fact that the very mention of Karbala evokes strong emotions amongst Muslims, particularly the Shi’a. On 10 October 680, corresponding to the Islamic date 10 Muharram 61, the grandson of Prophet Muhammad, Husayn b. ‘Ali (referred to as ‘al-Husayn’) along with his family and companions, was brutally martyred.

If it is death that determines the limits of life, it is love which offers the promise of overcoming those limits. Between these two great defining factors of human existence there is a necessarily complex relationship, which in one way or another involves just about every aspect of what it means to be truly human.

The ghazal, or love lyric, evolved out of the pre-Islamic Arabian qasida, or ode, and the origins of the qasida go back to a time before Arabic became a written language.

Rabia of Basra lived in twelfth-century Iraq. She wrote in Arabic, but her exemplary piety made her a saint who is venerated all over the Muslim world. In her era, the mystical tradition of Islam was growing, even burgeoning