Mohamed Aslam Haneef and Amreen Sultan The last twenty-five years, rife with numerous banking and financial crises, has re-emphasised two factual realities. First, that the current banking/financial system is inherently unstable. Second, that the system is unjust. However, we live in postnormal times, where the old system no longer works, but where newer systems have not yet replaced the dysfunctional ones. Hence, we are living in a transition period in which contradictions, paradoxes, ironies, and chaos prevail. The result is a disillusionment among the masses.  This state of affairs is ..read more

Turkey has been in my imagination for a long time, ever since I learnt its heritage and modern legacies. I was and continue to be fascinated by its historical and modern development. Turkey is the heir of a great Muslim empire that governed most of the current Muslim world for more than fourteen centuries. Under the rule of the Ottomans, the world of Islam was looked at with due respect, fascination, and fear. They united the Muslim world, expanded its lands wider and farther than any other Muslim empire did before or after, secured its borders, and protected the holy places in Mecca, Medina ..read more

I had hoped it would help me sleep at night and perhaps avoid a little controversy along the way. Luckily for my university, the controversy was not well known, but those who knew what clouds gathered over our campus were well within their rights to be angry. The objective was to recast neoliberal economics in an ethically sound mould capable of carrying out moral good. The rationale was to sugar-coat two generations of nefarious civic actions. The culprits were the infamous Koch Brothers – amongst the highest ranking of bastards you are apt to find in the contemporary era. Plainly put, it was ..read more

One night after dark when his brothers were already asleep his father, returning home even later than usual, called him out to the yard. Excitement was crackling in his eyes and voice. So Ali stepped out carefully, open-eyed, pointed foot following pointed foot. A donkey was tied to a post beside the latrine. Its sad soft eyes watched Ali expectantly. This is yours, said father, grinning. Mine? It’s ours. Yours and mine. But you will look after it. Ali approached and touched the beast’s warm muzzle. You wanted to go to the school with your brothers, father said. It made you angry when I said n ..read more

When Charles de Gaulle heard about the arrest and detention of the philosopher and intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre for civil disobedience in a suburb police state in Paris, he famously ordered for his release, saying ‘you don’t arrest Voltaire.’ This incident between Sartre and de Gaulle is often cited to demonstrate the unique position held by intellectuals within French society. One of the arguments for this privileged position is the claim that the French intellectuals speak in the universal with the aim of providing guidance on social and political mattersto the world. This trend, they furth ..read more

Words have power. They can evoke raw feeling and emotion. They can stir hate or provoke joy, convey knowledge or disinformation. More fundamentally, they are the way by which we communicate with one another. They are representations and as has been proven by both elected representatives and dead language script, those representations can stray far from their original intention. Sometimes cultural phenomena and changing sentiments can nudge a shift in language. Time, memory, and dynamic attention spans do a a number on this. And just like everything else, language, and the words that make it up ..read more

The Bedouins of Israel have been marginalised and persecuted since the establishment of the State of Israel. Over the decades, they have suffered from exclusion, expropriation of property, and violations of their rights. The exclusion of the Bedouin population from mainstream Jewish-Israeli society, and the weakening of the traditional Bedouin culture and social structures, resulted in a growing disconnection from tradition and leadership. Conventionally, the Bedouin society, excluded and located on the periphery, has been perceived as ‘empty’, existing in a void. But now this so-called void i ..read more

The virus likely arrived in Russia from Italy. By the time the seriousness of the threat was recognised, it was too late to close the borders. The government was quick to blame the ‘liberals’ who ‘brought the virus from Europe’, forgetting that most government-connected figures travel to Europe more than the average Russian. Nationalists blamed the Chinese, and by extension all Asians. Margarita Simonyan, head of ‘Russia Today’, promoted the idea that only ethnic Chinese carry the virus. Moscow’s transit authority demanded bus drivers call the police on ‘ethnic Chinese’, a move that anger ..read more

‘How many times does Adam Smith use the term the invisible hand?’  I was asked this question, several years ago, during conversations with the British historian, Emma Rothschild, her noble laureate husband Amartya Sen, and the French economist Michel Camdessus, in Bilbao, Spain. Of course, I did not know the answer. So, Rothschild spared me the embarrassment; and went on to explain that he only uses the word three times in his entire opus. In the work most are familiar with, The Wealth of Nations, he uses it only once. Yet this one metaphor has come to dominate the popular consciousness w ..read more

In an article published in Foreign Affairs magazine in 1993, the American political scientist, Samuel Huntington, suggested that world politics was entering a new phase. In that new phase, ideological disputes and economic interests would no longer be the primary source of global conflict. Instead, ‘the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations.’ Huntington identified a list of ‘major civilizations’ whose interactions would shape the global order: ‘Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American and pos ..read more