By Ahmed Bin Qasim

For the Kashmiri Muslim who desires liberation, i.e. Azadi, from India, two common responses have historically emerged. First,  Indian liberals (and, liberals in general) pathologize this desire,  turning it into an illness and an  abnormality that ought to be explained, accounted for, and remedied. It is argued that something must have caused the Kashmiri Muslim, who is now seen as a patient of sorts, to have this desire. 

Palestinians have once again made a historic stand against the renewed attack by Israeli colonial settlers and their occupation security forces. The heavily armed settler army attacking praying worshippers inside al-Aqsa were met by Palestinians creating makeshift barricades to keep the military out of the holy mosque. These initial scenes of several hundred Palestinians trapped inside al-Aqsa, building obstacles (with chairs and tables from the mosque against one of the best armed militaries in the world), while hosting Quran study circles and children completing their schoolwork, have been met with expanding waves of resistance from the rest of Palestine. Palestinians in the larger occupied West Bank and Gaza have been joined by Palestinians living inside Israel (Historic Palestine ‘48) who have launched protests unprecedented since the 1947-48 War. In the process they have unified not only the Palestinians separated across colonially demarcated borders inside the occupied whole of Palestine but also its diaspora, as well as the Muslim umma, and peoples across the world to struggle in a renewed uprising.

By David Brophy

“From Beijing’s point of view, of course, all this is of secondary importance. In official rhetoric it was the arrival of ‘Pan-Turkism’ and ‘Pan-Islamism’ at the turn of the twentieth century that laid the foundations for today’s violent extremism. But here too, history can complicate things. These twentieth-century ideologies did not automatically bring with them a critique of Chinese rule in Xinjiang, and more frequently expressed hope for anti-colonial collaboration with China. The 2019 White Paper cites Masʿud Sabri and Muhämmämd Imin Bughra as representatives of these radicalising trends, but both men spent considerable portions of their lives working alongside Chinese nationalists in the Guomindang—hardly the CV we would expect from a pair of die-hard extremists. A third much-maligned villain of this period is Sabit Damulla, who served as Prime Minister of the short-lived East Turkistan Republic in 1933–34. Yet, although obviously inspired by ‘Salafist’ theology, there is nothing in his writings to indicate that he felt religiously obligated to engage in anti-Chinese resistance.”

By Zaman Asaduz

“The police and prison combination is probably the largest force to hinder da'wah activities in Black communities. We are also realizing that inside America, Black people who engage in struggle are treated like terrorists. What Islamists are to America outside in the global War, Blacks are to white-power inside America. This relationship between Islamists and Black strugglers then, is not one of moral solidarity, but rather of an ontological consensus.”

By Zunaira Komal

"However, as Kashmiris – activists, freedom fighters, scholars – have demonstrated for a long time, the illusion of “statehood” under occupation has been a cruel and clever lie. The long on-going fight is thus not about reinstating this temporary provision that maintains autonomy-in-permanent-abeyance. So, what then is this fight about? What is the real terror that the revocation signals if not a newly marked non-autonomy? In this time of fleeting global scrutiny, in which purported allies and supposed neutral mediators peddle a false and ever-deferred peace, we must correctly identify the relationship of Islam to both the resistance and to the repressive paranoia of the Indian state. While Islam is downplayed in both right-wing and liberal-secular discourses about Kashmir, it simultaneously undergirds the present moment’s horror and anxiety."

“Many young Turkic Muslims continued to fast across the Uyghur Autonomous Region in Northwest China. At night restaurants were packed with students waiting with slices of watermelon and pieces of bread that had been distributed throughout the restaurant for those who were breaking the fast. The students waited for a silent signal from restaurant workers that it was time for iftar and that they could begin to eat and drink. Few people talked openly about the fast. Those who fasted were the silent majority. “

"It is no exaggeration to say that in today’s French mainstream mediascape, Erdoğan is increasingly replacing former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or even Saddam Hussein as “Foreign Islamist Public Enemy Number One.” He has become a dangerous scare-and-hate figure, l’homme à abattre as the French expression goes (“the man to shoot down”), or at best “The Scary Muslim We Love to Hate.” In other words, he is indeed the geopolitical equivalent of a Tariq Ramadan, and one observes that his fate and treatment in French media is more or less the same."