From my vantage point in Brighton, UK, it’s a strange time on Planet Earth – for all the sound and fury, social media meltdowns, strikes and protests, it has felt to me this autumn of 2022 as though we are just miming political action.

Islam is my choice: I pronounced the shahadah on Thanksgiving Day, 1972, in the city of Washington, DC. Often when I say I am Muslim by choice, both Muslims and non-Muslims ask why.

Tūqān, best known for her resistance poetry against the Israeli occupation of Palestine, connects the dots between resistance, victory, patriarchy, and feminism.

My friend Will has built me a bookroom. It sits at the transition point of our property and the farmer’s. From the large window I see the two-year-old hedge on the boundary, and sheep fields and drumlins, and beyond them the rising Galloway Hills.

Yusuf Ali, on furlough from the India Civil Service, now called to the bar in London, dressed and made his way on foot to Hutchinson and Sons. After years of passing judgment on mundane matters in the villages near Saharanpur, he was eager to prove what he could do.

Time is the capsule through which we interact with great sporting moments. One of these was when NFL San Francisco 49ers quarterback, Colin Kaepernick, began kneeling as the US national anthem played, before playoffs during the 2016 season.

The Qur’an is replete with sonorous insistences on the ineluctability of death: that firm bedrock of vitality on which we repose will ineludibly erode, and all our varying ventures bear the indelible imprint of mortality.

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.