Since 1966, a regular part of my travels from Scotland to Afghanistan and Pakistan has been the study and enhancement of brown trout, a fish which is native to cold waters from Iceland eastwards to the borders of China.

During the first lockdown in 2020, I lived in an old tenement building on Easter Road in Edinburgh, Scotland. One day, I looked up the distance between my flat and Lochend Park, the nearest green space. 1.126 kilometres.

No public figure in the UK can express old-school leftist politics without being labelled a ‘firebrand’ – a word implying an angry, rabble-rousing nature, which once invoked a person, damned to burn in hell.

William, or Bill, Holmes – otherwise known as Muhammad Ameen – has been in love with rockscapes at least since the start of his eastern journeys in the very early nineteen sixties.

Before, there were green hills. Now, narrow roads snake through layers of blackness and thick phantoms of smoke float up from the grounds as if the air is drawing out the past’s vestiges.

The morning sun lights up Maryam’s face through the gap in the curtains. She lies there with her eyes closed, enjoying the gentle heat. She knows she should get up, but her blanket hugs her whole body with kindness and forbids her from leaving the warm bed. It is a rare comfort: most days she has to wake before sunrise to get ready for work. 

Breaths shallow, eyes unfocused, he lets the ringing in his ears drown out the shouts and sirens, and grasps the gift like a lifeline. The memory plays in his mind: the first time his akhee taught him how to perform wudu. 

Ghazals by Deema K. Shehabi.

A poem by David Pollard.

At the start of 2017, Donald Trump enacted a series of Executive Orders and Presidential Proclamations prohibiting travel from a number of countries that eventually became known as ‘the Muslim Travel Ban’.