4 articles exploring politics & society
In July 2025, The Lancet established what campaigners had long argued and policymakers had long denied: unilateral economic sanctions kill more people every year than most of the world's active wars. The number is 564,258. Half of them are children under five.
If a human life is extinguished by military force, but the grammar of the headline refuses to name the actor, does the perpetrator exist? The passive voice is not a stylistic preference. It is an instrument of erasure, and its deployment in conflict reporting follows patterns too consistent to be accidental.
The modern research university studies Islam the way a lepidopterist studies butterflies: with genuine expertise, considerable technical skill, and no expectation that the specimen might have something to say about the method. The question is whether an institution built on that assumption can ever do justice to a tradition that refuses to accept it.
The multi-billion-dollar Islamic finance industry presents itself as a faith-based alternative to the predatory structures of conventional economics. It is not. It is a captive mind operating under dual hegemonies: Western neoliberalism and Saudi norm-setting, dressed in the aesthetics of piety.
