Pakistan is in a mess. Controlled by an increasingly unpopular military, the nation is teetering on the brink of default. By July, the country’s foreign exchange reserves are set to fall below $3 billion, barely sufficient to cover a month’s …
Modi’s dirty war on ‘love jihad’
Liberals are livid. Ban the film, they say. It’s Islamophobic dross. India’s current ruler Narendra Modi, meanwhile, has waxed lyrical about The Kerala Story, a film about a Hindu woman hoodwinked into joining Isis. His praise has only intensified liberal …
How Lee Rigby’s murder changed terrorism
Like a still from a cheap horror flick, Michael Adebolajo stands with a meat cleaver and a large knife clasped in one hand. His free hand, saturated in blood, is raised towards the camera. Together with his accomplice and fellow …
The Kurds fighting the Isis resistance
“George W. Bush is a hero.” General Sirwan Barzani utters these words with quiet satisfaction. “The best thing that happened to Iraq, at least to us Kurds, was its liberation in 2003. He liberated all of Iraq from dictatorship. It …
Will Erdoğan survive Turkey’s earthquake?
It took barely two days for Monday’s earthquake in Turkey and Syria to turn political. On Wednesday, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Turkish president, warned of the danger of giving credence to “provocateurs”. He was referring to opposition figures who have …
The hijacking of Pakistani feminism
My first thought after reading the form to express interest in volunteering at Pakistan’s annual Women’s March was: how many women in Pakistan know what “non-binary” and “cis woman” mean? In a country with a literacy rate of less than …
The Taliban must purge itself
It has become common for countries to boast three-word slogans. India, Incredible India. Malaysia, Truly Asia. Afghanistan’s could be: We Squander Opportunities. Or perhaps: We Never Learn.
Consider Afghanistan’s recent history. The Soviet Union occupied the country, was defeated and …
American democracy isn’t dead
Democracy didn’t die. Of course it didn’t. The existential angst of the past few weeks seems quaint in retrospect. Was the panic real or was it more a matter of romanticism run amok — of wanting to feel like a …
Is Iran’s Arab Spring doomed?
Ayatollah Khomeini was a fundamentalist cleric who inspired the 1979 Islamic Revolution to overthrow a millennia-old history of Iranian monarchy. He was also, legend has it, an athletic young man who became the leapfrog champion of his village of Khomein …
Don’t fall for the Isis Matchmaker
I’ll never forget the moment I uncovered Umm Muthanna Al-Britannia’s real name. Back in early 2015, she was a brazen British propagandist and recruiter for the Islamic State. I’d been tracking her for months, almost marvelling at her shamelessness: she …
What Western feminists can learn from Iran
Is this it? Could this, finally, be the end of the Islamic Republic of Iran? As huge crowds of women and men surge through the Iranian streets, burning hijabs and calling for “Death to Khamenei!”, is an impossible dream finally …
Charles will be our Perennialist King
King Charles III has often been accused of heresy. As the Prince of Wales, his early support of environmental activism and his (tenuous) involvement in the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset marked him out as a dissenter who might break …
The rise of Jihadi prison gangs
By the last count, there were more than 200 convicted terrorists — most Islamist, but some far-Right — currently housed at Her Majesty’s pleasure in British prisons, with a further 200 or so convicted of other offences but deemed similarly …
Writers shouldn’t submit to Islamists
Ever since my childhood, I’ve been afraid of them. I was five years old and they had the face of Iranian ayatollahs. I was 15 and they raged through neighbouring Algeria. I remember, on television, their faces eaten up by …
Histoire de ma lâcheté
Depuis que je suis enfant, j’ai peur d’eux. J’avais cinq ans et ils avaient le visage des ayatollahs iraniens. J’avais quinze ans et ils sévissaient dans l’Algérie voisine. Je me souviens, à la télévision, de leurs visages mangés par des …