Critical Muslim

West — Issue 58

C Scott Jordan has a conversation on ‘manifest destiny’; Ziauddin Sardar attempts to pin down the contours of ‘the West’; Liam Mayo uncovers how the…

Featured in this issue

Also in this issue: Zain Sardar tackles enemies of truth: Abdelwahab El Affendi traces wars of terror; Rajbir Singh Judge asks what happened to global Islam; social media artefacts; extract from miriam cooke’s upcoming novel; short story by Ayaz Shah; poems by Fatema Alzari and Rosie Jackson; Khuda Bushq watches the endless stream of Iranian Lego videos; and our list of Hollywood celebrities we admire.

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Highlights

Issue 58 West

INTRODUCTION: Manifest This

‘Tis the season for ‘manifesting’!Manifest that perfect beach bod before spring gives way to summer. Manifest that serene workplace environment…

C Scott Jordan

Issue 58 West

INTRODUCTION: THIS IS THE BBC

Mrs Robertson lived two doors from my humble abode in north London. She had one daughter who migrated to Australia. In her early seventies, she lived…

Ziauddin Sardar

Issue 58 West

Enemies of Truth

The concept of ‘bullshit’ has become an increasingly credible part of the theoretical toolkit utilised by political scientists and philosophers in…

Zain Sardar

Activists doing a demonstration outdoors

Issue 20 PostWest

PostWest Anxieties

French sociologist Michel de Certeau argued that ‘narrations about what’s-going-on constitute our orthodoxy’. We can say the same about narrations…

Gordon Blaine Steffey

Javier Bardem at the Oscars showing solidarity

Issue 58 West

Ten Hollywood Celebrities We Stand With

Since its founding over a century ago, Hollywood has generated a steady stream of American soft power. The culture generated in western California was the ‘it’ thing, desired by many all over the world. And through its century of dominance, it was not always afraid to play its…

Issue 57 Fire

Ten Contemporary Self-Proclaimed Arsonists

Fire is simply a chemical reaction. It is difficult to speak of will or intention when considering fire as such. Many fires have started by all accounts, randomly, and not necessarily for lack of investigating a cause! And a variety of theories seek the reason behind some of…

Issue 50 Halal

The Last Word: On the Halal Food Authority

Order order!This was not the cry of a butcher at a halal meat stall, but the Speaker of the Muslim Parliament of Great Britain agreeing to an emergency debate on the halal meat industry in Britain. It’s 1993. The parliament, formed a year earlier by the Muslim Institute, would…

Asim Siddiqui

Issue 56 Journalism

Moral Amnesia

There are books that read you first – they articulate the disquiet that has long been wordless in you. You close them feeling that the air around you has grown more voluminous, that something within you has shifted to accommodate the change. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always…

Leila Sansour

Interior damage to an Armenian church in Mosul, Iraq, destroyed during the ISIS occupation of the city.

Issue 20 PostWest

The West is Dead

It is clear. The West is dead. It is time to stop beating a dead West. It is time to start grooming and riding new horses beyond even postnormality.

Jim Dator

Issue 50 Halal

Ten Halal/Haram Discourses

Is this halal? Like an act of electromagnetism, Muslim dinners are drawn to this particular provocation. In our contemporary world, at times, the answer can be quite obvious, yet as things change – as they tend to do – what we take for granted can, upon investigation, be…