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  • aerial view of the Medina from the phoenician tombs near body of water during night time
    Issue 09 The Maghreb

    Souk Shopping in Tangier

    It was shopping that first inclined me towards an interest in Islam, though it must be said that the lupine line of hassling touts that in the old…

    Barnaby Rogerson
  • Biennale
    Issue 08 Men in Islam

    The Aesthetic of Promise

    The Venice Biennale is regarded as one of the most prestigious cultural events in the international calendar. Its history dates back to 1895; since…

    Marjorie Allthorpe-Guyton
  • Muslim young woman with hennaed hands
    Issue 08 Men in Islam

    Other Than Men

    Official pre-modern histories of Islam typically tell the stories of prominent men and their lives. Unofficial chronicles and literary sources…

    Asma Afsaruddin
  • The Old City of Jerusalem, including the Dome of the Rock and various church steeples, seen through coils of razor wire, illustrating the Holy Land's history of division and conflict.
    Issue 07 Muslim Archipelago

    The Dome of the Rock

    Early on a Friday morning, we enter the Muslim quarter of old Jerusalem through Damascus Gate. Arab owned shops are opening languidly. Some display…

    Iftikhar Salahuddin
  • Mohammad Natsir
    Issue 07 Muslim Archipelago

    Muslim Intellectuals in Indonesia

    Indonesia is increasingly identified as an upcoming global powerhouse ready to join the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China), but too…

    Carool Kersten
  • The Window of Enlightenment
    Issue 06 Reclaiming Al-Andalus

    The Original Enlightenment

    History, wrote the Roman Catholic saint Gregory of Nyssa (335-395), is a non-stop sequence of new beginnings. Some sixteen centuries later, we are…

    Emilio Gonzalez-Ferrin
  • three brown puppies
    Issue 06 Reclaiming Al-Andalus

    Muslim Dogs

    It was a packed London underground train, so social interaction was already set at a glacial minimum –the standard non-communication of a…

    Barnaby Rogerson
  • Issue 05 Love and Death

    The Ghazal

    The ghazal, or love lyric, evolved out of the pre-Islamic Arabian qasida, or ode, and the origins of the qasida go back to a time before Arabic…

    Robert Irwin
  • Karachi in Fragments
    Issue 04 Pakistan?

    Karachi in Fragments

    Shahid kept his pigeons in a coop on the roof of his home, nested somewhere in the anthill labyrinth of Karachi's oldest neighbourhood, Lyari. The…

    Taimur Khan
  • Jilani Caligraphy 4
    Issue 04 Pakistan?

    Atia Jilani: Writing the Qur’an

    Atia Jilani is a self-taught calligrapher, a painter and a writer living in the village of Mohammad Abad. She is the first Asian woman to inscribe…

    Syed Haroon ur Rasheed Ahmed
  • Bernard Lewis
    Issue 03 Fear and Loathing

    Neocon Orientalists

    Barely six weeks after the 9/11 attacks in America, a prominent New Yorker and ‘liberal’ intellectual, Paul Berman, published an essay in American…

    Abdelwahab El-Affendi
  • Park51 in New York
    Issue 03 Fear and Loathing

    Park51

    The Park51 project, originally called Cordoba House, is a planned community centre located in Lower Manhattan, New York. When it was first reported…

    Michel Abboud