Rounded Analysis On Contested Issues; Spotlighting Blind Spots; Politics, Religion, Travel, Books
Bitter fruits of British colonialism—India's division in 1947 and expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland for Israel's creation a year later—informed Indian policies towards Palestine until the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) rose to power in 2014
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the secular Turkish republic, banned Sufi orders, put mosques under government control, mandated officials to wear European-style brimmed hats, and banned Arabic as part of sweeping measures to impose secularism on Turks
Bahrain has been a trendsetter in the Middle East including in introducing greater participation of women in political and public spheres that have inspired other Gulf nations to follow suit
The Iranian revolution and the captivity of 52 Americans crystalized dormant Islamophobia with ubiquitous Khomeini at its center decades before the US invasion of Iraq put another Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani under the global spotlight for entirely different reasons as someone unlike the Iranian revolutionary leader
Britain and France secretly hammered out the Sykes-Picot accord in 1916 to arbitrarily redraw borders by marking straight lines with a rude chinagraph pencil and a ruler on the Middle East's map as their shared spoils of the First World War without letting the region's people have a say in it
The policies pursued in the aftermath of the 1979 Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini-led Iranian revolution stoked sectarian hatred in the region but they have been discarded in line with the changed geo-political realities
A culture of openness, pluralism, and innovation has transformed the United Arab Emirates into one of the most advanced countries globally in less than five decades after the country was formed encompassing tribal lands
The Crusades were not just any other wars or an ordinary event in world history, but a theologically-justified attempt to erase Islam and the Islamic civilisation
Former Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan's allegations that the US backed an attempt to oust him in April 2022 put a spotlight on Washington's involvement in regime changes
