Rounded Analysis On Contested Issues; Spotlighting Blind Spots; Politics, Religion, Travel, Books
Shrines of Prophet Muhammad's grandson Imam Hussain in Karbala and his father, Imam Ali, in Najaf funded the Saraya al-Atabat and deployed them for their protection as well as to fight ISIS
Cyril Radcliffe drew the India-Pakistan border weeks after arriving in India for the first time in 1947 without knowing much about the regions he divided haphazardly leaving tens of thousands dead and uprooted
In 2016, Iraq was reaping the bitter fruits of the adventurism of another westerner Paul Bremer, who fell back upon the colonial divide-and-rule policy to counter a broad-based challenge to the American occupation and prepared the ground for ISIS to tap into resentment over the Sunni purge
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
Mutanabbi Street is named after poet Abu al-Tayyib al Mutanabbi, one of the leading lights of the Islamic Golden Age when a spirit of openness fostered the pursuit of knowledge and big science
Academic powerhouse Bayt al-Hikmah (House of Wisdom) carried the global light of learning in Baghdad for centuries as a centrepiece of the Islamic Golden Age
Medieval Europeans felt inferior to the then vastly advanced Muslim world before they outshined and rejected its scientific legacy besides writing Islamic civilization out of their intellectual history
