A watermelon gives us a brief taste of summer.

Latvia’s Rihards Kols strives to make George W. Bush fashionable again.

 

Student loans, often accruing crippling amounts of interest, are often taken as a given for Muslims in the West seeking higher education – but it doesn’t need to be that way! A Continuous Charity, a USA-based charity, is here to provide the option of a riba-free future for young Muslims pursuing post-secondary education.

In this episode, Faizan Syed, the co-founder of A Continuous Charity, speaks to Zainab about what ACC can do for Muslims seeking riba-free higher education in the West, and what that means for our communities at large. If you’re a university student, parent of a university student, or just want to help your community, this episode is for you!

Related:

Should I Take A Quarter Of A Million Dollars On Interest For Medical School Or Live A Terrible Life With Crushed Dreams Forever?

[Podcast] Interest-Free Student Loans with A Continuous Charity | Abdullah Syed

The post [Podcast] A Riba-Free Future with A Continuous Charity | Faizan Syed appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

Heavy shelling is replaced by a different kind of suffering: survival away from home.

Violence against Palestinians is not only accepted but expected.

“For so many Indians, the events at Pahalgam is when history begins. Never mind 500,000 troops occupying Kashmiris. Never mind mass graves, enforced disappearances, torture camps & extrajudicial killings. Tourists expect to be safe where residents don’t have any human rights.” -Azad Essa

 

At the time I wrote this article (May 14, 2025), the news coming out of India, Pakistan, and Kashmir continues to churn rapidly. On April 22, an attack in Pahalgam, Indian-administered Kashmir, killed 28 civilians, mostly Hindu tourists and one Muslim tourist. India blamed The Resistance Front, linked to Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba, though the group later denied involvement. In retaliation, India launched Operation Sindoor (precision missile and drone strikes across Pakistan-administered Kashmir and Punjab), claiming to target militant camps. Pakistan accused India of hitting civilian areas, including mosques, and responded with its own strikes on Indian military sites under Operation Bunyan-un-Marsous. What followed was the first large-scale drone war between the two nuclear states, claiming dozens of civilian lives. 

Though full-scale war was avoided and a tentative U.S.-brokered ceasefire was reached on May 10, it exposed India’s increasing reliance on the “Israeli model”: striking alleged “terrorist infrastructure” with broad impunity, even at the cost of civilian lives, bolstered by a slick propaganda machine that cast the strikes as surgical, moral, and necessary.

Many, from across the subcontinent to the Middle East to mosque pulpits in America, have used the language associated with analysing Zionism to make sense of the violence. This parallel is not incidental. As journalist and Al-Jazeera columnist Azad Essa argues in his book Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel, the ideological and tactical convergence between Zionism and Hindutva has created a shared architecture of war crimes with impunity. Essa, a South African journalist of Indian descent, provides readers with an incisive recounting of history; how India has increasingly mirrored Israel, not just in military strategy, but in its ethno-nationalist project, legal repression, and media manipulation.

A Survey of Zionism and Hindutva Parallels

The book opens by laying out the ideological foundations of Zionism and Hindutva. Both movements emerged with the goal of defining their respective homelands – Israel and India – as ethno-religious states. Israel’s apartheid regime in Palestine functions not only through military occupation but via a matrix of laws, bureaucracies, and land policies designed to erase Palestinian identity.

India, however, originally refused to recognize Israel at the United Nations in 1948 and voted against its admission. This was part of India’s anti-colonial foreign policy, which viewed Zionism as a settler-colonial movement akin to European imperialism. But public sympathy for the Palestinian plight began to erode in the 1990s, particularly after the 1991 Gulf War and India’s economic liberalization, where the formal establishment of full diplomatic ties with Israel in 1992 marked a sharp turning point. Even as India began purchasing Israeli weapons (which Essa details extensively), it continued symbolic support for Palestine at the UN; a dual stance that persisted until the Modi era, where open admiration for Israel and right-wing Zionism replaced older rhetoric entirely.

Yet, even during India’s officially pro-Palestine decades, the ideological roots of Hindutva grew. The RSS and Hindutva movement have long envisioned a Hindu Rashtra – a nation purified of what they consider “foreign” elements. For example, Essa quotes M.S. Golwalkar, who in 1939 insisted that “foreign races” in Hindustan “must entertain no idea but those of the glorification of the Hindu race and culture . . . or may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu Nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment—not even citizen’s rights.”1 Likewise, in Israel, views like that of Ze’ev Jabotinsky (founder of the expansionist Revisionist Zionism) paved the way for an ethno-state (“Zionist colonization must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population—behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.”). Essa traces these ideological convergences, noting how India’s BJP and Israel’s Likud are not aberrations but extensions of their founding logics, both seeking demographic engineering.

Palestine, Kashmir, and Dissent

Essa draws a direct line to India’s own efforts in Kashmir: the revocation of Article 370, the introduction of new domicile laws, demographic engineering, and the repression of dissent, all under a framework that mirrors Israeli mechanisms of control. In both cases, civilians are cast as potential terrorists, and state violence is sanitized through the language of security and sovereignty. He draws a direct comparison to the Nakba and its subsequent erasure of Palestinian villages, noting that India has similarly renamed Kashmiri landmarks, flooded the region with military personnel, and introduced new “domicile” laws to enable non-Kashmiris, mostly Hindus, to settle, mirroring Israeli settlement strategies in the West Bank. 

Perhaps most jarring alongside Israel’s blatant disregard for international law is India’s similar manipulation of legal frameworks to criminalize dissent. Laws like the UAPA (Unlawful Activities Prevention Act) have been used to jail activists, journalists, and students without trial: Catholic Priest Stan Swamy, student activists Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam among them. In March, the UAPA was invoked to silence protests in solidarity with Palestine. Indian police often demolish homes in Muslim neighborhoods under the pretext of punishing rioters, an echo of Israel’s punitive house demolitions. In both cases, the goal is to break the will of the population and warn others against defiance.

Ultimately, Essa argues that the alliance is not merely about ideology or weapon sales -though those are significant, evidenced by India’s extensive use of Israeli drones in the current conflict- but about exporting a model of control. He warns that the Israel-India partnership is a test case for a new form of authoritarianism masked by democratic veneers. India has learned to deploy soft power -tech, Bollywood, yoga- to mask its fascist tilt. During Operation Sindoor, Indian media seamlessly echoed government lines, with a female Muslim officer paraded in press conferences to deflect accusations of bigotry. Within this framework, the deaths of 28 tourists in Pahalgam become pretexts for escalating a settler-colonial logic already decades in motion – one now increasingly backed by Gulf capital and Western complicity.

The Precarity of Indian Muslim Identity

One of the strengths of Essa’s work lies in its critique of the political dynamics within India. The acknowledgment that it was not under the BJP but the Congress government of Rajiv Gandhi that certain pivotal actions occurred, such as the reopening of the Babri mosque for Hindu worshippers, and the normalization of ties with Israel, underscores the non-partisan nature of anti-Muslim hatred: “Whereas the political and social foundation of Hindutva had been laid by Hindu nationalists, it was the Congress party who had helped normalize the ideology. It follows, naturally, then, that when Rajiv Gandhi took over in 1984, the idea of normalizing ties with Israel had become tangled with the very demand of progress, liberalism, and technological advancement of India.”2 It dispels the notion that these issues are confined to a particular political party, instead, far more entrenched in the evolution of the country itself.

Given the above, the comparison between India and Israel, Kashmir and Palestine, makes the current moment a particularly volatile one for using this framework of analysis for Hindutva and Zionism. As an Indian-American Muslim, I do wonder if these parallels do not implicitly make those unfamiliar with the history put Indian Muslims at a crossroads. In other words, some analyses view Indian Muslims as analogous to collaborators, sell-outs of the Ummah. This misreading flattens history and regional contexts, and overlooks India and Pakistan as state-on-state warfare, wherein Pakistan is a nuclear-armed state with its own record of military coups, political repression, and U.S.-aligned operations. Imran Khan continues to languish in inhumane jail conditions.

Additionally, for all their similarities, there do exist distinctions between Zionism and Hindutva. Their origins, logics, and conceptions of indigeneity can differ in critical ways. Zionism emerged as a nationalist movement to establish a homeland for Jews, a diasporic people historically persecuted across Europe. Zionism is centered on a restorative settler-colonial logic, where Jews, regardless of origin, are defined as indigenous to the land of Israel. Hindutva, by contrast, does not imagine an exiled people returning but rather an indigenous majority reclaiming dominion over a homeland allegedly corrupted. As Essa outlines, Hindutva treats native Muslims and Christians not as external enemies but as internal contaminants, descendants of conquerors or converts who have betrayed the authentic civilizational essence of India. Hindutva does not seek partition but purification. In other words, Zionism and Hindutva converge in form but differ in origin.

Indian Muslims, far from being state proxies, are themselves targets of a majoritarian ethno-nationalist project. Of course, it is a moral imperative that those who can afford to voice opposition do so, or at the very least avoid echoing Hindutva jingoisms or cheering state violence, especially when it targets civilians, no matter what side of the border. But we must also acknowledge the structural precarity Indian Muslims live under, many of whom have sacrificed livelihoods, safety, and even their lives in pursuit of justice.

Conclusion

The dust has yet to settle after the ceasefire; the region remains taut. The violence of the past weeks are not anomalies, but manifestations of an ideology that rewards majoritarian cruelty and reframes it as righteous duty. These geopolitical conflicts are not insular. What followed after the Pahalgam attack is not a break from history but proof that the convergence Essa traces has never been theoretical.

May God preserve all innocent life, grant justice to the oppressed, and may we resist, always, the temptation to cheer power over principle.

 

Related:

– The Graveyard Of Normalcy – New Report Uncovers Egregious Human Rights Violations In Indian-occupied Kashmir

– Perpetual Outsiders: Accounts Of The History Of Islam In The Indian Subcontinent

1    pg.44, Hostile Homelands2    pg. 24, Hostile Homelands

The post [Book Review] Hostile Homelands: Drawing Parallels Between Hindutva And Zionism In Historical and Present Day Context appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

Global action must match the scale of the genocide for it to end.

We speak with the UN expert about efforts to stop the genocide, the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” and activist convoys trying to reach Gaza. It was also one of the costliest weeks for the Israeli army.

Cryptocurrency is Deek’s last chance to succeed in life, and he will not stop, no matter what.

Previous Chapters: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7

“Were the world the possession of a single man, it would not make him rich … because it is passing away.”
– Rabiah Al-Adawiyyah

Who Are You?

Deek dreamed that he was walking through the Al-Hajarah desert of his native Iraq. It was a forbidding land, with a mosaic of stony plains, wadis, ridges, and gullies. He’d heard a rumor that the the Half-Buried Ziggurat of Šar-Ḫadīdu, part of the ancient kingdom of Ur, held a huge hidden cache of silver drachmas. He wanted that money, and would stop at nothing to get it.

He had drunk the last of his water and his throat was parched, but he must have that treasure.

As he trudged through the sweltering landscape, he passed a knot of Bādū shepherds, tending their sheep in the arid washlands. They called to him, offering to share water and flatbread with a weary traveler, but Deek did not trust them. What if they only wanted the secret of the treasure? Licking his cracked lips, he walked on.

He dropped behind a stone to hide from a group of shadowy men driving battered 4×4s and carrying rifles.

He encountered a woman praying on a rug in the shadow of a crumbling watchtower. Her abaya was drawn across her face, but she seemed young. He was about to pass her by when she ended the prayer and spoke his name.

“Deek Saghir, son of my sons.”

Deek cleared his throat. “Yes?”

“I am Rabiah Al-Adawiyyah.”

Deek knew her. She was an Iraqi poet and ascetic who had lived in the 8th century. She was famous for her deep piety. Deek cast his gaze at the ground so as not to offend the holy woman’s modesty.

“My father,” he said, “often told me that you were our ancestor. But our village shaykh said that he was wrong, that you never married, and spent your life in worship.”

“Child Deek,” she replied. “Who are you?”

Deek was confused. If she knew his name, why was she asking?

“I’m looking for a hidden treasure of silver,” he explained. “It’s near here.”

“I did not ask what you are doing. I asked, ‘who are you?’”

Deek’s eyebrows knitted together. “This is me. I am determined to be rich. It’s my destiny.”

“If that is all you are, then you are nothing.” Rabiah turned away and began to recite the Quran, her soft voice carrying clearly across the desert sand.

Deek walked on. The sun was high in the sky and beginning to burn. His waterskin was bone-dry, and each breath tasted like dust. He wasn’t going to make it. It had been folly to come out here. He was wounded by Shaykha Rabiah’s words. What did she mean that he was nothing? He had struggled mightily to find this treasure, and was still struggling. He was determined and focused. That was more than 99% of people could say.

His legs gave out. With the words, “Who are you?” echoing in his mind, he fell on the hot sand and lay prostrate.

Clear Mind

Deek’s face was hot. He waved a hand beside his cheek, mumbling, “I’m me, that’s all. I’m just me. That’s something, not nothing.” He opened his eyes to find himself in a small bed that just barely fit him, covered with a geometric-patterned quilt. The sun beamed through the window, shining on his face.

He didn’t like the way Rabiah Al-Adawiyyah had turned away from him at the end. Was she disappointed in him? She was a saint, and he was an ordinary man. What did she want from him?

Wait… that wasn’t real. That was a dream. He blinked several times, trying to understand where he was. Sitting up, he felt a twinge of pain in his ribs. He was dressed in blue flannel pajamas that he did not recognize. Lifting the shirt, he saw that his entire torso was bandaged.

He remembered. The kidnapping, the terrible beating they’d given him, and Zaid Karim blazing in like the angel of death, killing the kidnappers and saving him. The pain in his ribs was not nearly as bad as it had been last night. He opened and closed his mouth. His jaw was sore, but worked just fine. He touched his nose and found it also bandaged.

He was not worried. In fact, now that the morning brain fog had cleared, his mind was sharp and clear. He didn’t feel much of anything, emotionally. Instead, he was like a machine that had been designed to observe, calculate, and strategize. He still remembered Rabiah Al-Adawiyyah’s probing questions and comments. He understood that she expected more from him spiritually. But at the moment, this did not disturb him.

The room in which he sat was made of white painted brick. On the walls were shelves that held colorful woven baskets, a stone axe and obsidian knife, and other objects that might have been tools or weapons; as well as abalone shells, something that looked like a rattle, and a feathered headdress mounted on the wall. It was as if he was in a Native American museum.

His two suitcases stood in one corner. Zaid must have gone back to the Moon Walk motel to retrieve them.

He was desperately thirsty. Rising slowly, he put on a pair of slippers he found beside the bed, went through a door and found himself in the bathroom. The mirror above the sink showed a face that did not look as bad as he expected. His eyes were slightly bruised and swollen, and his nose was bandaged, but on the whole he felt much better than he should, based on his memory of what the thugs had done to him.

The Namer’s House

The small sink operated with a foot pedal, of all things. Pumping the pedal, Deek drank greedily and washed up, then went to find someone to talk to.

He discovered that he was alone in the small house. There was another bedroom, decorated similarly to his own. The modest living room, sparsely furnished with a sofa, table, and chairs all hewn from natural oak, also had shelves on the walls, but these held glass jars and bottles that were filled with herbs, spices, and colored liquids. There was no television, phone, or any electronics that Deek could see. Not even a refrigerator in the little kitchen, though there was an ancient-looking oven and stove. There were unlit candles everywhere, most of them in votive glasses.

His phone sat on a little table in the kitchen, beside a candle, a box of matches, and an ashtray. In addition,n there was an assortment of foodstuffs, including a loaf of bread, a few tins of sardines, a small block of cheese wrapped in cloth, jars of peanut butter and jelly, a basket of tomatoes, a bowl of oranges, and a bag of dry cat food.

Beneath the phone was a note:

“Akhi Deek: You are in the Namer’s house. It’s a safe place where you can recuperate. She treated your wounds and gave you healing medicine, so you should feel better. She’s gone to the coast for a day, but help yourself to the food. You can use your phone, but don’t make any calls for now, and remember there’s no electricity. Do NOT talk about last night’s events to anyone! I need to get to the bottom of what happened. I’ll see you later tonight, inshaAllah. Burn this note. – Zaid.”

Wealth for Wealth’s Sake

Deek read the note over again, then crumpled it, lit it on fire with a match, and set it in the ashtray to burn. No electricity? Sinks with foot pumps? Shelves with axes and potions? He couldn’t tell if he was in a Western movie, a Grimm’s fairy tale, or a spy thriller. In any case, he was alive, so alhamdulillah for that.

Compulsively, he turned on the phone. There were text messages and missed calls from his wife and both of his daughters, and voicemails from numbers he did not recognize. He would read and listen to them later.

He checked his crypto balance. The altcoin rally he’d been waiting for the last two years was in full swing. His portfolio was up to 90 million.

This was what Rania, Lubna, and others had not understood about crypto. It was extraordinarily volatile, but it was cyclical, and it was a waiting game. You had to have the knowledge to know what to buy, but after that, it was all about being patient and waiting for the next parabolic bull rally. Crypto bull cycles could be insanely profitable, to a degree unimaginable in any other asset class.

Deek had been through one such euphoric rally before – that was when he’d made the $200K – but he’d held the tokens too long and lost it all in the inevitable bear market collapse. After that, he’d waited three years for the next bull cycle, and it was finally here. His knowledge and patience had paid off. All he had to do was recognize when this monster run was peaking, and get out in time.

If he played his cards right, he could hit a net worth of half a billion dollars before this bull cycle ended. The thought was mind-boggling. He had no idea what he would do with the wealth he already possessed, let alone half a billion dollars. But it wasn’t about that anymore.

His friend Marco had multiple college degrees. He’d once told Deek that receiving the first diploma had been a thrill – as it was for everyone- but that after that, each successive degree meant less. For Marco, studying wasn’t about the degrees anymore, but the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. It had occurred to Deek more than once that Marco, who was not Muslim, was following with great dedication Allah’s command to “Read!” – But was missing the second part: “In the Name of your Lord Who Created…”

The point was that Deek felt the same way about growing his cryptocurrency hoard. Now that he was at almost a hundred million, it was no longer about securing a better future for himself and his family, but about perfecting the investment process itself. Making the right choices, timing the market, seeing the numbers grow. Excellence and wealth for the sake of excellence and wealth.

As he thought this, he heard a distant echo of Rabiah Al-Adawiyyah’s voice saying, “If that is all you are, then you are nothing.” But he pushed it aside.

Urban Wasteland Oasis

There was no lock on the front door. How was he supposed to be safe in a house with an unlocked door? He opened it and stepped outside to find himself looking at a garden in the middle of a wasteland. The house’s small front yard was gorgeous, filled with flowers and herbs. Bees buzzed resourcefully, and butterflies flitted from rose to bird of paradise to carnation. There was a narrow driveway, but no garage.

Beyond this house, however, the neighborhood consisted of crumbling homes with bare earth yards, junked cars, empty lots strewn with trash, a house that had burned to the ground, and an abandoned house that was boosted up on pillars of bricks for some reason.

What city was this? Was this even Fresno? He’d never seen anything like this in Fresno.

He went inside and explored further. There was a back door that exited off the kitchen.

Stepping out, he found himself in an earthly imitation of Paradise. The backyard was huge, many times larger than the house, and enclosed by a wooden fence. The entire space was filled with fruit trees and herbs, rows of vegetables, and bird feeders. Everywhere he looked, he saw birds hopping, darting, and feeding, including hummingbirds. There was a covered patio with chairs and a glass table, and several empty food bowls. As Deek stood there, four cats of various colors trotted up to him, meowing and rubbing against his legs. He retrieved the bag of cat food and filled their bowls, and watched them munch happily.

The Namer’s backyard

He considered. Based on the poverty-stricken neighborhood, the lack of a lock on the front door, and the herbs and potions in the house, he concluded that the Namer must be some sort of neighborhood medicine woman. She treated the people here, and they respected and protected her. Or perhaps they feared her. Or both.

Also, based on his own physical condition, which was better than he had any right to expect, and on his strangely clear state of mind, he deduced that the Namer had given him some sort of healing potion. The woman was clearly a genius. She could market these potions and make a fortune.

Money Management

Speaking of fortunes, it was time to manage his assets. He must not fail to make the most of this opportunity. First, he changed the settings on his Coinbase account, linking it to his own personal account instead of the joint account. Then he sold $5K worth of Solana and sent it to his bank account.

Using Phantom, Solflare, Trust Wallet, and Coinbase wallet, he created multiple sub-wallets and began to distribute the assets. For each wallet he created, he wrote the secret phrase – a list of 12 or 24 random words – on an encrypted text file on his phone. Later, he would save the phrases on an encrypted thumb drive and store it in a safe deposit box.

He sold the five dozen or so nearly valueless meme coins that he still held, and began to invest in blue chip cryptos like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche, Cardano, and Chainlink. He also bought a number of large-cap utilities on the Solana chain, including DEXes (decentralized exchanges) like Orca and Raydium, a launchpad, a streaming audio service, and a few popular games. Lastly, he put about $10 million in more experimental tokens, not tiny microcaps this time, but mid-cap AI tokens similar to the Alpha101 that had made him a fortune.

When this was done, he did a search for asset management firms that specialized in crypto. There were many in the USA, including in San Francisco, and others in London, Switzerland, and Germany. Several in Singapore and Hong Kong, and three in the Caymans. He called all three of the Caymans firms and got voicemail each time. Apparently they didn’t work on Saturdays down there. Too busy relaxing at the beach. He left messages explaining that he had earned a lot of money in crypto and needed guidance.

For a long time, he lost himself in these tasks, as he always did with crypto. Cryptocurrency fascinated him, and he never grew bored of it. The cats lounged at his feet, and occasionally he reached out to pet one. At some point, he realized he was hungry. He went inside and made a sandwich of sardines and tomatoes of all things – not something he would normally choose. He had no craving for chips or sweets. What had the Namer done to him? She could seriously be rich if she wanted.

His body needed more rest, so he returned to bed and fell asleep almost immediately.

Shake the Earth

Zaid needed to confront Bandar Tzan’ani, but he wasn’t interested in assaulting the man’s fortified compound in south Fresno. Killing those three men yesterday had shaken him and left his soul as turbulent as a thunderstorm. He’d gone home, parked the car, and wept. They had not been the first men he’d killed, nor even the last since Panama. But taking a human life was an enormity that should quake the earth itself and make the heavens weep. It was not to be done and forgotten.

To make matters worse, he’d made no attempt to negotiate and delivered no warning. He’d cut the men down in cold blood. Tactically, it had been the sound choice. There really had been no other option, and one could say the men deserved it. Without a doubt, this had not been their first crime. Zaid wouldn’t be surprised if collectively, those three men had a river of blood on their hands.

But it didn’t matter. Who was he to say who deserved what? The experience left him feeling like an assassin.

Nevertheless, he had a job to do. He’d made some calls, and learned that Bandar had a certain ritual that he repeated every Saturday night. That was perfect, as it would allow Zaid to confront the man in a public setting, which would force them both to behave. Hopefully.

Zaid had two goals: one, he had to make it clear to Tzan’ani that Deek Saghir was off limits. Two, to take responsibility for the killing of Tzan’ani’s men. If the Yemeni king of liquor and dope was determined to pursue this conflict, then Zaid wanted to make himself the target of the man’s wrath, rather than Deek.

Saturday Night at the Movies

It was Saturday night, and Bandar Tzan’ani settled into a middle seat at the River Park Regal cinema. He always reserved his seat in advance, and he always reserved the seats on either side and directly in front, to make sure that he had plenty of private space and an unobstructed view. His hulking bodyguard was seated in the row behind him and a few seats over. Bandar had a large bucket of popcorn, a soda, and a box of red liquorice. His wife would not let him eat such things, but in this theater he was king.

The previews had just begun, and he was already smiling. He cherished these weekly movie excursions. In fact, he lived for them.

About a year ago, he’d begun experiencing pains in his abdomen. He had not gone to the doctor, as he was afraid of what they might say. He told himself it was stress. The only pleasure he had anymore was his Saturday night movie outing. He changed up the cinema regularly for security purposes, but he had to admit that the River Park Regency, with its huge screens and surrounding restaurants in the mall, got more attention than all the others.

Here at the movie house, he could forget the world for a solid three hours. And if it was an action movie or a western, so much the better.

Hollywood hardly ever made westerns anymore. Why was that? Bandar absolutely adored movies like Open Range, True Grit, Red Hill (though it was modern and Australian), Django Unchained (though not a true western), and above all, 3:10 To Yuma. Though, as for The Revenant, the director should be thrown off a high cliff for making that depressing abomination.

He’d thought about building a private cinema in his compound, but it wouldn’t be the same. He liked the excitement of seeing new releases, hearing people laugh or cheer, and the feeling of losing himself in the crowd.

So it was a bit of a downer, to say the least, when the movie had begun and the lights dimmed, and a lean young man with a scarred face and wearing a brimmed hat sat in the seat next to Bandar and casually planted the barrel of a gun in his side.

“How’s tricks, Bandar?” the man said. “Do you know who I am?”

***

[Part 9 will be published next week inshaAllah]

 

Reader comments and constructive criticism are important to me, so please comment!

See the Story Index for Wael Abdelgawad’s other stories on this website.

Wael Abdelgawad’s novels – including Pieces of a Dream, The Repeaters and Zaid Karim Private Investigator – are available in ebook and print form on his author page at Amazon.com.

 

Related:

Kill the Courier |Part 1 – Hiding in Plain Sight

The Albatross and the Quran: A Short Story

 

The post Moonshot [Part 8] – The Namer’s House appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

In Muslim communities, naseeb is a word people often say when things don’t go to plan. But what does it really mean, and what can it teach us?

I still remember the day I left Germany for good. Four incredible years in the heart of Europe were behind me, and ahead of me was a return to Afghanistan – a country I never stopped loving, even from afar. But what should have felt like going home came with a weight of uncertainty.

I went back with hope. Real hope. Afghanistan, despite all its scars, was buzzing with young energy. More than two-thirds of the population is under 25. You could feel the hunger for change in the air – in the packed classrooms, in the cafes full of debate, in the crowded markets thick with the smell of naan and kebabs. There were snow-capped mountains and sunlit orchards but also a fragile kind of optimism holding everything together.

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Surging demand for looser styles with high necklines comes amid politicians’ criticism of burqa and the hijab

Fashion influenced by Islam and other religions is expected to become “mainstream” globally, in spite of politicians singling out the burqa and the hijab, as the rise of “modest fashion” is powered by influencers, luxury brands and big tech.

The Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, has said employers should be able to ban staff from wearing face coverings, before adding that she was not in favour of a government ban.

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Rev. Johnnie Moore dismisses Palestinian deaths as “without incident.”

We speak to University of Tehran professor Mohammed Marandi about why Tel Aviv struck his country and what may come next.

Hundreds of Palestinians killed in US-Israeli death traps while trying to obtain food aid.

Space is scarce in Gaza, and people are setting up tents in areas once thought uninhabitable.

Israel killed the fathers of 12 children from the same class.

European Commission indicates that 2024 appeal by Ireland and Spain was allowed to gather dust.

Is working in big tech halal? Muslim workers are reckoning with the possibility that their jobs go against their religious obligations

Before Ibtihal Aboussad was fired by Microsoft for protesting the company’s work with the Israeli military during a celebration of the firm’s 50th anniversary, she sent two emails.

The first went to all of her colleagues. She appealed to their universal humanity and urged them to stand against Microsoft’s contracts to provide cloud computing software and artificial intelligence products to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).

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Since the riots last summer British Muslims have felt a deep unease in our own country

Here we are again, debating the right of Muslim women to wear what they want. Last week, the Reform UK MP Sarah Pochin asked the prime minister, Keir Starmer, if he planned to follow other European countries and prohibit burqas.

Then the leader of the opposition, Kemi Badenoch, called for bosses to be able to ban the burqa in the workplace. Following the example of the former Labour minister Jack Straw, who in 2006 sparked the first burqa debate by asking constituents at his surgeries to remove their face coverings, she stated that she does not see constituents at her surgeries if they have their faces covered, “whether it’s a burqa or a balaclava”.

Nadeine Asbali is a secondary school teacher in London and the author of Veiled Threat: On Being Visibly Muslim in Britain

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