Your first week of university is often imagined as a rite of passage, both an illuminating gateway into supposed freedom and wanton exposure to the vices that unfold on a university campus. For me, it has felt less like a canticle of novel experiences but rather like a furnace or
Istanbul is not a mere metropolis of mosques and mausoleums, but rather a palimpsest of civilisations, a living manuscript of ambition, conquest and triumph. Dominating from the shores of the Bosphorus, it appears a vision suspended between continents, a region mediating East and West, antiquity and modernity, faith and secularity.
Modern life dazzles with its platitudes of efficiency, innovation, and strategy. Corporations invest in consultants, governments draft policies, and organisations construct futures in detail. Despite this feverish planning, many workplaces and institutions remain brittle and society, restless. This disconnect is glaring, we produce endless tactics but seldom propagate people of
I do not rejoice at death. As a Muslim, I cannot. The sanctity of life is unassailable, no ideology, no fury, no outrage can make the spilling of innocent blood acceptable. Murder is not justice but actually the collapse of courage, the refusal to endure another’s speech. I sit
Not every prison is carved from stone nor every chain forged from iron. There exists an imprisonment worse than palsy and more severe than the stifling of breath. Rather the confinement of the heart, a state in which the soul finds itself unable to outstretch, towards the Divine. One may
In recent years the world has grown enamoured with the language of wellness. Scroll through your feed or browse through a bookstore and with certainty you will encounter endless exhortations in fasting intermittently, waking up before dawn, practicing gratitude, eating clean and the decluttering of your life. These ideas are
At first glance, Dubai feels like the future incarnate but stay long enough and you learn of the sacrifice that keeps its skyline standing. Upon returning from Dubai, my fingers lay restless on the keyboard, twitching with a desire to muster order into the chaos of Dubai's dissociative
Surah Al-Buruj, the eighty fifth chapter of the Qur’an, is a surah that does not just simply speak to our notions of logic and reason but rather reverberates through the chambers of our hearts. A short, striking passage that tells the story of believers thrown into a fiery pit,
Assalaamualaikum, I recently finished reading Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. A work that is often praised for its depth and philosophical ambition. There are novels that entertain, and then there are novels that interrogate. Dostoevsky’s final work does the latter, and it does so relentlessly. I was affected
Bosnia is not a country you stumble into. You arrive with some notion, however faint or romantic, of where you’re going. Perhaps the lingering images of the Srebrenica Genocide, fractured war stories from GCSE history or just a scenic desktop wallpaper with the bridge in Mostar - at least
One minute you're making plans to get food and go bowling with a friend, the next you're cancelling them because he's broken his ankle. The way this world runs on a certainty only known by its Designer, a reality in the hands of only
As many of you know, I am currently undertaking a gap year in order to pursue some passion projects and attempting to figure out what I want to do, and who I wish to be in life - God, I sound like such a back-packing hippie. Amongst my other endeavours,