My Learnings

I've been thinking a lot about Maulana Abul Kalam Azad lately. Not simply the Azad we know as a freedom fighter, scholar, Qur'anic commentator and one of the founding figures of modern India, but Azad the young man who questioned almost everything he had inherited. What makes his story particularly interesting to me is that I find some resemblance between his intellectual journey and the kind of questions that many Muslims of our generation quietly go through. Of course, my own journey is nowhere near as intellectually sophisticated or historically significant as his. But the direction of the questions feels familiar. Azad was born into a deeply traditional religious household. His father, Maulana Muhammad Khairuddin, was a respected religious scholar and Sufi. Azad received an intensely traditional education and absorbed the beliefs and practices of his family almost unquestioningly. And then he started reading. He encountered Sir Syed Ahmad Khan and other modern intell...

I've been thinking about a question that goes much deeper than whether one particular interpretation of Islam is right or wrong. The question is: If Islam is meant to guide human beings toward justice, morality and a good society, what should the most just Islamic society actually look like? And when I say "Islamic," I don't mean simply reproducing every rule found in a medieval fiqh manual. Nor do I mean taking modern liberalism as the standard and then trying to make Islam fit it. I mean something more fundamental: If we begin with what we can reasonably establish as Allah's revelation and the Prophet's guidance, distinguish that from later interpretation and historical practice, and then ask how those principles should be understood and implemented in our circumstances, what kind of society follows? This question matters because I increasingly see a gap between the Islam many Muslims are taught and the kind of society that many Muslims actually have to live...

Something unusual is happening across South Asia. In Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal, young people have taken to the streets against governments they saw as corrupt, unresponsive and disconnected from their lives. In Bangladesh in 2024, a student movement that began over government job quotas grew into a broader uprising that brought down Sheikh Hasina's government. In Sri Lanka in 2022, young protesters helped force President Gotabaya Rajapaksa from office after an economic collapse. In Nepal in 2025, Gen Z protests over corruption, nepotism and a social-media ban helped force Prime Minister K. P. Sharma Oli to resign. And now something much less dramatic—but potentially very revealing—is happening in India. The Cockroach Janta Party, which began partly as a satirical response to a controversial remark about unemployed youth, has attracted a large youth following around issues including examination failures, paper leaks, unemployment and frustration with the political establishmen...

One of the recurring problems in diverse societies is the relationship between identity and political power . When a community is a minority, it naturally becomes concerned about: equal rights; protection from discrimination; freedom of religion or culture; political representation; security; and the ability to preserve its way of life. But when that same community becomes the majority, something can change. It may begin asking: If we are the majority, why shouldn't our values shape the state? That transition is not unique to any particular religion, ethnicity or community. It is a broader problem of majoritarian power . When numerical strength becomes political ownership Give almost any identity enough political power and there is a temptation to convert numerical strength into political privilege. A religious majority may want the state to reflect its religion. A linguistic majority may want its language to dominate public life. An ethnic majority may define...

When India became independent in 1947, it inherited a problem that was much older than Partition. How could people belonging to different religions, languages, castes, regions and cultures live together in one political community without allowing the largest community to permanently dominate the smaller ones? The Muslim League had offered one answer. It argued that Muslims were not merely a religious minority but a separate political nation. If Muslims were to be secure, they needed political safeguards based on their identity—and eventually, in the League's view, their own state. But there was another answer. It was the idea that ultimately became the foundation of the Indian Republic: You should not need to belong to a political majority in order to be an equal citizen. That idea was extraordinarily ambitious. And if India can make it work in practice, it offers something much more powerful than separate political representation for every religious community. It offers a way out ...

As we watch films about Partition, I think we owe the people who lived through 1947 something more than a convenient version of history. We owe them remembrance. Perhaps the most humane way to remember Partition is to acknowledge that there was not one set of victims. There were Hindu families who were massacred in the areas that became Pakistan. There were Sikh families who suffered the same fate. There were also Muslims who were killed, driven from their homes and subjected to terrible violence in East Punjab and elsewhere. Millions survived—but lost their homes, their communities and often members of their families. Women were abducted and subjected to unimaginable violence. Children were separated from their parents. Entire villages and neighbourhoods disappeared. This was not an ordinary episode of communal tension. It was a human catastrophe. What Does the Historical Evidence Tell Us? With Main Wapas Aaunga bringing the trauma of Partition back into public discussion, perhaps it ...