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In this episode of the Radio ReOrient podcast, Dr. Shehla Khan, Dr. Sher Ali Tareen, and Salman Sayyid discuss the ongoing crisis in Pakistan under Gaza’s looming shadow . The latest exacerbation of the crisis comes with the general elections of February 2024, which represent an electoral heist of historically unprecedented proportions followed by the regime’s concerted efforts to normalize the results. This conversation ties the current political climate to broader global issues, including the tragic events in Gaza. The discussion navigates through a complex of concepts central to the development of a critically informed understanding of the Islamosphere.
Secularism is usually understood as the separation of church and state, religion and politics, or rationality from dogma. This is an overly simplistic reading of the concept, which dates to historically long-running power struggles and wars that accompanied the rise of European nation-states and colonial empires, and fundamentally changed the exercise of political power. Rather than merely marking the disentanglement of political from sacral authority, secularism refers to the process whereby princes and monarchs (rather than priests) gradually extended their authority over state and society in an uneven, contested, and variable fashion. The process culminated in the establishment of a form of state that based sovereign authority on a set of interrelated functions. Firstly, it assumed the power to legislate the boundaries between the public and private spheres. Secondly, it constructed 'religion' as a category denoting a distinct area of human experience, primarily identified with Christianity. Thirdly, it relegated this area of experience to the private sphere, and in doing so, also proclaimed its neutrality and non-interference in this domain as a means of promoting societal harmony and tolerance. Taken together, these endeavors enabled the rise of secular power and informed its deep anomalies. Far from retreating from the newly instituted realm of 'religion', the newly empowered secular state sought to domesticate its content and purpose, regulate its expression, differentiate 'good' from 'bad' variants, and ultimately co-opt and align with some sects and denominations while suppressing or persecuting others.
Lastly, the conversation critiques in passing 'methodological nationalism'—an approach to understanding the world that considers the nation-state and its territorial limits as the naturalized, sole points of reference for explaining and analyzing complex political, social, and economic phenomena that sidelinesthe merits of a relational, transnational approach.
These concepts are used in this conversation to illuminate the current crisis in Pakistan as an example of how Muslim political sovereignty, whether in Palestine, Egypt, Eastern Turkestan, or for the Rohingya, continues to be systematically undermined.
Further Readings and Listening
tps://criticalmuslimstudies.co.uk/project/the-political-struggle-in-pakistan/
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/pakistan-reframing-the-debate/id1458817693?i=1000619861664
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-political-struggle-in-pakistan/id1458817693?i=1000614889565

In this episode of Radio ReOrient, Salman Sayyid, with Hizer Mir as your host, discusses why Gaza matters. This leads to a wide range of discussions with topics ranging from ongoing support form Washington, London and other Western governments for Israel, how the notion of ummah deployed in light of the attack on Gaza has disrupted the nation state model (amongst others) and what is meant by the concept of Palestinisation of Muslims and how that can be resisted.

Islamophobia is a global phenomenon found not only among the international 'usual suspects' of gross and systemic human and civil rights violators but also among established liberal democracies that present themselves as custodians of the international legal order.

In this episode of Radio ReOrient, we talk to Saul Takahashi, an international human rights lawyer and academic who navigates the intersections between Islamophobia and the international liberal order. He describes his odyssey through the landscapes of Islamophobia, beginning with his human rights work with the UN in occupied Palestine (where he reverted to Islam), to his observations on the Muslim minority in Japan. In Japan, Saul witnessed how the growth of Muslimness seemed to go hand-in-hand with increased state surveillance.

The journey continues to Denmark, where Saul researched the institutionalization of Islamophobia in urban governance, demonstrating furthermore that Islamophobia is racism, and racism is a form of governmentality as much as it is about abusive attitudes and street violence. Given the global nature of Islamophobia, we conclude this conversation by examining some hopeful proposals that Saul has written about reforming the Organization of Islamic Cooperation to make it a more effective player in the struggle against Islamophobia.

This episode of Radio Reorient is based on an event held on Islamophobia and Emancipation. This event was held to discuss the definition of Islamophobia that was put forth by the people’s definition in the UK… Islamophobia is a form of racism against Muslimness and perceived Muslimness.

In this intriguing episode of Radio ReOrient, Kawter Najib, Abdoolkarim Vakil, Salman Sayyid, hosted by myself, Hizer Mir engage in a discussion that explores Islamophobia, its definition and emancipation.

In this episode, Kawter Najib sits with Hizer Mir to return to the topic of Islamophobia in France. In this discussion we talk about Kawter’s own experiences of Islamophobia in France as well as the Islamophobic murder of French-Algerian teenager Nahel Merzouk in the summer.

In this episode of Radio ReOrient, Rebecca Ruth Gould, Claudia Radiven and your host Salman Sayyid, talk about some of the issues raised by Rebecca’s new book Erasing Palestine (https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/2903-erasing-palestine).