Writing from the margins, not the centre
Rage Against the Machine: Toward Humane Systems of Mutual Aid
Humanitarian aid is sold as neutral and benevolent. On the ground, it is an outpost of empire. It registers, sorts, and disciplines the people it claims to save, and leaves untouched what wrecked them. In Palestine, it normalises occupation and freezes life in permanent limbo. In Sudan, it retreated and left devastation behind. In Congo, it manages displacement while extraction rolls on. States have even captured zakat and turned it into prestige and bureaucracy. Still, communities feed each other. Palestinian crowdfunding, Sudan’s Emergency Response Rooms, and Team Congo RDC bypass the gatekeepers and put resources in people’s hands, with no donor hierarchy. Share this work, and strengthen the mutual aid ecosystem.
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There Is No Correct Way to Be Poor
Poverty is not a moral failure, and survival should not depend on obedience, productivity, or proving that you have suffered correctly. Poverty policing protects class hierarchy by scrutinising the poor while leaving concentrated wealth and power largely untouched.
Is Islam Compatible with Western Civilisation?
When someone declares that Islam is “incompatible with Western civilisation,” why is the West automatically treated as the moral standard? Before you judge whether Islam fits your “Western” world, you must first prove that your world is morally defensible.
On Pathologising Structural Criticism
Pathologising structural criticism as anger lets power avoid accountability. This polemical personal-political essay argues for dignity, boundaries, and solidarity without self-abandonment, rejecting respectability politics that demand dispossessed people make harm sound polite before they are recognised as human within every collective struggle.
Orientalism and the Denial of Muslim Political Agency
Western political discourse often treats Muslims as politically illegible, interpreting Muslim societies through secular or liberal frameworks. This critique examines how Orientalism embedded in Western political thought denies Muslim political agency and frames Islamic resistance as a threat rather than a response to imperial violence.
Is Islam Compatible with Modern Values?
Islam is compatible with justice, dignity, accountability, care for the vulnerable, limits on power, and moral restraint. If those are the values being named as modern, then there is real ground for conversation. If “modern values” means endless consumption, moral relativism when it is convenient, state violence wrapped in the language of security, and pretending colonialism is finished, then no. Islam was never meant to be compatible with that.
Muslims Parroting Colonial Hasbara
Aww, a Muslim posting an anti-Arab dog-whistle in support of Sudan — otherwise known as colonial hasbara — without naming the actual perpetrators (UAE or RSF)? 💔🥺 Sad, oh no, whatever will you do 💔🥺
It’s not okay.
I don’t excuse Arab supremacy either (f*ck you, Saudi royal), and it doesn’t mean we should leave our critical literacy behind or engage without an ounce of political awareness in our wording.
The Violence of Stupidity
When ideas are crushed and dissenters are criminalised or even pathologised, the harm doesn’t stay abstract. Violence isn’t always soaked in blood.
If Islam Is Enough, Then Let It Be a Shelter for All Women
If Islam is enough, we don’t need feminism. But that is not the point. Have we experienced true mercy and justice in Islam’s name?