The Leopard and the ruins of history
an essay on Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's novel The Leopard
Thomas Mann and the European disease of nihilism
an essay on Thomas Mann's novel The Magic Mountain on the hundredth anniversary of its publication
an interview with the film director Whit Stillman
Who are the white working class?
an essay on a new form of political consciousness
7/7 changed life for British Muslims forever
a column about the way the London bombings brought Muslims centre-stage
The far-right have rampaged on our streets. How do we keep the peace?
a column about keeping the lid on political violence
Fear, lust and paranoia at the Berlin Film Festival
a dispatch from the 75th Berlinale
an essay on Tomiwa Owolade's ideas about race in Britain
Is it time for Britain to abolish its monarchy?
My speech in the New Statesman debate at The Cambridge Literature Festival 2023, published in the magazine
THE FINANCIAL TIMES & FT WEEKEND
an essay on Franz Kafka's legacy on the centenary of his death
an essay on the contemporary revival of faith in culture
on being bilingual
an essay about Islam in Europe
a review-essay on Salman Rushdie's Victory City
an interview-profile of the novelist Mohsin Hamid
When empathy collides with ideology
on Peter Handke, winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize for Literature
on historian William Dalrymple's study of ancient India
on the Bengali short story tradition
on the historian Brian Catlos's Kingdoms of Faith: A New History of Islamic Spain
on some recent writing about jihad, including John Wray's novel Godsend and Abdullah Anas's memoir To The Mountains
on the New Yorker essayist Jia Tolentino's book Trick Mirror
on the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh's novel Gun Island
on the historian and translator Julia Lovell's Maoism: A Global History
Is the 'war on terror' founded on fantasy?
on sociologist Arun Kundnani's book The Muslims are Coming!
The Johnny-come-latelies of geopolitics
on anthropologist Miriam Cooke's book Tribal Modern
on Christos Tsiolkas's novel Damascus
Stuffed full of parody potential
on Jessica Anthony's novel, Enter the Aardvark
on the novelist John Banville
A joint interview-profile of the choreographer Akram Khan and film director Asif Kapadia (collaborators on the film Creature)
The Phoenician Scheme is fantasy
On the politics of Wes Anderson's Middle Eastern fantasia
on novelist Karl Ove Knausgård
on novelist Jhumpa Lahiri
on Pankaj Mishra's novel Run and Hide
on novelist László Krasznahorkai
on novelist Neel Mukherjee
on novelist Edmund White
on novelist Kamila Shamsie
on novelist Joseph O'Neill
on novelist David Peace
on novelist Carys Davies
on novelist Aravind Adiga
on novelist Mirza Waheed
Why Egypt embraces Edward Albee
on the dramatist Edward Albee's reception in the Muslim world
THE WASHINGTON POST
Why human progress is inextricably linked to war
on the historian Margaret Macmillan's War
The tragic voice of a vanished world
on Norman Lebrecht's Genius & Anxiety: How Jews Changed the World , 1847-1947
on the historian Richard Eaton's India in the Persianate Age
on Hashi Mohamed's People Like Us: How to Make it in Modern Britain
on Sam Byers's novel Perfidious Albion
The almighty versus the internet
on Nathan Englander's novel Kaddish.com
The seismic psyche of the Balkans
on Bulgarian poet Kapka Kassabova's travel writing
The partition of India through one family's eyes
on Marina Wheeler's history of parition
an interview-profile of the novelist and Nobel laureate Sir Kazuo Ishiguro
an essay about statuary, decolonisation and history
a feature on the Victorian designer William Morris and Islam
a feature on the Bengali film director Satyajit Ray
a feature on the modernist painters of 20th century Brazil
an opinion piece in favour of disused churches being put to use as mosques
on Marlene Dietrich
on the films of Hong Kong film director Wong Kar-Wai
on the BBC at 100
on Silvio Berlusconi
on The White Pube art collective
THE LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS
an essay about pilgrimages
on the novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen
on the novelist Paul Yoon
on Ayad Akhtar's novel Homeland Elegies
on Amit Chaudhuri's novel Sojourn
THE SULTAN'S SEAL
on the glorification of the past
THE LA TIMES
Taking a businesslike approach to social woes
on the development economists William Eggers and Paul Macmillan
an essay on religion and the Marxist philosopher Martin Hägglund
on Ahmed Saadawi's novel Frankenstein in Baghdad
Why does Calcutta produce so many writers?
on Kushanava Choudhury's memoir The Epic City
an essay about ethnic in-marriage
The Queen's war on nationalism
an essay about monarchy and multiculturalism after the Platinum Jubilee
Partition was not an imperialist plot
a comment on attempts to erase South Asian agency from accounts of India's partition
Face masks diminish the romance of everyday life
on what it means for public life to be deprived of smiles
Theatre's Arab Turn
on Arab theatre in the UK
CRITICAL MUSLIM
on the poetry of Sayyid Qutb
in Critical Muslim 8: Men in Islam (London: Hurst. 2013)
FRIEZE
on painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye's exhibition Verses after Dusk (Serpentine, 2015)
Runner-up for the Frieze Writer's Prize 2015