The writer is Professor in the faculty of Liberal Arts at the Beaconhouse National University, Lahore
W ar with Iran may mark a turning point—not in the balance of power alone, but also in the slow disintegration of the West as a coherent...
T he transition between 2024 and 2026 from shadow warfare to open confrontation between Iran on one hand and Israel and the United States on...
M odern science, al-Attas observed, often studies the natural world purely in terms of empirical phenomena, treating nature as an object to...
T he passing of Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas on March 8 marks the end of an era in modern Islamic intellectual history. For more than half a...
T he modern political economy of the Gulf Cooperation Council states - Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman -...
P akistan has witnessed several variations of autocratic rule. Ayub Khan’s era was marked by controlled intra-elite transfer, sometimes...
P ower in autocratic systems has always had a curious dual character: it looks absolute while actually resting on a narrow, unstable...
S overeignty is one of the words that sound simple but actually define a very technical idea in political theory. The most plausible...
T he rise of empires has rarely puzzled historians; it is their decline that has generated deep and enduring reflection. Across cultures and...
P akistan has compelling reasons to be deeply concerned about the prospect of a US attack on Iran that results in the dismantling or severe...
W e are living through a loud age. The noise comes not only of wars and weapons, but also from certainties shouted across screens; identities...
T he terms history and her-story name not merely two ways of narrating the past, but also two different orientations toward knowledge, power...
I n a disturbingly short span of time, two cases of suicide at a local university in Lahore have jolted the public conscience and compelled a...
I n response to my column of last Sunday, Prof Shahid Imtiaz has offered a deeply sceptical, almost civilisational critique of contemporary...
Debates among political scientists and policy thinkers over whether dictatorship can be more effective than democracy in ethnically and...
A year-end assessment of the state of democracy in Pakistan
F reedom — that luminous word around which modern civilisation revolves — has become, in our age, a beautifully crafted illusion. We...
W ords do political work. The repeated deployment of charged epithets like kafir , ghaddar and the generic tag of security threat function...
T he political evolution of underdeveloped polities has been persistently obstructed by the refusal of their leaders to relinquish power at...
To talk of Iqbal’s affirmation of the self, his khud , under the long shadow of colonialism, is to speak of a metaphysics of resistance,...
