Naqib Hamid

In a very exciting passage in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, and what Alice Found There, the young Alice meets Humpty Dumpty who is sitting on a wall. In the conversation that follows, there is a thought provoking instance when Humpty Dumpty states, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose […]

In early September, just a few days before the 13th anniversary of al Qaeda’s attacks on the US, the chief of central al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, announced that he was sanctioning the formal establishment of a new franchise named al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS). This article is an academic attempt at analysing the […]

“Atheists have to be driven away from this country,” stated Maulana Ahmed Shafi, the chief of a new Islamist movement in Bangladesh named the Hifazat-e-Islam (HI). The Islamist outfit has called for enforcement of Shariah and strict blasphemy laws in the country to execute controversial, atheist bloggers in Bangladesh along with issuing other demands related […]

The month of Ramazan is approaching. It is the month in which the revelation of the Qur’an began on the Holy Prophet (PBUH). It is also the month when many Muslims around the world ‘reconnect’, so to speak, to religion and spirituality and try to ponder the meaning of their Holy Scripture. This article seeks […]

The contemporary world is one of cultural intersections and according to some sociologists, the world is moving towards a global culture, most likely to be an Americanised model of cultural values and life, a ‘McWorld’ according to the globalisation theorist Benjamin Barber. The present article looks at such processes of cultural convergence from the sociology […]

The long awaited music video of Lady Gaga’s ‘Marry the Night’ is out. Designed as an autobiography project, Gaga’s directorial debut fails to impress after the first sequence due to a somewhat flat, superficial imagery that makes use of raw, sexually explicit content. But where it is surely captivating is the deeper angle capturing on […]

Sociology shows us how people ‘operate’ in life according to their perceptions of things. Individuals and groups act according to a specific ‘definition of a situation’, which needs to be studied in detail in order to understand their corresponding actions and worldviews. This article seeks to academically probe into the socio-historical-psychological state of mind associated […]

The concept of identity occupies a central place in contemporary intellectual discourse as Zygmunt Bauman, one of the leading sociologists today, shows us in Identity in the Globalising World (2000). And it would be correct to note, perhaps, that nowhere in contemporary discourse has the concept of identity been more actively involved than in discussions […]

On Friday, July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik shook Norway, and the world. Perhaps, Ayman al-Zawahiri now has this unexpected, unknown foe who has stolen the limelight and air time from him, at least for a while.Not only has his action brought to the fore, once again, the multiculturalism debate but has also made many […]

As a sociologist, particularly interested in the sociology of religion and trying to analyse the difficult situation at hand, it is increasingly becoming clear that the war with the radicals is a war of scriptural hermeneutics and the worldviews that emerge out of these. An academic review of the pamphlet left by the members of […]