S Mubashir Noor

Sheikh Hasina Wazed, Awami League (AL) chief and Bangladesh’s incumbent prime minister, has long sold herself as a regional bulwark against Islamic extremism. Critics even accuse Wazed of scaremongering the general public to pry votes away from the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) led by her political nemesis, Khaleda Zia. And yet on her watch, Bangladesh […]

Henry Kissinger, storied academic and secretary of state to US presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, is arguably the finest political brain of his generation. In 2014 at the ripe old age of 91, Kissinger published his magisterial tome World Order, a peerless peek at history tracing the evolution of the incumbent international system of […]

As a highly charged and deeply polarising debate on the burkini rages on in France, where 30 towns dotting its southeastern coastline have banned the swimsuit version of the burqa on public beaches, it would be far too easy for us in the Muslim world to unequivocally affirm the French state as inherently ‘Islamophobic’. Hardcore […]

These are dark days for international jihadists. In Syria, Islamic State (IS) and al-Qaeda militants are being chased out of their long-held strongholds by troops loyal to President Bashar al-Assad and the Kurd-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), backed by Russian and American airpower respectively. Pro-government militias in cooperation with national armies also have them on […]

The “great man theory” popularised by writer and historian Thomas Carlyle defined 19th century sociology. He posited that human history was merely play-dough for the whims of “supermen” — individuals blessed by the heavens from birth to rise up and single-handedly alter the trajectory of civilisation. Napoleon, Hitler, Lenin, you get the picture. Not everyone […]

The US and Japan are maneuvering with greater purpose this year to contain an increasingly assertive China in East Asia and the Indian Ocean. From deploying the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system in South Korea to signing a landmark Logistics Support Agreement with India, the longstanding allies are pressuring Beijing to back down from […]

The world has taken a turn for the worse this year. Istanbul, Paris, Brussels and now Nice, the once untouchable icons of European civilisation, isolated from the fires of the Middle East and Africa, are reeling from jihadist attacks. Europeans today are confronted with madmen who do not or will not differentiate between innocent civilians […]

Recent events suggest the Obama administration reckons that sanctioning Russia and expanding NATO’s militarisation in eastern Europe is not enough to deter Moscow’s belligerence towards nations comprising its “near abroad” (i.e. ex-Soviet republics) and former member states of the Warsaw Pact. To this effect, the Rio Olympics are Washington’s new geopolitical lever to force Russian […]

On July 15, thousands of angry Turks gave armchair democrats around the world, including those in Pakistan, an object lesson in how to defend their democracies. The answer: by obsessively giving a damn. A deluge of civilians then overran the streets of Ankara and Istanbul in response to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s calls for […]

The US presidential election in November will be unique for at least two reasons. One, in Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump it will feature two contenders with the worst favourability ratings in US electoral history. Two, both candidates have been campaigning on planks traditionally associated with their ideological opposites. Democrats, for instance, tend […]