UNAPOLOGETIC with Ashfaaq Carim

In the latest episode of UNAPOLOGETIC we sat down with Faisal Devji in Oxford. Devji is a widely acclaimed scholar of both South Asian history and the history of intellectual thought.
In his latest book, Devji presents a novel idea: that "Islam", as many of us commonly use the word today, meaning a single thing with a will and a direction of its own, rather than the faith Muslims practise, is barely 150 years old.
Sometime in the mid nineteenth century, people increasingly started using the word Islam not to describe the faith that Muslims follow, but as the name of something that acts. Islam wants, Islam demands, Islam is in decline, Islam will rise. Devji's argument is that this shift happened not because Muslims became more or less devout, but because Muslim political power collapsed under European empire. Once "Islam", or more specifically Muslim political power, was no longer held by kings, caliphs or clerics, it became something anyone could speak for, and many people did.
Devji is Beit Professor of Global and Imperial History at Oxford and a Fellow of Balliol College. His new book is Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam.
We follow that story through the three movements it produced. The modernists, from Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Ameer Ali through Iqbal to Fazlur Rahman. The Islamists, from Maududi to Khomeini. And the militants of the 21st century.
Along the way we get into why Maududi thought sovereignty itself was a form of tyranny, why Khomeini told his own president that the state could suspend prayer and fasting, why Iqbal was declared a heretic and then became the intellectual father of a country, why Hamas quoted him in its founding document, and what it means that you can stand at the heart of Islamic ritual in Mecca today and find skyscrapers and fast food.
None of this is an argument that Muslim belief is fading. Devji is clear that the people in the movements he describes may be deeply religious, and that this is not a story about secular against religious. It is a story about a word, where it came from, what it made possible, and what a much older and richer tradition of Muslim thought was obscured by it.
And when he is asked whether Muslims are in crisis, his answer points somewhere else entirely.
UNAPOLOGETIC is hosted by Ashfaaq Carim.

"The story that I tell in the book is how this one Indian Empire passport became, by the 1970s, twelve independent passports." - Sam Dalrymple
"The story that I tell in the book is how this one Indian Empire passport becomes, by the 1970s, twelve independent passports." — Sam Dalrymple
We sat down with historian Sam Dalrymple, author of Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia, for UNAPOLOGETIC. His argument: the "Partition" most people know from 1947 was only one of five ruptures that broke apart the old British "Indian Empire" — a single administrative unit stretching from Aden in Yemen to the borders of Thailand — between 1937 and 1971, producing the twelve nation-states of today's South Asia and Arabian Gulf. This was a world where the Sultans of Oman were schooled in Rajasthan and grew up fluent in Urdu, where a Yemeni family's move to the Deccan gave the world haleem (Yemeni harees, remixed with Hyderabadi spice), and where Rangoon in 1933 briefly overtook New York as the world's busiest port of migration. Sam traces exactly how that world got torn apart, piece by piece.
We go deep into the personal story behind Pakistan's founding, from Muhammad Ali Jinnah's transformation after the death of his wife Ruttie, to Gandhi's early opposition to a "Greater India," through all five partitions in turn: Burma in 1937, the Arabian states, the Great Partition of 1947, the forced integration of princely states like Hyderabad and Kashmir, and finally the 1971 war that created Bangladesh. We also talk about the scale of the devastation, the myths that have grown up around it, and Sam's own Project Dastaan, reconnecting Partition survivors with the homes they lost.
UNAPOLOGETIC is hosted by Ashfaaq Carim.

We sat down with Middle East Eye journalist and author Sean Mathews on UNAPOLOGETIC to ask a question that unsettles a lot of assumptions: do Greeks actually have more in common with Arabs and Turks than they do with the rest of Europe?
Mathews is the author of The New Byzantines: The Rise of Greece and Return of the Near East, and his answer draws on years of reporting from Istanbul, Cairo and occupied Jerusalem.
He argues that Greece's "Western" identity is a relatively recent import, imposed from outside, and that the country's deeper roots, culturally, religiously and geopolitically, lie in the wider Middle East.
The episode traces how the Greek revolution, the population exchange with Turkey, and the collapse of cosmopolitan cities like Alexandria all shaped the identity Greece wears today. We also get into the present: Greece's fast-deepening, and increasingly fraught, alliance with Israel, and what that could mean for Turkey, NATO and the wider region.

UNAPOLOGETIC is hosted by Ashfaaq Carim.

The US backed Khomeini's return to power, then a year later greenlit Saddam Hussein's invasion of Iran, the same country it had just warned Saddam might attack.
In this latest episode of UNAPOLOGETIC, radio host and presenter of The Scott Horton Show, Scott Horton, sat down with MEE's Ashfaaq Carim to discuss the history of the US and its impact in the region.
They also touched on Netanyahu's "new Middle East" doctrine and whether real US pressure could actually force him to fall in line. UNAPOLOGETIC is hosted by Ashfaaq Carim.

We sat down with Andreas Krieg for the fourth time on UNAPOLOGETIC, this time in the aftermath of the war on Iran, to ask what it has done to the balance of power across the Middle East. His answer is stark: this is the most fundamental shift in regional order in thirty years, and it has undone the American empire in a way he does not think it can recover from.
We get into why the Gulf no longer believes the United States can protect it, why its bases have become magnets for attack rather than deterrents, and why nobody in the region has a plan B for the order that is now crumbling. Andreas lays out the battle between the Israel lobby and the Gulf lobby that he believes will decide Washington's approach for years to come, the split between Marco Rubio and JD Vance, and why Iran has emerged able to impose its will without ever building a bomb.
We also talk through Iran as a network state, the Strait of Hormuz as a chokepoint, Saudi Arabia's strategic drift, Qatar's network power, Egypt reduced to a beggar state, the violation of Iraqi sovereignty, Syria under Sharaa, and why Andreas argues Israel has become a hammer that sees everything as a nail, isolated and digging itself into a hole it may not climb out of.
UNAPOLOGETIC is hosted by Ashfaaq Carim.