First, a brief acknowledgment: Kabir remains one of the pillars of this blog. His consistency, depth, and willingness to engage with the hardest questions are invaluable. I donโt always agree with himโbut the conversation would be much poorer without his voice. The post is a series of reflectionsโstitched together from the comment threads.
I. Gaza: Beyond the Pale of Language
The death of a 19-year-old TikToker, Medo Halimy, in South Gaza this week caught my eyeโnot because it was the most horrific (foetuses are sliced in two in Gaza as Dr. Feroze Sidwa*ย attests). But because having seen his video, it just made the death so immediate (yes that is a cognitive bias).
At this point, to debate whether what is happening is a genocide feels grotesque. It clearly is. The scale, the intent, the targeting of civilians and childrenโitโs all there. The legal frame collapses under the moral weight. We are witnessing something darker than war: ethnocultural suffocation & demographic extinction, broadcast live and met with diplomatic shrugs. But the world is watching inspired by the very brave Bob Vylan duo (UK punk-rap duo opposing imperialism, recently denied US visas):
Something stirs and pricks beneath the rubble.
II. The Huma Moment: A Civilizational Reversal?
For over two centuries, the Muslim world has lived under historical gravityโcolonized, humiliated, reactive. But in recent years, a new pattern flickers, subtle but persistent.
Azerbaijan (Turko-Israel ally) triumphed over Armenia (Russo-Iranian proxy). Iran reached Israel. The Houthis disrupted maritime supremacy. Saudi Arabia is reconfiguring itself at speedโless Red Sea, more Persian Gulf; less Quraysh, more Aramco. Even the symbolic arc of history seems to bend, if only slightly, in another direction; I’ve touched on Dubai before.
What we may be witnessing is the early edge of what I can only call a Huma momentโafter the mythic bird of Persianate lore, whose shadow alone bestows transformation. These are not definitive victories, but they are unmistakable signals. The shadow of the Huma is passing once again over lands that had long forgotten how to dream of ascendancy.
The Kingdom is becoming post-clerical, post-Arabist, post-old orderโquietly, almost imperceptibly. Its future may no longer lie in Mecca but in Al-Hasaโless sacred than strategic. And in that shift lies a deeper question: is the Muslim world learning to imagine power not as nostalgia, but as negotiation?
III. Resistance, and What Comes After
Which brings me to the idea of resistance.
It is seductiveโmorally, emotionally, historically. But what does resistance mean in a world where the line between liberation and vengeance blurs?
Violent resistance feels inevitable in a world this unjust. And yet, Gandhiโs legacy stands like a luminous interruption. India was freed without an army. That was his miracle.
But Gandhiโs contemporariesโNehru, Q.E.A-Jinnah, Mountbattenโwere not equal to the world he tried to leave behind. Partition was not a settlement. It was a wound disguised as withdrawal, a rushed unraveling of a civilizational fabric that perhaps needed a century to mend.
Sometimes I wonder: what if Indiaโs postcolonial moment had been paced, not amputated? Would we be talking today about โresistanceโ or โreconstructionโ?
IV. The Thrones That Never Were
That thought leads me to the Windsors.
European monarchies intermarried for centuries. Queen Victoriaโs children found their way onto Catholic and Protestant thrones alikeโBelgium, Spain, Romania. But never India. Never Egypt. Never Nigeria.
The British Empire ruled half the world, but never imagined itself marrying into it. No cadet throne in Delhi. No royal marriage to a Maratha or Sikh princess. Not even symbolic absorption.
They married into the Habsburgs, but not the Holkars.
That wasnโt oversightโit was ideology. The Empire saw itself as steward, not partner. It was not about Protestantism**. It was about race. It was about refusing to imagine a shared future.
What if they had tried? What if a United Monarchy of India had emergedโa blend of Victorian and Vedic, with royal marriages across the 600 princely states? Yes, fantasy. But also a reminder that some roads werenโt merely untakenโthey were unthinkable.
V. Market Minorities and the Illusion of Disappearance
Every few years, someone laments the disappearance of the Parsis. But letโs be clear: they own South Bombay. Their numbers may dwindle, but their wealth endures and compounds through the property and luxury market.
Market minoritiesโJews, Armenians, WASPs, Parsisโdonโt vanish. They adapt. They entrench. They survive not by brilliance but by insulation. Their genius isnโt IQโitโs institutional memory. Like the Norman aristocracy in England (who are still dominant), they endure through rules, not revolutions.
These groups may intermarry, but they rarely dissolve. They find ways to reproduce themselves through structure, not sentiment.
VI. A Misread of Martyrdom
What stunned me about Israelโs strike on Iran wasnโt the forceโit was the timing. To bomb just before Muharram, on the threshold of Ashura, was not only provocative. It was a religious own-goal.
Ashura is not a mere mourning ritual. It is the spiritual engine of Iranian Shiโismโthe commemoration of Imam Husseinโs martyrdom, the sacralization of resistance, the sanctification of loss.
When Iran heals itself during Ashura, it does so not only as a state, but as a theater of memory. This isnโt geopolitics. Itโs Karbala 2.0. And that matters for the 30% of the population that stick by the Islamic regime***.
Below is a viral video of an older Iranian man berating Trump and calling him “his enemy”:
VII. On Iranโs Civilizational Composition
Western analysts still misread Iran as a brittle state. But Iranโs unusual demographic structure gives it strength. Its non-Persian minoritiesโArabs and Azerisโare overwhelmingly Shia. Its Sunni minoritiesโKurds and Balochโare linguistically and culturally Iranic.
This means Iranโs fault lines do not align with neat sectarian binaries. Its coherence is not perfect, but itโs deeper than its critics imagine. Where most postcolonial states battle layered identity fractures, Iranโs fractures are misalignedโand therefore manageable. This man is from Iran’s Arab minority:
Itโs a state with real volatility. But also real architecture. And thatโs a kind of resilience no Twitter storm can fracture (unlike Elon and Trump who are threatening each other with deportation and deposition).
VIII. The Decay of the English-Speaking Web
Lastly, a word on the intellectual weather. The English-speaking web feels exhausted. The age of wild forums, experimental blogging, and open-source subcultures has yielded to something flatter: brand management and aesthetic compliance.
Where once there was generative chaos, now there are filters. Where there was flame, now there is formatting. Outside of Telegram and a few dissident spaces, the digital agora is fenced. The village square has become a corporate foyer. We donโt post. We perform. The best thinking no longer happens in English or even online. The frontier has moved. Most havenโt noticed.
IX. Seeds for Next Time
Palestine, Partition, Parsihood, Petro-politics. A round-up, a meditation, a loose map of some roads not taken. Thank you again to the commentariat for keeping the fire lit. We may not always agree, but weโre still, in some strange and rare way, thinking together. And in these times, thatโs not nothing.
And so we end where we began: not with answers, but with remembrance. Of TikTokers and Tikrit, of thrones that never were and martyrs who never fade. The world is unmaking itselfโbut thought, at least, remains a kind of resistance.
Footnotes:
* Dr. Feroze Sidwa is a a Pakistani-American Parsi doctor probably related to the author Bapsi Sidwa.
** Many of Victoriaโs descendants were Catholic or Orthodox.
*** In a working democracy you need the passive buy-in of the 70%, whereas in a hybrid autocracy you need a very invested 30% backing.
On Iran: This conversation between Karan Thapar and Vali Nasr is very interesting
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWUTNt0Zems
I’ll have a look
I have seen some people write for many years, I have seen again and again which side peoples bias rests. . I see through performance of words and have learned to measure people for where and how far will they act. I see now and cannot unsee the performance at many places and here. . One should observe who people are willing to accuse and who people are willing to defend and you shall know who are moral , cowards, opportunists and otherwise. The future is not humans, the future is machines and how one navigates that. People who have brains will see it for what it is. And machines, they too will see. Those who hedge, etc, will be found out.
what does that mean?
Nobody showed any love to this post alas.. I think also for me to write more, I do need the commentariat activated as I don’t see readership data.
Sorry, I meant to; but I’ve gotten tied up with fun work!
Is Huma like a Phoenix? I’d never heard of this before. Would love to hear more honestly.