FOUNDER & EDITOR, NOUS
Ali writes and produces documentary explainers on democracy, law, and the geopolitics of the Muslim world.
In conversation with political scientist Harish S. Wankhede, a history of caste, cinema and political strategy explains why Indian screens produced Dalit victims for decades before they allowed a Dalit hero.
Islamic scholar Waris Mazhari argues, in a long conversation on Nous Podcast, that the intellectual revival Muslim communities need is a renewal from within their own tradition, not a modernist rupture borrowed wholesale from the West.
In a wide-ranging conversation, the Islamic scholar Waris Mazhari argues that Muslim intellectual tradition was never as frozen as its critics and defenders alike assume, and that reviving ijtihad from within it, not importing ready-made secular frameworks, is the way out of the crisis facing contemporary Muslim thought.
Historian Imran Mulla on how the last Ottoman caliph, exiled to the French Riviera, and the Nizam of Hyderabad's dynasty tried — and failed — to relocate the seat of Islamic authority to India.
A historian's search for a forgotten Ottoman tomb in western India uncovers a decade-long scheme to rebuild the caliphate from the treasury of a princely Muslim state, and the Indian anti-colonial movement it grew out of.
Historian Imran Mulla's forgotten history of the alliance between the last Ottoman caliph and Hyderabad's Nizam shows how a 1931 royal marriage became a bid to relocate the caliphate to India — and what it reveals about a more interconnected Islamic world.
Dr Syed Zafar Mahmood, a retired IAS officer who overhauled Hajj logistics and Waqf administration from inside government before founding the Zakat Foundation of India, argues that Indian Muslims already hold the institutions, data and resources to lift themselves, if only they organised them.
A retired civil servant who helped shape the Sachar Committee report argues that India's Muslims already have the resources they need, and that the real work now is building institutions patient enough to use them.
From reforming the Haj bureaucracy to writing Waqf reform into the Sachar Committee's report, Dr Syed Zafar Mahmood argues India's Muslims already have the resources to lift themselves — if only the community organised to use them.
Professor Irfan Ahmad argues that terrorism has no agreed definition anywhere in the world, yet the claim that terrorism is uniquely Islamic has somehow become common sense across four continents — and traces why that particular story, rather than any other, is the one the modern nation-state needs told.
Anthropologist Irfan Ahmad argues that the word "terrorism" was never meant to be defined — it was built to be deployed, first against communism, then against Islam, while state violence that dwarfs it goes unnamed.
Anthropologist Irfan Ahmad argues that "terrorism" was never a neutral description of violence — it was built, definition by definition, to mean Islam.
In a wide-ranging conversation, the author of The Making of Majoritarian India argues that India chose unconstrained majority rule over guaranteed minority representation at its founding — and that everything since, from Partition to today's delimitation debate, follows from that choice.
In a wide-ranging Nous conversation, the writer Javed Gaya argues that India's Muslim question was not born in 2014 but engineered into the republic's founding choice of liberty over equality — and nowhere more decisively than in the politics of Uttar Pradesh.
The author argues that India's constitutional framers privileged an unguarded liberty over hard-wired equality, and that a section of the Hindu elite quietly welcomed Partition as its byproduct.
In the debut episode of Nous's First Principles series, Ali Javed argues that Hindutva no longer needs the RSS to survive it has fused with the Indian state's own institutions, and traces what that fusion does to Muslims, Dalits and the Constitution alike.
In the first episode of Nous's "First Principles" series, researcher Ali Javed argues that after 2014, Hindutva stopped needing the RSS as its vehicle — because the Indian state itself became Hindutva's body.
In the opening episode of a new Nous Podcast series on political theory, the researcher argues Hindutva has evolved from a pragmatic ethnic-nationalist project into a worked-out metaphysics with structural parallels to Zionism.
Economist Abusaleh Shariff describes how decades of village-level data collection, and a Prime Minister's phone call, produced India's first government report measuring Muslim exclusion — and why he insists its answer was never a quota.
Two decades after the Sachar Committee measured the scale of Muslim deprivation in India, the economist who built its data explains how the report came to be written, why it was never withdrawn, and why he opposes the quota it is often credited with demanding.
Economist Abusaleh Shariff tells Nous how a childhood split between a Kannada school and an Urdu classroom led him to a data gap that had kept Muslim deprivation invisible in Indian policymaking for decades, and why he insists the Sachar Committee report has never actually been rejected.
Veteran journalist and rights activist John Dayal argues that laws against conversion, the exclusion of Dalit Christians from Scheduled Caste status and the squeeze on foreign funding form a single system of enclosure, and that the community lacks the leadership to answer it.
In a wide-ranging conversation, veteran journalist and human rights activist John Dayal traces how anti-conversion law, caste and state complicity have reshaped violence against Christians and Dalits in India over half a century.
In conversation with Nous, the veteran journalist and Christian rights campaigner traces anti-Christian violence in India to a colonial-era caste order that, he argues, still shapes who gets protected and who gets blamed.
