Karbala as a compass against empire.

I write from the intersection of occupation, survival, faith, and memory.

I grew up in Kashmir under occupation, learning early that power does not only control land- it reaches into memory, language, movement, and the imagination of what a life can be. Years later, after living through prolonged illness and receiving a kidney transplant that gave me a second life, I found myself thinking even more deeply about what it means to survive, to remember, and to refuse the worlds power tries to make inevitable.

My writing grows from that journey.

Through Kashmir and beyond, I explore how power remakes the worlds we inhabit- and how those worlds can be remade in return.

Karbala is one of the compasses I return to.

I approach Karbala as a school of moral refusal: a tradition that asks what it means to stand against power when power demands obedience, what we owe the dead, and how dignity survives when domination tries to make surrender appear inevitable.

Through political reflection, historical recovery, and spiritual inquiry, these essays trace the world’s empire tries to make permanent and the memories, traditions, solidarities, and acts of refusal that keep other worlds possible.

What I offer here is not simply commentary, but a way of seeing: an attempt to connect the histories we are taught to forget with the worlds we are still fighting to imagine.

This publication is for anyone looking for a deeper language for power, dignity, memory, faith, and resistance- whether you arrive through Kashmir, Karbala, history, decolonization, or the struggle for a more just world.

If you believe the past is not dead, that memory is a site of struggle, and that another world has to be imagined before it can be built, you are in the right place.

You can find me on Instagram @jaleeshyder