( Foreign Policy in Focus ) – The international community’s approach to conflict resolution has undergone a profound and dangerous structural shift, moving away from the pursuit of political settlements toward the permanent administration of crisis. This transition is vividly apparent in Rafah, where the newly established National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG) has begun overseeing a reconstruction process stripped of any path toward genuine sovereignty or political renewal. What is being built instead is a sprawling, technocratic bureaucracy designed to manage human suffering indefinitely, transforming a site of active geopolitical dispossession into a permanent administrative holding pattern.

The rollout of Phase Two of the Trump administration’s Comprehensive Gaza Plan—secured with a UN Security Council endorsement—exposes the nakedly corporate logic underpinning modern foreign policy. By placing a “Board of Peace” stacked with billionaire financiers and political hawks like Marco Rubio, Tony Blair, Jared Kushner, Ajay Banga, and Marc Rowan in charge of post-conflict governance, Western hegemony has effectively financialized geopolitical containment. The plan treats Gaza not as a nation deserving of self-determination but as a high-risk economic asset to be secured, stabilized, and folded into regional trade corridors while its population remains permanently disenfranchised.

This containment model carries severe consequences both for the occupied population and the broader global order. For Palestinians, it institutionalizes a bleak daily reality of endless aid lines and checkpoints under an international apparatus that has traded the promise of liberation for technocratic stabilization. Globally, this reveals a deeper systemic reality: the traditional assumption that regional conflicts are temporary shocks awaiting a diplomatic fix has completely collapsed.

For global political and economic elites, perpetual instability is no longer a failure to be corrected but a baseline structural condition around which modern global capitalism is choosing to organize itself.

A Shift in Logic

In the twentieth century, major conflicts were viewed as massive disruptions to globalization. In the twenty-first, globalization is rapidly adapting itself around endless disruption. Entire corporate, financial, and bureaucratic systems now operationalize instability as a baseline condition rather than a temporary shock.

Private-sector logistics firms are securing long-term contracts to manage continuous delivery corridors into high-risk zones. Maritime conglomerates are permanently adjusting pricing models and routing assets around Africa as a structural business reality. Digital and physical infrastructure protection has transitioned from an annual insurance check-box to a core operational expense that drives tech-sector hiring and venture capital investment.

Markets are internalizing this shift. Oil prices no longer spike the way they once did after escalations because commodity investors increasingly price in chronic, localized instability rather than assuming systemic collapse. Capital markets are no longer asking whether a crisis will end but whether it can remain geographically contained. That distinction changes everything for how corporate treasuries allocate capital.

Gaza and Ukraine

Gaza illustrates this vividly. The NCAG’s reconstruction mandate and the Board of Peace’s integration of Gaza into the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) show that crisis management itself has become a growth industry. Reconstruction is not about closure; it is about embedding instability into global supply chains.

This economic adaptation mirrors a deeper systemic fatigue within international governance. The post-Cold War era operated on the logic that major conflicts eventually reached closure, whether Bosnia after Dayton or Northern Ireland after the Good Friday Agreement. Today, that logic is spent.

Instead of diplomacy aimed at structural architecture, modern institutions are becoming highly efficient at administering instability rather than ending it. The UN’s Resolution 2803 did not declare peace; it endorsed a framework for managing crisis indefinitely. The NCAG’s mandate is to restore services under conditions of volatility, not to deliver closure.

Ukraine offers a parallel. Western institutions have become adept at stabilizing financial flows, managing refugee integration, and sustaining military aid—but without a credible path to settlement. Sudan’s humanitarian corridors are similarly managed as permanent relief operations. Gaza’s plan institutionalizes this model: reconstruction without resolution, administration without settlement.

Normalization

The third transformation is occurring inside the human infrastructure of the modern workplace, driven by algorithmic fatigue and the workspace paradox. The digital age has fundamentally altered how societies, consumers, and employees process global trauma.

Previous generations experienced major conflicts sequentially. Today’s professional workforce experiences them simultaneously, continuously, and instantly. In any given hour, a professional’s algorithmic stream displays corporate Slack messages alongside real-time updates from Gaza, Ukraine, Taiwan, and climate disasters.

This continuous exposure has created a dangerous psychological paradox. The global workforce is more emotionally connected to macro-level crises than at any point in history, yet constant exposure is triggering widespread psychological numbness and professional exhaustion. Public and corporate outrage surges rapidly, then stabilizes into fatigue. For leaders, managing a workforce under the weight of this continuous cognitive load is a quiet crisis in itself.

The ultimate danger of the era of permanent crisis is that it becomes intellectually and socially normalized. Once corporate strategies and public expectations internalize the assumption that global disruption never truly ends, ambition contracts. Leaders stop pursuing long-term expansions because planning horizons narrow from years to weeks. Innovation takes a backseat to survival and containment.

Photo by Yannis Boschung on Unsplash

History offers a stern warning: the late Roman Empire did not collapse because every frontier failed simultaneously. It declined because permanent emergencies became routine, and tactical crisis management slowly replaced strategic renewal.

The modern international order risks entering a similar phase. Gaza, Ukraine, and shipping vulnerabilities matter immensely for their immediate human and material costs, but they matter even more because they reveal the new template of global operations. Trump’s Gaza plan, with its NCAG, Board of Peace, and IMEC linkage, is not just a reconstruction blueprint. It is a case study in how global institutions now design for permanence of crisis rather than its resolution.

The challenge for the next generation of business leaders is not simply navigating the next disruption but learning how to build sustainable, human-centric enterprises when disruption is the baseline condition. The permanent crisis economy is here: industries are monetizing instability, institutions are administering it, and workforces are absorbing it.

Gaza’s reconstruction framework, endorsed by the UN and operationalized by Trump’s Board of Peace, crystallizes this reality. It shows that the world’s most powerful actors are no longer promising closure. They are promising management.

For commerce, governance, and society, the task is clear: to resist the temptation to normalize crisis as the only horizon. Otherwise, the machinery of global order will become a treadmill of containment, and the ambition for renewal will fade. The permanent crisis economy may be the present reality, but it must not become a permanent destiny.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

Really? The costliest fires ever? Doesn’t that catch your attention? It certainly did mine!

In fact, wouldn’t it catch your attention more than “President Said to Be Dropping Plans for Fund,” or “In Stalemates, Trump’s Talk Meets Reality,” or, for that matter, “Lutnick Runs Commerce Dept. With Bare-Knuckles Approach”? All three of those headlines were on the front page of that same paper, not at the bottom of page seven, and all three were, of course, distinctly Trumpian-themed pieces.

And, of course — sorry to be so repetitive, but what choice do I have in the world of… yes, who else but, of course, Donald J. Trump? — who or what could possibly catch your attention more than him and his crew?

If he were another president, I would have written “his crew and him,” but of course, in his world — and all too sadly in ours as well — he always seems to come first, no matter what. Certainly, on the planet that Donald Trump rules (or at least thinks he rules), the last thing that should appear on a front page would be an article about the scorching of this world of ours, or “the costliest wildfires ever,” or the fact that the European Union “declared the 2025 wildfire season the most destructive on record,” or that we (or at least our children and grandchildren) could potentially be facing the end of this planet as we’ve known it all these thousands and thousands of years, right?

 

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Or put another way, of these four lines, which would you have highlighted on page one and which would you have buried on page seven:

“President Trump is backing off his plan to establish a $1.8 billion fund to compensate people who claimed they were victims of unfair prosecution by the government, two people familiar with the matter said on Monday.”

“President Trump likes his military and diplomatic victories quick, clean, and decisive”

“When auto executives learned last year that President Trump’s punishing tariffs on foreign car parts were set to cost their companies billions of dollars, they were rattled.”

Or (yawn):

“Even though the total area burned was relatively small, 2025 was the most economically damaging wildfire year on record, according to a new analysis published Sunday.”

Yes, those are the first lines of each of those pieces and that ordering tells you so much about how Donald Trump has indeed taken control of our world in 2026. And give The Donald credit. After all, his greatest skill (above all others) is his unbelievable ability — no matter what he has to say — to regularly get more attention than just about anything (or anyone else) on this planet of ours, including the possible end of this world as we’ve known it.

And I suppose we need to give him credit in another sense, too. He has, in every imaginable fashion, proved capable of all too literally changing the climate of our all-American world. (And I’m already sweating as I write that!) He’s the man who has shut down wind-power projects along the East Coast, tossed solar power projects out the window, managed to open another 1.3 billion acres of ocean waters to oil and natural gas drilling, and considers climate change not just a distinctly fake news story, but a genuine “scam,” and yet Americans elected him president a second time in 2024.

And consider this no less strange: Despite Donald Trump, as the Guardian reported recently, red states, unbelievably enough, seem to be heading the green energy build-out in this country, with Texas, for instance, “the leading green energy superpower, especially in wind power where it leads the country,” while green states seem — how truly strange! — to be cutting back on or “shrinking away from their climate plans.” Yikes!

And in his own strange fashion (despite that “despite Donald Trump” in the previous paragraph), “our” president has, in fact, launched a kind of global green energy — well, if not revolution, then at least potential spurt. After all, by launching a war on Iran and ensuring the blocking of the Strait of Hormuz, through which about one-fifth of this planet’s sea-borne oil and 20% of its natural gas passes (or rather once passed), he’s also spurred countries globally, especially in Asia and Europe, to at least start thinking about revving up green energy production. Of course, It’s sad indeed to count on a war for good news on the energy front, but there we are. Sigh.

Photo by David Yao on Unsplash

Now, don’t misunderstand me. Donald Trump is doing everything he can to promote the worst kind of energy on this planet. Only recently, for instance, he’s been using the Cold-War era Defense Production Act to provide grants to, as the (wonderful) Guardian again reports, “more than a dozen existing coal plants across the U.S., including facilities capable of exporting coal.” As he put it recently, “As a result of the $700m investment that I’m announcing today, we will protect 14 coal plants and 42 coalmines, a tremendous number, and build two new coal plants and one massive new export terminal.” And he added charmingly, “You’re not allowed to say ‘coal’ within the Trump administration unless it’s preceded by the words ‘clean, beautiful’.”

Now, admittedly, American coal production has nonetheless been falling for years.

And of course, if I were running a newspaper these days, I would indeed put the fate of the planet in the age of Donald Trump front and center. The top of page one, day in, day out. After all, nothing else truly matters if this planet of ours becomes ever more unlivable for us.

Let’s face it, if we don’t read not The Times but our times correctly, we’re in trouble deep.

Via Tom Engelhardt Substack

If, however, the strike on the water tanks was deliberate, it was a war crime. Iranian media alleged that it deprived 20,000 people of drinking water in 113º F. (45º C. ) temperatures and 60% humidity. This affected men, women and children. The reservoir held 70K cubic feet of water and the water tank 17K cubic feet. Drinking water was unavailable for 12 hours.

Photo by IRIB News of alleged US damage to water facility. Public Domain in U.S.

Fatemeh Jarareh, the female representative in parliament of Hormozgan Province, called the attack a “blatant war crime against humanity.” She accused what she called the “terrorist army” of the United States of deliberately targeting key infrastructure necessary to human life and livelihood.

The government said that repair crews restored water transmission lines in twelve hours and said that over the following 24 hours drinking water would stabilize.

During the 39-day all-out war in March, Iran asserted that the US or Israelis had damaged a desalinization plant providing drinking water to residents. Bahrain likewise said that a desalinization plant providing water to 30 villages had been damaged by an Iranian drone.

Quite apart from the question of whether it is a war crime to hit civilian water facilities, it is a very dangerous move. If Iran felt its inhabitants were systematically being deprived of water, it could likely take out all the desalization plants in the territories of its Arab Gulf neighbors, without which none of those countries could survive more than three days. That is how long it takes for renal failure from lack of water to kick in and kill you; it is why rescue teams after an earthquake gradually stop searching in the rubble for survivors after 36 hours, since the likelihood of someone surviving longer than that without water is low.

Some 80% of water in the United Arab Emirates, a country of 11 million, comes from desalinization plants. Their total destruction would provoke a vast exodus of the population and raise questions about the survival of the country, where 88% of the residents are non-citizen migrant workers and expatriates. In turn, the Emirates’ ability to export petroleum would be drastically impeded, hurting the whole world.

Hence, the Trump administration should think long and hard before hitting such civilian infrastructure in Iran. The whole Gulf region is full of glass houses, and if they are all shattered, the energy crisis would be unprecedented.

Currently, much of the international debate centers on a single official: Bulgarian diplomat Nickolay Mladenov. The former United Nations Special Coordinator has been designated by the United States as the Executive Director of the Trump administration’s newly established ‘Board of Peace’—an international council founded to oversee the implementation of Washington’s 20-point Gaza roadmap.  

The issue, however, is much bigger than a single Washington-backed bureaucrat. A growing number of Palestinians and political analysts accuse Mladenov of manufacturing the very conditions that continue to obstruct progress on the agreement’s transition to its second phase. 

Under the framework, the official transition to this second phase—which Trump and the Board of Peace declared to have begun in January 2026—demands sweeping, one-sided Palestinian concessions, most notably the total disarmament of armed factions.  

This demand is a recipe for the failure of the entire project, especially given that Israel has completely failed to implement the most basic requirements of the agreement’s first phase. It has refused to halt its routine military incursions, has failed to withdraw its forces to the originally mandated ‘Yellow Line‘ demarcation, and continues to deny entry permits to the technocratic committee slated to assume civil governance of the Strip.

Mladenov’s insistence on Palestinian disarmament before the agreement can advance—without a single guarantee of Israeli compliance—conveniently flips the narrative. It cynically reframes systematic starvation and the blockade of medical and construction supplies as a Palestinian failure to honor commitments.

In reality, Mladenov holds no real cards; he is merely a cog in a larger machinery controlled by Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israeli Prime Minister has made it explicitly clear that he has no intention of following any peace roadmap, planning instead for the permanent, incremental takeover of Gaza.

Speaking at a conference in an occupied West Bank settlement on May 28, Netanyahu explained his strategy with total clarity, abandoning all diplomatic doublespeak: “We are currently squeezing Hamas; we now control 60% of the territory of the Strip—you know this. We were at 50, we moved to 60. My directive is to move to…” he said, pausing as an audience member shouted “100!”  

Netanyahu smiled and responded: “Let’s go step by step. First of all, 70. Let’s start with that. We’re pressing them from all sides, we’ll deal with the remnants.”  

This is the actual blueprint of the Israeli government, declared openly to domestic audiences. The admission was so brazen that even US Secretary of State Marco Rubio expressed frustration at Netanyahu’s candor. Testifying before Congress on June 2, Rubio remarked, “We have a plan—it doesn’t call for that,” referring to further Israeli territorial expansion. 

Yet, Rubio quickly reverted to Washington’s standard line: “And at the end of the day, we understand that what we want, and I think what the Israelis would ultimately want, is a Gaza that is governed by a non-Hamas entity.” 

While the immediate priority for Palestinians is not governance but life-saving food, clean water, medicine, and basic survival, Netanyahu and Rubio view the entire crisis through a political lens.

The US-Israeli plan is predicated on achieving, through diplomatic strangulation and engineered famine, what they failed to fully achieve through military might.

A rare, decisive answer came from United Nations spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric, who summed up the UN position plainly: “One hundred percent of Gaza should be for the Palestinian people.” The problem, however, is that the UN’s rhetoric is backed by no real enforcement mechanisms. 

The international community has walked directly into a trap, outsourcing the future of the Gaza Strip to the Trump administration and its Board of Peace. Even the designated technocratic committee has been rendered entirely irrelevant, excluded from a decision-making process left solely to diplomats beholden to the White House.  

The situation on the ground remains catastrophic. Since the fragile, heavily compromised ceasefire took effect on October 10, regular Israeli violations and airstrikes have killed nearly 1,000 Palestinians and wounded thousands more—the vast majority women and children. When added to the horrific toll of the initial two years of war, the official number of Palestinians killed has surpassed 73,000, with over 173,000 injured.  

Photo: A young boy in a gray shirt works in a muddy trench in a refugee camp in Gaza, by Hosny salah from Pexels

Furthermore, credible epidemiological studies and medical journals have concluded that the true death toll is vastly higher. 

With nearly the entire population of Gaza living in sub-standard tents and surviving on the meager rations permitted through Israeli checkpoints, it is the highest form of immorality to demand political concessions in exchange for basic sustenance. 

Netanyahu’s “step-by-step” annexation does not hinge on what Palestinian factions decide to do; his expansionist timeline is shaped independently of Palestinian compliance.

Arab, Muslim, and allied nations must fundamentally shift their diplomatic strategy. They must firmly insist on completely delinking humanitarian aid from the future governance or demilitarization of the Gaza Strip. 

Starvation cannot be tolerated as political leverage for war criminals. Netanyahu is emboldened by a history of international impunity, speaking openly of expanding his military footprint regardless of the consequences of such action. 

The international community must remind Israel’s government that the survival of millions of Palestinians cannot be held hostage to the political ambitions of an extremist coalition. 

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.

Via Middle East Monitor

Unless otherwise stated in the article above, this work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

(The Conversation) – The US military launched strikes against Iran on June 9 in response to the downing of a US Army helicopter near the Strait of Hormuz a day earlier. These strikes, which the US military called “a proportional response to unjustified Iranian aggression”, came after Donald Trump claimed he was in the “final throes of what will be a very, very good deal” to end the war.

Iran swiftly carried out retaliatory attacks of its own. The powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps branch of Iran’s armed forces says it has struck US bases in Bahrain and Jordan. And it has warned of “even more severe attacks” if the US repeats its strikes.

This episode took place days after Israel and Iran had briefly returned to direct conflict. Triggered by Israeli operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon, where a ceasefire was supposedly in effect, both sides launched various rounds of tit-for-tat strikes before announcing they would halt hostilities.

At first glance, these incidents appear contradictory. Diplomacy is supposed to be the alternative to war and ceasefires are supposed to reduce violence. Yet with the US, Israel and Iran once again exchanging attacks, and as military operations continue in Lebanon despite ceasefire arrangements, diplomacy and conflict increasingly seem to be unfolding simultaneously.

For decades, policymakers assumed that war and diplomacy were distinct phases of international politics. States negotiated until talks broke down, and fighting followed. Eventually, battlefield realities or international pressure pushed adversaries back to the negotiating table. Diplomacy then functioned as an exit ramp from conflict.

The aftermath of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war exemplified this model. Sustained diplomatic efforts following the conflict culminated in the 1978 Camp David accords, which laid the groundwork for a definitive peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. This treaty was signed the following year and remains in effect to this day.

However, this model is becoming difficult to recognise, with the Middle East nowadays characterised by a different dynamic. Negotiations between warring parties continue during military confrontations, ceasefires coexist with airstrikes and mediators shuttle between capitals even as threats escalate.

The problem is not that diplomacy is failing. Instead, it is that diplomacy is no longer serving its traditional purpose. Rather than ending conflicts, diplomacy is helping to manage them – a distinction that matters because a conflict that is managed is not necessarily a conflict that is resolved.

Managing conflict

The latest escalations between Israel and Iran, and now Iran and the US, illustrate this dilemma. None of these parties appear to want a full-scale regional war, as the costs would be enormous and the consequences unpredictable. Yet each of them is unwilling to abandon what they see as vital security interests.

Israel views Hezbollah’s military capabilities as a major threat and therefore has a strong incentive to weaken the group. Iran, on the other hand, sees defending Hezbollah as critical to its security because the group serves as a key deterrent against Israel and extends Tehran’s regional influence. And the US struck Iran in an attempt to uphold deterrence and signal that attacks on US personnel and assets would carry consequences.

The result of this is a cycle of calibrated escalation. Military force is used not to secure decisive victory but to signal resolve to adversaries, reassure allies and domestic audiences, and persuade opposing leaders that the costs of further escalation outweigh the potential benefits. Diplomacy, meanwhile, works not to eliminate the underlying dispute but to prevent escalation from spiralling beyond control.

This creates a dangerous equilibrium. When diplomacy functions primarily as a mechanism for crisis management, leaders face less pressure to make the difficult compromises that lasting peace requires. Negotiations can continue indefinitely while violence persists, ceasefires become pauses rather than settlements and conflict becomes chronic.

The old distinction between war and peace is becoming blurred in the Middle East. Rival powers do not move neatly from diplomacy to conflict and back again. Instead, they are operating permanently in the space between the two. This should concern policymakers.

Much of contemporary diplomacy remains based on assumptions that no longer fully apply. Negotiations are often treated as evidence of deescalation, while ceasefires are assumed to signal progress towards peace. Yet neither necessarily tells us much about whether a conflict is actually moving closer to resolution.

The latest exchanges between the US and Iran, as well as Iran and Israel, therefore raise a troubling possibility. The greatest danger may not be that the Middle East slides back into a wider war. It may be that it settles into a condition of permanent confrontation in which violence periodically erupts, diplomacy periodically intervenes and neither fundamentally changes the underlying reality.

Photo of Manama by Charles-Adrien Fournier on Unsplash

For decades, the central challenge of international politics has been how to move from war to peace. The challenge emerging today is different, with negotiators grappling with the much more difficult task of ending a conflict when war and peace are happening at the same time.

Bamo Nouri, Honorary Research Fellow, Department of International Politics, City St George’s, University of London and Inderjeet Parmar, Professor in International Politics, City St George’s, University of London

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

A key architect of this movement is the Black American convert amina wadud, an Islamic feminist theologian whose radical actions and provocative statements have earned her death threats and hostile fatwas from traditional clerics, but whose vision of Islam has earned her a passionate following among Muslims seeking justice and equality. Like Malcolm before her, she has harnessed Islamic principles to a social justice movement, and has paid dearly for doing so.

The Lady Imam: How amina wadud’s Life and Faith Changed the World, By Carla Power. Penguin Random House. Published June 16, 2026. Click here to order.

wadud became the world’s most famous—and infamous—Islamic woman scholar in 2005, when she strode to the front of a Muslim congregation gathered at Manhattan’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and broke with 1400 years of Islamic tradition by claiming her right to act as the spiritual leader of men as well as women. After news about a Black American woman leading men and women praying side by side made headlines, the death threats, fatwas and trolls came swiftly. So too did the joy among Muslim women and queer people seeking more inclusive and expansive interpretations of Islam.

Like Malcolm before her, she was born into a Christian household battling racism and poverty. Christened Mary Teasley, the daughter of a Methodist preacher and a discontented housewife, wadud was sent as a teenager to live with affluent white families in Massachusetts. After cross-country hitchhiking and a stint in a Buddhist ashram, she converted to Islam as a twenty-year-old Ivy League student. Her ground-breaking 1992 book Qur’an and Woman, a reading of the scripture from a female perspective, would go on to serve as a theological scaffold for women taking on Islamist interpretations of gender relations during the 90s.

Like Malcolm before her, she’s been vilified for her frank critiques of the status quo, and her take-no-prisoners pronouncements on race, gender, and power. She drew widespread ire from online trolls after she called the Prophet Ibrahim a “deadbeat Dad” for abandoning Hajar with a nursing baby in the desert—a statement even some admirers felt was too incendiary. She’s been called crazy. A CIA agent. An exhibitionist. A “devil in hijab.” A “soldier of Satan.” A diva. A victim of a slave mentality. A heretic. An enemy of Islam. Among the virtues wadud shares with Malcolm, notes scholar and novelist Michael Muhammad Knight, is “the courage to be hated.”

Malcolm and wadud also share daring evolutions. On Malcolm’s famous hajj in 1964, his views on race were challenged by the Islamic spirit of unity. On seeing white Muslims amid the pilgrims of all races, he realized “we were truly all the same (brothers)—because their belief in one God had removed the ‘white’ from their minds, the ‘white’ from their behavior, and the ‘white’ from their attitude.”

Where Malcolm evolved from petty criminal to public intellectual, from disaffected Christian to Muslim leader, wadud has adopted a frank dynamism in her outlook and faith. Her early Islamic orientation was strictly Salafi—there’s a picture in my biography of wadud, The Lady Imam, of her vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard c. 1974 in a niqab. Like Malcolm, wadud has been unafraid to reassess and revise her worldview as she encountered realities of living in Muslim-majority countries. Her early efforts as an activist with the Malaysian group Sisters in Islam and the global woman’s organization Musawah, were focused on women’s issues. But after an explosive incident at an HIV/AIDS conference of Muslim leaders, she has since broadened her thinking to include the LGBTQ+ community. Today, she identifies as queer.

wadud hasn’t met with the violence that felled Malcolm and so many other Black male thinker-activists. Now 73, she lives peacefully in a village of rice planters in Java. That said, her importance as a major Black American thinker, and her contributions to Qur’anic analysis have been too often minimized and overlooked. “Faculties are not vying for her, students are not demanding, the American Muslim community is not touting her scholarship, and those with financial resources are not providing chairs in institutions for her to continue,” wrote the professor emerita at DePaul University Aminah McCloud Al-Deen in A Jihad for Justice, an online collection of essays on wadud. “Is it because she is African American, American, female, what?”

After my six years researching her biography, my own theory is that wadud remains an outsider to mainstream institutions through a mix of factors, which include the challenges of being prickly and gifted, Black and female, Muslim and controversial, nomadic in lifestyle and syncretic in outlook. Like Malcolm X, who was widely reviled by mainstream America in his time, it may also be that she’s often a few steps ahead of the rest of us.

XLIV.

The mighty Mahmud, the victorious Lord,
That all the misbelieving and black Horde
      Of Fears and Sorrows that infest the Soul
Scatters and slays with his enchanted Sword.

FitzGerald admitted to mashing the quatrains together, and there is no one source for this stanza in the Persian. Many verses urge the dispelling of sorrow and at least two advise against fear.

I have already discussed, regarding 1:6, FitzGerald’s use of no. 92 in the Calcutta manuscript of the Rubáiyát which is reproduced at this site:

با باده نشین، که مُلْکِ محمود این است
وَزْ چنگ شنو، که لحنِ داوود این است؛
از آمده و رفته دگر یاد مکن
حالی خوش باش، زان‌که مقصود این است

My (Juan’s) translation of this one is:

Sit with the wine, for this is Mahmud’s shore;
the harp is playing David’s melodies.
Recall this hectic to and fro no more–
be happy now: our purpose lies in this.

So line one of C92 is likely the inspiration for the mention of Mahmud as a symbol of the way wine gives existential courage.

—-
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As for the metaphor of Mahmud’s campaigns in Hindu India 1000-1027 CE being like the soul’s conquest of fear and sorrow, that likely came, as Edward Heron-Allen and A.J. Arberry argued, from the great mystic Farid al-Din `Attar’s Conference of the Birds (Mantiq al-Tayr). FitzGerald made a very compressed translation of some of its passages, which, however, he did not publish in his lifetime. Attar also uses Mahmud’s strike at the renowned Hindu temple of Somnath in Gujarat in 1026, where he destroyed the figure of Shiva and looted the site of its treasures, in an allegorical way. He depicts Mahmud after the campaign as being in a quandary about whether to give an extra share of the booty to his warriors or to the Sufi saints who prayed for his victory. (The Sufis won, in Attar’s telling).

Mahmud of Ghazni, Ghaznavid ruler, conquering Qasdar (modern Khuzdar) in India, miniature from the Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh of Rashid al-Din Il-Khanid Tabriz Ms Or 20 f.108v. Public domain. Via Wikimedia Commons .

The husband and wife team of Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis, in their classic rendering of the The Conference of the Birds, translated this passage thusly:

Shah Mahmoud at Somnat

lines 3122–43

Its worshippers flung treasure on the ground
And as a ransom gave the glittering mound;
But Mahmoud would not cede to their desire
And burnt the idol in a raging fire.
A courtier said: “Now if it had been sold
We’d have what’s better than an idol – gold!”
Shah Mahmoud said: “I feared God’s Judgement Day;
I was afraid that I should hear Him say
‘Here two – Azar and Mahmoud – stand, behold!
One carved his idols, one had idols sold!’”
And as the idol burned, bright jewels fell out –
So Mahmoud was enriched but stayed devout;
He said: “This idol Lat has her reward,
And here is mine, provided by the Lord.”
Destroy the idols in your heart, or you
Will one day be a broken idol too –
First burn the Self, and as its fate is sealed
The gems this idol hides will be revealed.
Your soul has heard the Lord’s commanding call;
Accept, and at His threshold humbly fall.
Your soul and God have formed a covenant;
Do not turn back from that first firm assent –
Will you object to what you once averred,
Swear true allegiance and then break your word?
Your soul needs only Him – through good and ill
Keep faith, and what you promised Him fulfil.
Another story of Shah Mahmoud in India
Mahmoud began his Indian campaign
And saw before him, drawn up on the plain,
The massive army of his enemy –
In fear he prayed to God for victory
And said: “If I should win this doubtful day,
The dervishes will bear the spoils away.”
They fought, and Mahmoud’s conquest was complete –
His captives piled their treasures at his feet.

lines 3144–64

The king declared: “1 will fulfil my vow;
The dervishes shall have this booty now,”
But all his courtiers cried: “Can gold and jewels
Be given to that crowd of cringing fools?
Reward the soldiers who have won this war,
Or have it piled up in the royal store.”
What should he do? Shah Mahmoud was unsure.
Just then his eye caught sight of BoulHossein,
A pious fool whom many thought insane;
He said: “Whatever that man says, I’ll do –
No kings or armies influence his view.”
They called the madman over to the king,
Who welcomed him and told him everything.
The madman said: “O king, these anxious pains
Are not worth more than two small barley grains –
If all your dealings with the Lord cease here,
forget the vow you made and never fear;
But if you think you might need Him again
Then keep your promise to the final grain.
God gave the victory to you; now where
In this agreement is your lordship’s share?”
So Mabmoud gave the gold where it was owed,
And took his way along the royal road.’

The Persian can be found here.

Map of the Ghaznavid Empire. Wikimedia Commons . Published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

For more commentaries on FitzGerald’s translations of the Rubáiyát, see

FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám: Commentary by Juan Cole with Original Persian

( Middle East Monitor ) – The pattern is now visible. On 1 June, Israel and Hezbollah agreed to a ceasefire. Within days, both sides violated it. On 5 June, Israeli airstrikes killed three Lebanese army officers and six others on a road south of Nabatiyeh. On 6 June, Israeli helicopters struck Beirut’s southern suburbs in retaliation for Hezbollah drone attacks. On 3 June, Hezbollah leader Naim Kassem called the ceasefire agreement “absurd, humiliating, and insulting” and rejected it entirely. The ceasefire lasted less than a week before it became what all the previous ones became: a framework in name, warfare in practice.

But here is what is not being said plainly: this is no longer a ceasefire breaking down. This is a ceasefire that was never real, now settling into its permanent form.

What emerges is not escalation toward a resolution. It is a managed stalemate. And every actor from Israel, Hezbollah, the Lebanese state, to the United States, has incentive to keep it exactly this way.

The ceasefire that was never a ceasefire

The 16 April ceasefire was supposed to be temporary. A ten-day pause. A negotiating window. It was extended on 23 April to three weeks. Extended again on 15 May to forty-five days. On 1 June, a new agreement was reached with explicit terms: Israel would not target Beirut’s southern suburbs. Hezbollah would not attack Israel. The Lebanese state would extend authority southward. All of this would be verified and enforced.

None of it was real. Not because the negotiators were dishonest. Because the framework assumed conditions that do not exist.

The Israeli military occupies approximately one-fifth of Lebanese territory. It has pushed further into the country than at any time since its 1982-2000 occupation. It is not occupying on the basis of a military offensive that ended, it is occupying while a ceasefire nominally holds. Every “violation” is not a breach of the ceasefire. It is the ceasefire’s actual operation.

Hezbollah has not disarmed. It has not withdrawn from southern Lebanon. It has not accepted the subordination to state authority that the ceasefire framework demands. Instead, it has continued limited military operations, attacking Israeli forces and launching drone strikes when Israeli aircraft strike Hezbollah positions. This is not defiance of the ceasefire. This is the ceasefire’s actual structure.

The Lebanese state has announced phases of disarmament and state consolidation. The military made declarations of progress on “establishing a state monopoly on arms.” None of this corresponds to reality. The state has not disarmed Hezbollah because it does not have the capacity. It has not extended authority south of Litani because Israel occupies that territory. The state’s announcements are not lies. They are the performance that makes managed stalemate possible.

What exists now is not a ceasefire that will hold or break. It is an arrangement where all parties continue operating while maintaining the fiction that a ceasefire exists.

Why all parties prefer this to everything else

Consider what each actor would face if the ceasefire actually ended:

Israel would need to decide: invade further northward toward Beirut and risk a full conflict with a Lebanese state it has no desire to fight, or stop and accept that Hezbollah remains in the south. Invasion carries costs that exceed benefits. Accepting Hezbollah’s presence seems unacceptable publicly. But accepting it under the cover of a ceasefire framework that is nominally holding? That is manageable.

Hezbollah would face: full escalation against Israel while weakened from eighteen months of bombardment, facing Iranian inability to resupply at scale, and watching Israeli forces consolidate in Lebanon. Or disarmament, which means surrendering the military capacity that gives it political legitimacy. Or this: continue limited military operations, enough to maintain credibility with its base that resistance continues, while avoiding escalation that would trigger Israeli response beyond what the population is already enduring.

The Lebanese state would face: attempting to disarm Hezbollah and triggering sectarian conflict that collapses the government, or accepting that disarmament is impossible and watching the state’s legitimacy erode. Or this: announce disarmament phases, make symbolic gestures, maintain the appearance of state consolidation while actually exercising no authority in the occupied south. This preserves the government’s international standing while avoiding internal collapse.

The United States would face: escalation involving Iran and broader regional conflict, or withdrawing from mediation and accepting that Middle East strategy has failed. Or this: maintain a framework that is nominally active, declare ceasefire extensions and new agreements when violations spike, give each actor the diplomatic cover they need while the actual situation on the ground remains frozen.

Every actor prefers managed stalemate to the alternatives.

The mechanics of permanent occupation

What makes managed stalemate permanent is that it does not require consensus on what is actually happening. Each side can narrate the situation differently.

Israel occupies territory and conducts military operations. These are violations of a ceasefire by Israel’s official position: targeted strikes against Hezbollah infrastructure and “imminent threats” to Israeli forces. By Hezbollah’s position: evidence that the ceasefire was never meant to be honored. By the US position: unfortunate incidents that do not constitute ceasefire collapse, provided both sides commit to negotiations.

Hezbollah conducts drone attacks on Israeli forces. These are violations of the ceasefire by Israel’s position: evidence Hezbollah is not committed to peace. By Hezbollah’s position: legitimate resistance to occupation. By the Lebanese state’s position: regrettable but not the state’s responsibility, as Hezbollah is a separate actor.

The Lebanese state announces progress on disarmament while exercising zero authority in the occupied south. By its position: the state is consolidating control gradually, in phases. By Israel’s position: insufficient progress, justifying continued military presence. By Hezbollah’s position: an illusion designed to serve Israel’s interests.

Each narrative is internally consistent. Each can be maintained indefinitely because none requires proof. The proof is in the territory that remains under Israeli control, the population still under Hezbollah’s de facto protection, the Lebanese state is still unable to exercise authority south of Litani.

The question that will not be asked

The real question is not whether the ceasefire will hold. It will hold because it is not a ceasefire, it is an occupation arrangement with diplomatic cover.

The question is not whether Hezbollah will disarm. It will not, because disarmament means surrendering the military capacity that makes it politically relevant to the Shia community that experiences Israeli occupation directly.

The question is not whether the Lebanese state will extend authority southward. It cannot, because it does not control the territory and has no military capacity to contest Israeli occupation.

The real question is: how long before the fiction becomes accepted reality?

The answer: it already is. The ceasefire framework has been “extended” four times in eight weeks. Each extension is a renewal of the fiction. Each violation is reported as aberration rather than pattern. Each new agreement comes with new terms that will be honored in form and violated in practice. Eventually, the extensions stop being announced. The violations stop being reported. Israeli military presence in Lebanese territory becomes accepted as the new status quo. Hezbollah maintains control of the south through Israeli sufferance. The Lebanese state exercises nominal authority from afar. The international community declares the situation “stabilized.”

Photo by El Jundi Pexels

This is not peace. It is not war. It is the permanent condition that all parties have learned to prefer.

The ceasefire will not collapse because there is no ceasefire to collapse. What exists is a managed stalemate that serves every actor better than escalation or actual resolution. It will persist because breaking it costs more than maintaining it. And the cost of maintaining it, permanent Israeli occupation of Lebanese territory, Hezbollah’s effective control of the south, the Lebanese state’s irrelevance in half its own country, has become the price of avoiding worse outcomes.

Lebanon did not lose the south in a war. It lost it in a ceasefire. And because the ceasefire is not real, the loss will never be reversed. It will only be gradually accepted.

OPINION: The ceasefire framework is exposing Lebanon’s institutional collapse

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