Dear friends, old and new,

I don’t know when you last heard from me. And I’m truly sorry if, in the last month, I ended up inadvertently sending you too many newsletters (or the same newsletter too many times). After leaving Substack, I’d been struggling with various newsletter services—it’s hell out there. But the trouble is hopefully over now I’m using my trusty old WordPress (the home of тнє ѕυℓтαη’ѕ ѕєαℓ), where I’ve realized I can publish a blog/newsletter as well as host a site. I’m as happy to have divested from Wix, which I’d been using for a couple of years unaware it was an Israeli company, as I am with the simple text-centric design of the new site.

(Do please feel free to unsubscribe from my emails if they are disruptive, you can always visit therakha.org and dip in at your leisure.* But, while we’re shamelessly at it, find me on Insta if you’re there, and give me some love if you’re active on Goodreads—my situation there is dire!)

Today I’m writing from my new base to solicit your prayers and good vibes on a totally different count. Postmuslim: Confessions of a Renegade Liberal, my book of twelve personal essays, will not be out till autumn next year. But now I am almost done with the MS I’ve been in a strange place:

Despite a handful of friends responding positively to what I’ve shown them, I’ve never felt so gravely responsible for my name being on a piece of writing. I’m satisfied with the work itself, as much as I’m going to be, but there is deep ambivalence and tredpidation about what publishing a book like this in 2026 actually means, about my sense of purpose, and my place in the world—unprecedented. This could be a function of the exposure that English (and Graywolf) have given me, for which I am of course grateful, jitters or no jitters. But it must also be about how serious-sensitive the material is and how ridiculously personal my take on it has been.

Meanwhile, I want to share my conversation on The Dissenters with the incredible Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou, which is now available to view at any time (thanks Fane UK). Here is a screenshot you can click on:

I also want to share two new Dissenters mentions—in brilliant Arab company: The National Abu Dhabi and Harper’s Bazaar Arabia.

But I’m leaving you with a tiny outtake from the selfsame Postmuslim, which I wrote in the course of one essay, then tried to fit into another. In vain. It’s about a very minor interlude in Ottoman history that nonetheless seems to say a huge deal.

All my love,

Y

* I can’t—don’t want to—set up two different mailing lists, so if you receive a post in Arabic and you don’t read Arabic, please ignore that particular post and wait for the next one?

MADNESS

Mustafa I, the Mad, the unpopular Ottoman sultan, spent most of his life confined to the Kafes—literally, “the cage”—a section of the harem, the palace’s private quarters, he was never allowed out of lest he try to replace his half-brother Sultan Ahmed, and then Ahmed’s son Osman. Mustafa couldn’t stand women, and when Osman wanted to punish him, apparently, he locked him up with two naked black slave girls. During his first, brief reign Mustafa went around throwing silver and gold coins to street characters, some say also to birds and fish, pulling at his viziers’ beards and sliding their turbans off their heads. On Ahmed’s death, the chief black eunuch objected to Mustafa becoming sultan on the grounds he was mentally unstable. And, only three months into Mustafa I’s first reign, the eunuch engineered a coup. He locked Sultan Mustafa in his room and enthroned his nephew Osman. Barely four years later, though, after the failure of a military campaign led by Osman in person and rumors of him planning to replace the originally Christian-born janissaries with a new Muslim-born corps, the janissaries stormed the palace and fished Mustafa bodily out, carrying him to their mosque to be declared sultan. Osman was captured and paraded in rags, the crowds jeering him on the way to the same mosque. At one point Osman was at the mosque door pleading with the janissaries that they were making a mistake while Mustafa—confused—kept getting up from where he was sitting by the prayer niche to see what the commotion was about, only to be made to sit back down. That night the janissaries took Osman to a fortress and strangled him, the first regicide in Ottoman history. Mustafa reigned for a little over a year, a puppet of his mother Halime Sultan and (for the first month) his brother-in-law Kara Daud Pasha, who had become grand vizier as a result of Osman’s assassination. Both Daud Pasha and the janissary commander were soon executed for that crime, however. And some sixteen months later, under pressure from the court, Halime Sultan agreed to have Mustafa deposed in favor of Osman’s younger brother Murad IV, on condition that his life be spared. Mustafa spent the remaining sixteen years of his life in the Kafes, where he died in obscurity. It is said that, during his second reign, the Mad Sultan never believed his nephew was actually dead. He was frequently seen roaming the palace searching for him, begging him to come back and relieve him of the burden of empire.