Reflections on 2025; Visions for 2026

Adnan Husain: salam hello peace to you all uh this is adnan hussein with a short video and audio commentary piece As some of you might know, if you've already seen it or seen my announcement earlier, I was invited by a wonderful writer, musician, music critic, Sacha Frere Jones, to contribute a short reflection in his writing about 2025 year-end newsletter, which he does annually, as well as, of course, all his other writing. So I did contribute a piece and it's published. It's out now. You can find it at n.sashafrearjones.com. And it's 30,000 words of enormously interesting and varied words. reflections, observations, insights about 2025 from a very interesting, uh, collection of people that included, uh, many friends, comrades, and colleagues who have been guests on this show or guerrilla history, uh, including people like Nora Barrows, Friedman, uh, Kala Walsh, Laleh Khalili, uh, Abdul Jawad Omar, Louis Alday, uh, and Lara she he so it really is a wonderful set of pieces but it also had wonderful writing and pieces and reflections and insights from people I don't know who I'd love to get to know better who through their writing really gave me deep insights into their experience and observation of this past year, 2025. What I'd like to do, in addition to promoting that newsletter and encouraging you all to subscribe to it and to follow Sasha Jones, Frere Jones's work and writing, is actually do a kind of video and audio version or reading of my piece, my contribution. And this will be very different, even though there will be some parts that, of course, I'm reading, but other parts I might paraphrase, and I definitely will be elaborating. So this is a different iteration, in some sense, of the sentiments and thoughts that... I submitted as my contribution. And I really do think that it had a kind of integrity as a written piece in its kind of language and structure. So I really do encourage you to go read it. But in addition, also, there were things that maybe I could elaborate on that I thought would be useful and also to put it in a different format because many of you enjoy listening and watching. So I thought I'd just go ahead and start by reading and see where this takes me. And hopefully you find these reflections on 2025 and at least inchoate visions for 2026 interesting and worth listening to and watching. Every day begins with a scroll through the carnage and suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza, who continue to post shamelessly the shameful atrocities against them. And I'll just say that I use the word shamelessly very intentionally not to indict the Palestinians in any way, but to say that they've moved beyond a position of being shameful or ashamed at all of the indignities that they are suffering because in point of fact, they have shown such utmost dignity. That it's really us who are ashamed by witnessing and doing nothing, at least nothing effective. Many of us have done many things, but have done nothing really to prevent the continuing genocide against them. So I said... who continue to post shamelessly the shameful atrocities against them. Frankly, there has never been a people of such dignity confronting such indignities. Some of my days in 2025 have not revolved emotionally around the present awareness of such genocidal horror, but they have been very few. And I think... Everyone who's listening to this likely has experienced something a little bit like that. It's an ever-present and constant awareness, even when it recedes from the forefront of our active consciousness. There's just this abiding sense of dread for the horror of this genocide continuing, being perpetuated. And so there have been very few moments where it hasn't been part of me and part of my consciousness in a very visceral and direct way. Since the ceasefire and the return of the hostages, quote unquote, the chorus on social media has shrunk to fewer quieter pleas, despite the ongoing killing and continuing obstruction of the necessities for life. Instead, the Gazans drown quietly in winter rain, flooding their encampments beside the ruins and rubble of their homes. This is the reality of how 2025 began and ended in my imagination. I think we can all feel that the genocide has been not only ever present, but really bookended the beginning and end of this last year. However, I'm supposed to feel good about achieving a political victory for Palestine. After multiple attempts to bring our pension divestment motion over three months this fall term, we're derailed by procedural games and obstructive tactics deployed by a few inveterate ultra Zionists and acceded to by the weak liberals running the union. Finally, late in December, my university faculty union held a vote. it went in favor by a substantial margin to demand our pension shared with several other universities and their employees divest from military industries and violators of international law citing specific examples of israel's illegal occupation of palestine Hooray! A Sisyphean labor for what felt a Pyrrhic victory, nearly a year of organizing for a valuable but narrowly framed symbolic vote, when a full BDS endorsement might also have been possible. Even so, two years of genocide and we should celebrate such a tepid collective response from only the 21st University Faculty Association in Canada to take such a vote? It seemed to sum up to me the futility of politics in the West, or at least North American academic institutions. Now, what I want to say here, in addition to what I wrote by way of context, is that, of course, it's something to celebrate, to be glad, to achieve some kind of institutional acknowledgement of the genocide and expression collectively and politically for divestment, to do something or to encourage these institutions, in this case our pension fund, to do something concrete like divest from companies doing business with Israel or supporting the occupation or financial instruments like Israel bonds that directly finance Israel's ongoing illegal military occupation of Palestine and genocide in Gaza. But what I was feeling and expressing is something that perhaps many of us feel, who've gone to so many demonstrations, who've written to politicians, to city councils, to our... You know, faculty associations to our workers unions and the like, trying to do everything possible in liberal democratic terms in civic society and associations to express our values. political will for change, to end complicity, to impose sanctions, embargo on weapons. You know, all of these things that we've been campaigning for for two years in the time of the kind of onslaught of this phase of the genocide, but for many of us for years, for decades. And while there have been victories like the one that we achieved When our faculty union voted in favor of pension divestment, they feel in some ways hollow in the face of the ongoing genocide. But more than that, compared to what seems possible, like it should be possible to do much, much more. And one of the disappointments I had was that that this first step for all the organizing that we did to achieve it seems like we might have expanded possibilities or been a little more ambitious once we had done all of this organizing to make a fuller or more complete and politically powerful statement like a boycott like the academic and cultural boycott So, but in any case, these are the endeavors that we're involved in. You can only make change in the context and institutions that you're a part of. But it does seem incredibly insufficient. And there was such a feeling of a kind of gap between the work involved in the struggle and the concrete achievements and outcomes, politically speaking. And that isn't just a matter of these small civic associations. It seems like that's something we could say about politics and the way it's framed and conducted more broadly in the West. So I continue. Perhaps I would have felt more connected to the collective political achievement had I been at home and able to join my comrades in celebration afterward. They would prefer not to be called comrades, I think. I'm projecting a bit. And I wouldn't have preferred to be in a bar, which is where they went to after the successful vote. So perhaps it was just as well. Instead, I was battling spotty internet to attend the online union meeting late at night, eight and a half hours ahead, alone in a hotel room in Tehran. That made for quite an incongruous feeling of the contrasts, because earlier that day I had visited the former U.S. embassy, now renamed the Jassus Khane or Den of Spies and repurposed as a museum of or on American espionage. Perhaps it was only natural to feel just a muted satisfaction at the successful divestment vote while absorbing and experiencing or at least witnessing life in Iran, at least in its capital city of Tehran. the only state in the world that has openly aided palestinian resistance while suffering maximum pressure and snapback sanctions after the 12-day war israel launched six months earlier that claimed over a thousand dead iranian civilians and i should point out and note of course that there are other groups that have acted in solidarity like resistance groups in iraq Southern Lebanon, of course, and of course, in Yemen. But in all cases, they are not nation state actors, although you could say Ansarullah is basically the government of Yemen. But there is something important to acknowledge and recognize about Iran being fairly singular as an established nation state, despite its decades of sanctions, maintaining some solidarity and support for resistance in Palestine. My friend's aunt showed us her back bedroom window that was shattered from the bombardment of a major tower block over a kilometer away in Van Nack District. A skyscraper still visibly disfigured. And I have photos, maybe I'll post some of them, that show... the damage that was done on this very tall building that had such powerful explosions that it shattered, as I said, a back bedroom window in my friend's aunt's house. And parenthetically, Tehran was very different from what I expected or was led to expect and nothing like portrayed, certainly in the Western media. And that's a whole other set of reflections, I hope, in the near future to be able to do. an episode, perhaps a Friday office hours live stream with my friend, Professor David Yaghoubian, who's been a guest on the Adnan Hussain show on two previous occasions, but who I spent time with and who helped facilitate my visit to Iran. Perhaps we'll have a discussion and dialogue today. about it. It's very timely because, of course, Iran has been recently in the news, although Venezuela and the U.S. criminal actions to kidnap President Maduro have, of course, dominated our attention in the anti-imperialist left. And the news is That was also the main subject of the recent Revolutionary Guerrilla Menace live stream that I also encourage you to go check out from a few days ago. So continuing on, 2025, I realized, has been my year of escaping the West and dreaming the East. I spent several weeks in the spring in places like Granada's Albicin, which felt like a liberated enclave from Europe. That's the old city of Granada in this city in Spain. uh cairo which i have to admit i had never really liked a great deal um and it was as a result only my third visit but i really had a very positive experience um This time was my first visit in 20 years. And whereas in the past, I felt it was an overwhelming city with such incredible, you know, wealth inequality and social inequality that it was almost intolerable being a foreigner in this sort of context. And of course, none of that has changed. But as we'll get to, something else has perhaps changed. And so I did have, since I had a concrete purpose and visit, it was a very interesting conference held at 6th October University. And I believe I talked about it in a previous video about my travels to Istanbul and Cairo. I experienced Cairo in a very different way this time. And then lastly, Tehran for the first time ever. As I've mentioned, that was my first visit and really there's a lot that I would like to reflect on about that. But also Istanbul, where I have traveled to on three separate occasions in 2025 for lectures, conferences, summer workshops, summer school. And although I've studied and taught the history of the Middle East and Islamic world for over 40 years, over the course of the last couple of decades in particular, I hadn't actually spent much time there. a family vacation trip to Morocco, a period in Amman, a couple of brief touristic visits to Istanbul, and some other scattered trips and visits for conferences. But my most memorable visit was in 2006, over the last 20 years, to the West Bank for a couple of transformative weeks where I participated in a kind of summer program institute established by my dear friend, colleague, and comrade, Dr. Rabab Abdul Hadi, that took us not only from kind of base camp in Ramallah, where most of the initial meetings took place, but also to Nablus, to Al-Khalil, to Beit Laham, Bethlehem, and also Jerusalem. After years of language learning and research, there hadn't been as many occasions for really living there or spending extended periods of time. My favorite country, Syria, where I had spent half a blissful year studying Arabic in Damascus and doing research during the early mid-1990s, had, of course, been destroyed by war over the decade of the 2010s. The places I most wanted to visit since university days, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Yemen remained dangerous. It was very difficult to travel there. Even so, I still couldn't live now in the Middle East with my family obligations at home and work obligations at the university. It's just not so easy to spend time. in the Middle East and Islamic world. But I had suddenly seized almost every opportunity in 2025 to spend time in the region. Why? I think the genocide has changed everything emotionally. It's excruciating to be in social spaces where it's abnormal to acknowledge the horror of the genocide. In Turkey, as in Canada or the US, most people can do little, it seems, just as I was reflecting earlier about the failures of our attempts to stop the genocide or at least to slow it or to end complicity in it. It seems to change their government's complicity in Israeli crimes against humanity. But in Istanbul, you simply feel that it is normal to reject genocide as repugnant to human decency. Somehow this is still contested, awkward and embarrassing to highlight in almost every space in my normal existence in Canada. outside of the very small and narrow organizing circles, for example, it just simply isn't possible to be naturally and normally condemning of the genocide as a given. And that has just become intolerable to me. It now strikes me as wholly unsustainable to live such a contradiction daily. I'm sure many of you feel the same way. This isn't a unique sentiment, I don't think, but it is something that I felt so palpably and powerfully over 2025. And having the chance to reflect and think about it for this piece made me realize that perhaps that's what has impelled so much journeying and traveling to the East. is looking for ways to escape, in some sense, the oppressiveness of living in a place where genocide is accepted and normal and contesting it is what's considered abnormal or awkward. Walking the streets of Cairo, Istanbul, or Tehran provided an unbelievable relief and genuine sense of freedom when I felt through so much of 2025 that I could barely breathe. But dreaming a different life is simply impractical. Dreams meet the realities that no place... can simply resolve all the problems and contradictions. And we know that all of those places that I mentioned have them, especially Cairo, Istanbul, but also, of course, Tehran. And simply being there is no panacea, no solution, doesn't resolve anything. It was just brief moments and opportunities to at least escape a very oppressive reality and feel the intimate, emotional connection and solidarity as a given. Imagining a different world is my only answer. so what i would say is we can only work towards changing the larger global conditions the individualistic attempt to escape isn't really a solution. Of course, it doesn't seem like a solution to change the world, but that is the only solution. It's one we have to work and strive for. The choice seems either to slip into unconsciousness and amnesia or to continue the laborious, frustrating, and barely rewarding struggle to make change in these sclerotic, late capitalist consumer societies that claim to be democracies in the hope that 2026 might be different or at least a substantial step in the direction of dignifying humanity. Well, I've gone on long enough, I think, in this video and in the audio version of reading and elaborating on it. So I don't want to say too much other than that that's my hope for 2026, is that I can rededicate and find meaning in collective struggle and working towards a better world. That's the only answer that we have, and we have to do it together. So, friends, comrades, colleagues, I wish you the best for 2026. I wish the best for all of us. So, of course, I hope for health and happiness. Prosperity for all of you and myself, but also for a collective change that we have to work for in this year coming up, 2026. So until we talk again, solidarity. Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim.