11/10/2025
Fugitive Thoughts: Essays on Politics and Society
by Mohammad Ishrak
Published by Swore O
MRP: 750 BDT
Sales Price: 25% discount + Courier
Lets read from the book :
Foreword by Hasan Mahmud
A compilation of essays rarely follows the conventions of a single narrative, nor does it always follow a linear argument. Instead, it feels like conversations spread across time, fragments of thought caught in the act of becoming public. Fugitive Thoughts is no exception. Its pages carry the heat of specific moments in Bangladesh’s political and cultural life – a government crackdown here, a street protest there, a shifting debate over language, religion, or justice. Yet as I read through them, I noticed certain currents running underneath. The writing may have emerged in response to the contingencies of a particular week or month, but together they begin to suggest something like a map: a partial, evolving map of power and resistance in contemporary Bangladesh.
It is tempting to present such a collection as coherent and systematic, to extract a set of tidy lessons from it. But Ishrak resists that temptation, and I am glad that he did. For real life is messy. Power does not operate on a single axis, nor do hierarchies neatly align. What we have here instead is a set of meditations, sometimes sharp, sometimes hesitant, on the way global and local hierarchies interact and reinforce each other. At one moment we are looking outward at global capitalism, donor discourses, and imported notions of secularism or democracy, and the next moment the gaze turns inward, toward the village, the madrasa, the newsroom. The effect is to remind us that Bangladesh is never just a “local” story. It is always already entangled with the world, and the world has its fingers deep in the soil of Bangladesh.
If there is a single thread holding these essays together, it may be the insistence that power sits at the center of almost every public question. The author does not treat words like “justice” or “secularism” as neutral categories. Instead, he asks: who gets to define these terms? In whose interest are these definitions circulated?
Several essays question whether what passes as a neutral appeal to justice often masks a selective process that spares the powerful while disciplining the poor. Such writing invites readers to practice suspicion, to be willing to ask uncomfortable questions even about the slogans we cherish.
One of the book’s underlying arguments – though it is never stated as a slogan – is that Bangladesh needs more public thinking, not less. At a time when public speech is either tightly scripted by political actors or scattered across social media outrage cycles, essays like these create a space for slower, more reflective conversation. They remind us that it is not enough to have debates confined to the university seminar or the conference room. Public intellectual practices – including writing, teaching, and arguing in good faith – are essential if a society is to remain open, self-critical, and capable of course correction.
In this sense, Fugitive Thoughts belongs to a long tradition of intellectuals writing for a wider audience and seeking to democratize and popularize deliberations on ideas. This book does not lecture from above but meets readers where they are, in the middle of unfolding controversies, and invites them to think more deeply.
One of the provocative themes in the book is the problem of “authentic” decoloniality. The term decoloniality has become fashionable in universities and activist spaces, yet here it is treated with a critical eye. Ishrak observes that what counts as decolonial often depends on who is doing the counting. A critique issued from a position of proximity to power – say, a well-placed academic in the Global North – can easily be celebrated as brave and radical, while a similar critique voiced by a grassroots activist might be ignored or even suppressed.
The implication is uncomfortable: decoloniality itself can be captured, curated, and turned into an academic commodity. This insight resonates with broader patterns of intellectual life in the Global South. Knowledge is not free-floating; it is authorized, credentialed, peer-reviewed. To be heard, one often must speak in the right accent, publish in the right journals, use the right theoretical language. Ishrak reminds us that the politics of knowledge production is part of the larger politics of domination. The question then becomes: how do we practice decolonial thought without simply reproducing a new hierarchy of experts?
Another pressing theme is the question of identity politics surrounding Bangladesh’s Muslim majority. The book does not shy away from this difficult terrain. Various essays convey that the anxieties about religious majoritarianism in Bangladesh often mirror anxieties imported from elsewhere, as if the country were always on the brink of turning into a theocratic state. Ishrak does not deny the dangers of religious chauvinism, but he cautions against narratives that treat Muslim identity as a threat in itself.
Instead, the essays point toward a politics of recognition that neither demonizes piety nor capitulates to authoritarian uses of religion. The challenge, as framed here, is to find ways to embrace Bangladesh’s Muslim-majority identity without turning the country into a theocracy. That means engaging in debates over madrasa education, religious scholarship, and public morality in ways that do not simply caricature them as backward. Overcoming this politics, Ishrak suggests, requires intellectual patience and a refusal to accept ready-made binaries of “secular” versus “religious.”
The answer offered here is neither a blueprint nor a manifesto. Instead, Ishrak gestures toward the need for counter-hegemonies – alternative spaces and ways of thinking. He also talks about choices, both personal and political, and ties them to questions of upward social mobility and, through it, emancipation.
One of the most striking messages that the book probably wants to send is never even stated in it. Ishrak writes this book in English, which is not accessible to most Bangladeshis. And those who can access it are often the very people Ishrak holds accountable for Bangladesh’s misfortune. In my reading, Ishrak is inviting his readers, the masses, to enter into the world of English, the language of upward mobility and global connection. It seems that it is his conviction that by fetishizing Bengali, the power elites have created a structural disadvantage for the masses, limiting their access to English and therefore to power.
Another important contribution of this book is its role in bringing academic concepts into public debate. Ideas like “hegemony,” “decoloniality,” or “politics of knowledge/truth” are too often confined to classrooms or locked away in journal articles. Here they are brought to life not as jargon but as tools for thinking through the messiness of current events. When an essay explains how the state frames dissent as “mob violence,” it is not merely describing a news cycle; it is demonstrating how discourse works, how language can do political work.
This is crucial for a country where intellectual life is frequently polarized and depoliticized at the same time. Making theory public is one way of breaking the monopoly of expert knowledge and enabling citizens to see the forces shaping their lives. Ishrak’s rigorous training in social sciences theories with renowned specialists such as Salman Sayyid is always present, but it never overwhelms the reader; it is a background hum that sharpens rather than dulls the arguments.
The tone of these essays is sometimes sharp, sometimes contemplative, occasionally angry, and often deeply personal. They do not pretend to speak from nowhere. Ishrak is very much present as a sociologist, as a migrant, as a Bangladeshi, as someone who straddles multiple worlds. This is one of the book’s greatest strengths. In a media environment saturated with punditry, it is rare to find writing that admits to its own situatedness, that says: this is how it looks from where I stand.
For students and general readers alike, this makes the book an excellent entry point into the study of contemporary Bangladesh. It shows that intellectual work need not be confined to the classroom or the journal article. Essays can be theory in action, testing concepts against the grain of daily events, refusing the neatness of finished arguments.
There is a danger, of course, that collections of essays age poorly. What was urgent in 2021 may feel distant today. But this book resists that fate precisely because it is less about the headlines and more about the structures that produce them. Essays on Shahbag or the July Revolution may have been written in response to particular events, but they capture dynamics that continue to shape the political imagination today – the dance between state and street, between global dictates and local improvisations, between elite discourses and popular responses.
If anything, the book is a reminder that we have not yet found satisfying answers to the questions it raises. How do we reconcile the demands of national liberation with the realities of globalization? How do we speak of secularism in a way that does not erase “religious” publics? How do we fight for justice without reproducing the hierarchies we oppose? These are live questions, and they will remain so for some time.
As you move through these essays, I encourage you not to read them as timeless pronouncements. Read them as provocations, as interventions in a conversation that is still ongoing. Some arguments may appear too harsh, others too forgiving; some may seem unfinished. Good. That is how intellectual life stays alive – by refusing closure, by inviting the reader to push back, to argue, to think again.
I have often found myself in disagreement with Ishrak, and that is why I keep reading him. In an age of algorithmic feeds and curated outrage, we need voices that trouble our certainties. These essays, taken together, do just that. They remind us that politics is not a distant spectacle but something we are all implicated in. They ask us to look closely at the language we use, at the hierarchies we accept, at the comforts we enjoy.
This book is, in that sense, an invitation to question, to think, to argue, to imagine otherwise. Whether you read it as a political primer, as cultural criticism, or simply as a chronicle of turbulent times, I suspect you will come away with the sense that Bangladesh, for all its crises, remains a place where ideas still matter. And that, perhaps, is reason enough to keep thinking, writing, and speaking.
Hasan Mahmud
Assistant Professor in Residence at the Northwestern University in Qatar
Doha, September 2025
