Renovatio

08/11/2026

We live in an age of overwhelming noise: political rhetoric, algorithmic outrage, words stripped of meaning through endless repetition and intentional misuse.

The Islamic tradition offers something different: a vision of speech as a sacred trust, not merely a tool of communication but a living thing, formed through “daily, devoted iterations of beauty and virtue.”

Hina Khalid's new essay in Renovatio asks what it would mean to truly guard our words, not as respectability, but as a discipline of the soul.

We can choose to use our words to dignify—or denigrate—others.

08/07/2026

It is often treated as self-evident that states have a moral right to exist in the same way it is self-evident that “persons have a right not to be killed.”

Political theorist Andrew March asks us to slow down and examine that premise.

Consider: Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, South Yemen, and East Germany have all ceased to exist. Was a wrong done to those states? March takes it as absurd that their dissolution “entailed a violation of the right to exist of those states per se.”

His conclusion: “States themselves do not have independent rights... States are derivative of the human, democratic, and justice-based rights of the people that they exist to serve.”

The question is never really whether a state has a right to exist, but rather whose interests are secured or at stake.

A clarifying essay in political philosophy.

It is often claimed as a self-evident premise that existing states have a presumptive right to exist. But this is a premise democrats must reject.

08/07/2026

Speech is not just communication. In the Islamic tradition, it is a trust formed slowly, through daily, devoted practice, capable of building shared worlds or destroying them.

Hina Khalid on what it means to treat your words as sacred:

We can choose to use our words to dignify—or denigrate—others.

08/06/2026

Renovatio essays are now in audio.

Professionally recorded. Ready for your commute, your kitchen, your morning walk.

Start listening:

Society & Culture Podcast · Updated Biweekly · A multimedia, multi-faith publication about the ideas that shape the modern world from the first Muslim liberal arts college in the United States, Zaytuna College.

08/04/2026

When author Michael Sugich taught English literature at an elite private school in Cairo, a student once slammed his desk and let out a full-throated animal roar in the middle of class.

His friends said it had happened before. He needed to let off academic stress.

That was 40 years ago. Today, 87% of Gen Z cite education as a significant source of stress and anxiety.

What have we done to our children?

The internet places knowledge at our fingertips, but to assert that we can know things wholly independently is, in one interpretation of the Qur’anic verse, to “transgress our limits.”

07/21/2026

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey has arrived in theaters —the second major film adaptation of Homer's epic in two years years, following The Return. Add two acclaimed new translations, and one thing is clear: the Odyssey is having a moment.

Scott Crider, who has taught Homer for over thirty years, has a theory about why: “One way to recognize a literary classic is that people keep reading it; another is that they keep remaking it.”

And what our era keeps finding in the Odyssey is a story we need right now: a veteran of a forever war who cannot speak about what he did. A wife who waited twenty years and resents it. A son who grew up fatherless and is furious at everyone.

Odysseus, Penelope, Telemachus are a family nearly destroyed by war and return, woven back together through forgiveness.

Before you see the movie, read this:
🔗 renovatio.zaytuna.edu/article/the-stranger-in-ithaca

07/15/2026

A boy looks out a window and sees a dark blue sedan stop in front of his house. Two men in US Air Force uniforms get out.
His father flies missions over Vietnam. His mother has been dreading this exact sight.

The officers walk toward...the house next door.

“I feel guilty relief,” Scott Crider writes. His father came home. His father's close friend did not.

Fifty years later, Crider—who has taught Homer's Odyssey for over thirty years—finally understands why the poem possessed him:

A film adaptation of Homer’s epic offers rare honesty about the shame returning warriors carry with them, which often frays the bonds of family.

07/08/2026

Between 1961 and 1993, the Republic of South Africa existed as a state with a specific territory and citizenry, and of course, ruled by apartheid.

In 1993, it adopted a constitution that fundamentally changed the racial basis of the political order.
Same name. Same territory. Same population.

But was it the same state?

Andrew March argues it wasn't: "Name and territory alone are not sufficient to denote ontological continuity. The fundamental basis of the state's moral and political existence changed with the transition from apartheid to universal citizenship."

In other words, a state can be transformed into another state entirely, without changing its name, territory, or population, "with a fundamental enough change in its constitution."

What makes a state the same state over time? The question is harder—and more consequential—than it looks.

https://renovatio.zaytuna.edu/article/nation-state-democratic-right-exist

07/07/2026

As America celebrates 250 years, Michael Sugich — a child of the 1950s and 60s who "witnessed upward mobility and conspicuous consumption in full swing" — unpacks the myth at the heart of the national story.

He and his generation were inducted into the American meritocracy without knowing it: "We worked hard, burnished our abilities, and were somehow instilled with confidence that we would take our places in the hierarchy."

In 1972, he quit the race entirely. In "a genuine leap of faith, entered Islam," and found himself in Morocco, sitting at a table with taxi drivers, tinsmiths, blind mendicants, and wealthy merchants, all eating together, all, as he puts it, "comfortable in their own skins."

No jockeying for position. No self-conscious tracking of status. Just people oriented toward something other than the hierarchy.

Read it now:
http://renovatio.zaytuna.edu/article/the-myth-of-meritocracy

06/27/2026

On Sapelo Island, Georgia, a woman named Margaret—daughter of an enslaved scholar named Bilali Mohamed—made rice cakes every year on "a big day."

She called them saraka. It meant sadaqa: charity; and that "big day" was Eid Al-Adha.

Her grandchildren, including Katie Brown (pictured below), remembered the cakes, holding onto a tradition with one hand as it slipped away in the other.

https://renovatio.zaytuna.edu/article/the-untold-stories-of-enslaved-african-muslim-women-in-the-americas