Golden Threads 2025 — A Year of History, Storytelling & Connection

Dec 30

As 2025 comes to a close, I’ve been reflecting on what Golden Threads has become this year: a space for rigorous history, honest conversations, and storytelling that looks behind the headlines.

Here are some highlights from an extraordinary year of learning and dialogue 👇🏽

🎙 Conversations that mattered

I had the privilege of interviewing Sal Naseem, national inclusion expert, former Director for London at the Independent Office for Police Conduct, and author of True North.

Sal spoke powerfully about growing up South Asian in Kilmarnock, experiencing violent racism, and later confronting institutional racism from within the system itself. True North is a moving account of integrity, moral courage, and choosing the right path — even when it comes at a cost.

I also spoke with historian and writer Sam Dalrymple about his book Shattered Lands, which reframes South Asian history through five partitions, not just India–Pakistan. His work reminds us how borders, exile, and displacement continue to shape the present — long after the ink on colonial maps dried.

I interviewed the brilliant and inspiring Mishal Husain about her book, Broken Threads: My Family from Empire to Independence. The book is a powerful memoir that brings the story of Partition to life through the lens of her grandparents’ experiences — emotional, eye-opening, and deeply relevant today.

📚 A personal milestone

2025 was also the year I launched my debut book, Dance Histories: A Journey Across the Muslim Silk Road — surrounded by family, friends, and community.

The book traces Muslim histories through dance and movement, from Andalusia to China, reclaiming stories enveloped in orientalism, colonialism and erasure. It’s about joy, devotion, resistance — and remembering who we’ve always been.

📺 Golden Threads History (YouTube)

This year’s videos tackled some of the most urgent and misunderstood topics of our time, including:

• Islamophobia as faith-based discrimination, and why labelling it as racism means it fall through the cracks

• Challenging Islamophobic stereotypes of Muslim men through dance traditions across the Muslim world

• The erasure of Muslim identity in mainstream narratives — from music to literature to public memory

Why the obsession with Muslim women? Beyond the veil, burqa and harem.

One particularly personal reflection followed the passing of Jimmy Cliff this year, honouring not only his musical legacy but also the often-erased spiritual chapter of his life as a Muslim — and what that silence tells us about whose faith is considered “acceptable” to remember.

✍🏽 Literature, power & representation

I also reflected on:

• Leila Aboulela winning the PEN Pinter Prize — and why her writing made many of us feel there was space for Muslim voices in literature

• The darker imperial legacy of Rudyard Kipling, and what accountability should look like when it comes to public memorials

🧭 History that shapes the present

Golden Threads this year also explored:

• The Central Asian roots of the Taj Mahal and Mughal India

• Chess as a game originating in India and popularised through the Muslim world

• The Bengal Famine as a colonial strategy — and the uncomfortable parallels with modern-day starvation as a weapon

• The colonial backstory of British tea

• The deep, Levantine roots of hummus

Through it all, the thread remained the same: history is important to our present — and we need to reclaim it.