Kasurian in Season: A Letter from the Editors #4
Concluding Kasurian’s Spring 2026 issue.
Kasurian’s Spring 2026 issue comes to a close with The Rise and Fall of New Atheism. We’ve been overwhelmed by the positive response, and as our readership has doubled in recent months, it’s worth restating what Kasurian is and what we’re trying to accomplish.
What is Kasurian?
Kasurian is a general-interest magazine for the 21st century, focused on understanding the fundamental drivers and processes behind events, institutions, and ecosystems that together underpin our reality.
Our tagline is ‘Curiosity and Conviction at the Scale of Civilisation.’ We look at the world with curiosity and conviction at the scale of civilisation: our conviction is that, in an uncertain world, certain truths remain unchanged; our curiosity is in exploring how these truths persist into our present and future.
Our values can and should inform discussions of contemporary and historical affairs, global and local, with curiosity and conviction. But they can only do so once articulated in a familiar manner. Every generation bears the burden of rephrasing age-old truths in the novel concepts, issues, and language of its time. Our objective is to restate these truths in the language of our time.
We hope that Kasurian leaves you conscious of the past, curious about the present, and confident in the future.
What does Kasurian mean?
Kasurian is a remixed Latinisation of the Arabic term for fractal: a geometric pattern that repeats itself at every scale, revealing a blooming, intricate self-similarity. We were inspired by the concept of an infinitely replicating phenomenon that has a single source. Thus, Kasurian: a sensibility attuned to the fundamental unity found in the myriad phenomena that constitute civilisation.
How have we tried to act on this meaning?
Where others might brute-force a grand metanarrative to explain the world, we begin instead with the fractal itself, with the idea that every fragment of civilisation, no matter how small or strange, offers a lesson. From odd curiosities to great founders, founding institutions and events of the past and present, we are building a set of case studies that form a new vocabulary for seeing, naming, and understanding the structures that animate history, society, and civilisation at large.
Why Kasurian?
Our mission is to create an alternative space for thoughtful ideas that grapple with reality in a grounded, generative, and serious way. Perhaps, in doing so, we come to understand the world, and in acting on it, shape it for the better.
Recapping Spring 2026’s Essays
Ibn Khaldun in the 21st Century: On the political economy of knowledge, institutions, and civilisational power.
Riding the Tiger: On modes of production, moral economy, and the industrial imperative.
Towards a Western Muslim Political Philosophy: The modus vivendi of two-faced pragmatism can no longer secure Muslim survival in the West. We must properly theorise religious and political freedom.
The Return of Oral Culture: Walter Ong, Neil Postman, and our new, high-tech oral culture.
How the Academic Left Failed Syria: On critique without action, and a revolution the Academic Left refused to see.
The Twilight of Mammon: On the moral anthropology of the market order.
How Zoning Shaped Islam in North America: The suburban zoning regime lies upstream of religious life and observance.
Oil Barons, Jadid Reformers, and the First Azerbaijan Republic: How the Jadid movement helped build the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic.
The Informal Economy is Pakistan’s Backstop: How Pakistan’s economy endures when its formal institutions fail.
What Are Podcasts For, Anyway?: Between a duet with a nightingale and a sensationalist thumbnail, Sohaira Siddiqui and More Muslim attempt to restore audio to an art form.
The Liberal and Socialist Ummahs: Manarism and Qutbism, the two competing wings of ‘Islamism’, are both descended from the liberal and socialist faiths of Europe.
The Rise and Fall of New Atheism: Where did the New Atheists go? A story on the life and death of one of the first internet-driven cultural movements.
How You Can Contribute to Kasurian
You can make a paid subscription of $10 a month or $110 a year and directly support Kasurian’s mission: to produce consistent, high-quality essays on history, culture, and civilisation. Kasurian is entirely volunteer-driven, and its continued production is supported by our subscribed readers.
Beyond a paid subscription, the most important thing you can do is share Kasurian. Start conversations about our essays with friends, with family, and with your internet mutuals!
What’s Next
We look forward to returning in October with our autumn issue. Until then, you can revisit the essays we have published in previous seasonal issues: Spring 2025, Summer 2025, and Autumn 2025.
We hope you have a restful summer, and we’ll see you again in the next issue for Autumn 2026!
Thank you.
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All art has been hand-drawn for Kasurian by Ahmet Faruk Yilmaz. You can find him on Instagram and Twitter/X.
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