The Qur’an talks of a time when 'the sky breaks, when the stars are scattered, when the seas burst forth.' When the 'sun is rolled up, when the stars are dimmed.' When hell is made to blaze. The IPCC recently warned that ongoing climate breakdown - extreme weather, rising sea levels, food insecurity, mass displacement - may be irreversible by the time of their next report in 2030.
Read MoreAn argument for community centered educational approaches to create more just futures for everyone. Do we, for example, interleave the teaching of Enslavement, Empire and the Industrial Revolution as Naomi Klein does as a “story that begins with people stolen from Africa and land stolen from indigenous peoples…so dizzying profitable that they generated the excess capital…to launch the fossil fuel-led industrial Revolution?” What efforts have we taken to reassure our communities when a succession of crises - Grenfell, Brexit and the liberal train wreck of Trumpish-Boris politics exposes the flagrant disregard for poor and especially black and brown bodies in favour of fasci-nationalism and corporate greed? Not always even marginally well when I recall a school leader rejecting a call for an assembly addressing even the most benign call for peace and love.
In Johnny Pitts' Afroeuropean, we see a new multiracial class in formation. This new Europe - Afroeurope, Muslim Europe, World Europe - shows the possibilities of a continental wide solidarity between the oppressed, the dispossessed, the mustadaefeen of Paris, Warsaw and Berlin.