Rekindling from the Forgotten
A Collection of Essays by Minhaaj Rehman
A Book That Refuses to Forget
Every age has its chroniclers—those who, in defiance of power, insist on remembering what the world would rather bury. For the 20th century, Edward Said’s Orientalism unmasked the literary masquerade of empire; Ali Shariati’s sermons shook the scaffolding of religious complacency in Iran; Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth became a bible of resistance for colonized peoples.
Rekindling from the Forgotten stands in this lineage. Written with the solemn cadence of elegy and the sharpness of polemic, Minhaaj Rehman gathers fragments of memory—political betrayals, historical amnesias, spiritual distortions—and welds them into essays that burn, unsettle, and illumine.
Where Said dismantled the West’s gaze on the East, Rehman turns the mirror inward and outward simultaneously: Pakistan’s debt economy is unmasked as modern serfdom; China’s “One Belt, One Road” becomes less a handshake than a noose; Kashmir is mourned not with statistics but with elegiac fury.
This is not an easy book. But then, neither was The Fire Next Time, nor Prison Notebooks, nor The Muqaddimah in its own time. Such books resist comfort because they seek transformation.
The Tone of an Age in Upheaval
What you will find here is not reportage—though the facts are sharp enough to wound. It is not philosophy in the academic sense—though the arguments are laced with Marx, Said, Piketty, and beyond. Instead, it is something rarer: a hybrid literature that weaves sermon, op-ed, and elegy into a single cloth.
In “The Macabre Wealth,” Caliph Omar’s tears stand as a mirror to Pakistan’s oligarchs draped in haute couture. In “The Lutheran Nightmare,” the dream of Martin Luther King collapses under the weight of Black Lives Matter funerals, while Nat Turner and James Baldwin are resurrected as interlocutors. In “The Kosher Holocaust,” Auschwitz becomes not an isolated horror but a warning siren—juxtaposed with Gaza, as a reminder that victimhood can metastasize into tyranny.
The prose oscillates between the prophetic and the polemical—sometimes mournful as Baldwin, sometimes fierce as Shariati, sometimes satirical as Orwell.
A Reader’s Journey
The book unfolds in movements, not chapters:
Politics and Empire: From Pakistan’s debt traps to Brexit’s epitaph, every essay dissects power’s amnesia.
Race and Memory: America’s unhealed wounds, Europe’s existential rot, and Islam’s misrepresented heritage.
Faith and Civilization: The mystics reclaimed, Sufism undistorted, Prophetic medicine re-situated against modern nihilism.
Each essay is both a lens and a lament—an invitation to see what was hidden, and a refusal to let silence become complicity.
Why This Book Matters Now
In an era of soundbites and selective histories, Rekindling from the Forgotten restores weight to words. Like Said’s Orientalism, it names the distortions of empire; like Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, it electrifies the moral imagination; like Shariati’s Martyrdom, it turns theology into rebellion.
Yet it is distinctly of our moment: the post-9/11 Muslim world, the financialization of everything, the death of nuance in the algorithmic age. Rehman does not merely comment on these forces—he indicts them, mourns their victims, and wrests hope from forgotten wells.
A Taste of the Fire
“Sharjeel Memon returned home after two years of escapade from the law, coronated with a golden crown while his people starved in Thar. Such are our Caliphs now, born not of the desert’s asceticism but of the banquet’s gluttony.”
(from “The Macabre Wealth”)
This is the register you will encounter: biblical in cadence, journalistic in fact, satirical in sting.
For Whom is This Book?
For the scholar who reads Said, Shariati, or Fanon not as history but as prophecy.
For the reader weary of spin, who wants writing that is unvarnished, even if it wounds.
For the seeker who believes that remembering is an act of resistance.
Step Into the Reckoning
Rekindling from the Forgotten is not meant to entertain. It is meant to awaken. It asks you to sit with discomfort, to wrestle with forgotten truths, and perhaps to find your own embers glowing in the dark.