Hello, dear listeners and Happy New Year. Happy New Year to you, Eamon.

Happy New Year to you, Thomas.

It's not exactly New Year. I mean, not yet. New Year's Day is 48 hours away. And so,

Amon, instead of ringing in 2026, let's ring out 2025, a year of momentous change across the Middle East and the whole Islamic world.

But then, what year isn't full of momentous change for the miserable East, huh?

Indeed. What isn't?

You know, Amin, looking back at 2025, it feels like the world only paid attention to a very small part of the Islamic world.

The focus was on Gaza, Iran, Yemen, and of course the GCC, and that's understandable.

Those are hugely important places, and those were huge stories.

But when I started digging into everything else that happened, I realized there were all these really important shifts going on elsewhere.

Places most people probably didn't even think about, in Africa, in Central Asia, even somewhere like Thailand.

Indeed.

So I thought, instead of looking back at 2025 by focusing on the usual hotspots,

why don't we take people on a bit of an unconventional tour of the Islamic world

to some places where significant events occurred but never made the headlines?

It's always those events that go below the radar

that would later come back and bat you in the backside. So that's

why it's important to pay attention. And these events are not isolated. They all touch on the

same deeper questions we keep coming back to on this show. Who has power? Who's losing power?

How states hold together? How identity shift, how new alliances form, and old ones

fall apart. Let's get right into it.

So, Amon, the place I want to start this 2025 retrospective with is the Sahill.

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