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Al-Tadafuʿ · Issue 3 · October 2026

Lives of Those Who Pushed Back

Damascene-style mosaic: ten coloured eight-pointed stars on a ring around a large central star
Ten lives around a single law. Mosaic in the Damascene manner.
Editorial

Lives, Not Statues

In this issue we read the lives of men and women who pushed back against what they saw as injustice or error. Not to make statues of them, but to understand how pushing back works when one human being carries it.

  1. The walls of Jerusalem and the Dome of the Rock at sunset, with yellow banners and people entering through the gate
    Military

    Saladin: The Push That Did Not Turn Into Revenge

    He recovered Jerusalem eighty-eight years after a massacre the Crusaders had committed there. He could have answered it in kind, and did not.

  2. An elderly scholar in a white turban walking beside a donkey laden with books outside a city gate, with people following him
    Law and politics

    Al-ʿIzz ibn ʿAbd al-Salam: The Scholar Who Sold the Emirs

    He was called “the Sultan of Scholars”. It was not an honorific but a description of a man who stood before sultans more than once and paid for it with prison, dismissal and exile.

  3. An old manuscript page with a drawing of the lungs and heart and the path of blood between them, with an inkwell and pen
    Science

    Ibn al-Nafis: When a Physician Said “No” to Galen

    Galen’s view of the heart was taken for granted for more than a thousand years. Then a physician from Damascus said that dissection did not support it. And his words were forgotten for six centuries.

  4. The snow-capped Djurdjura mountains and a Kabyle village, with a woman on horseback carrying a green banner and men following her
    Resistance

    Lalla Fatma N’Soumer: The Lady of the Djurdjura

    A woman of about twenty led the men of the Kabyle mountains against one of the strongest colonial armies of her day, and her enemies called her “the Joan of Arc of the Djurdjura”.

  5. An open book on a table by candlelight, and a broken iron chain
    Rights

    Frederick Douglass: From Slavery to the Podium

    He escaped slavery twice: once by train, and years earlier by a book he taught himself to read in secret.

  6. A wrecked newspaper office: an overturned press, scattered papers, a Free Speech sign and a broken window
    Journalism

    Ida B. Wells: Numbers Against the Gallows

    When newspapers justified lynching with rumours, a Black journalist answered with a tool no one expected: she gathered the numbers from her opponents’ own newspapers.

  7. A dark laboratory with tubes and a flask glowing blue-green, and a notebook
    Science

    Marie Curie: The Doors That Would Not Open for Her

    Barred from university in her own country because she was a woman, she studied at a secret one. Then she became the first person to win two Nobel Prizes.

  8. Rif fighters in djellabas and turbans with their rifles on a mountain ridge, smoke rising from a fort in the valley
    Military

    ʿAbd al-Karim al-Khattabi: The Rif That Defeated an Empire

    A judge and journalist from Morocco’s Rif mountains led his tribes to a defeat that brought down governments in Madrid; then two European states needed hundreds of thousands of troops to stop him.

  9. An empty boxing ring under a single light, with a pair of red gloves hanging on the corner post
    Conscience

    Muhammad Ali: The Champion Who Refused to Step Forward

    He was at the height of his glory when he refused to take a single step forward. He lost his title and the best years of his boxing, and then won something more lasting.

  10. A student in a yellow coat sitting alone on the pavement outside the parliament building, beside a wooden sign reading “School strike for climate” in Swedish
    Environment

    Greta Thunberg: The Student Who Sat Alone

    At fifteen she sat alone on the pavement outside the Swedish parliament with a sign she had written by hand. A year later millions of young people marched in cities around the world.