On Openings: A Message from the Editor-in-Chief

After a five-year hiatus, Muftah Magazine is back with a new mission and vision for the future.

Selecting the right words to inaugurate the return of a small magazine is a peculiar task. Editors often feel the duty, perhaps even the compulsion, to make grand pronouncements about their publication—to articulate a bold vision, and the distinct urgency of realizing it, usually in the service of some neglected ideal. Yet an honest reckoning would suggest that this general script for announcing the entry or return into the world of a publication seems to be motivated by one of two beliefs: either a bloated sense of importance, or the notion that readers are at all interested in overt displays of intellectual self-indulgence. In lieu of such an approach, I will simply offer a few words about where we have been, where we are now, and where we are going in the future.

When Muftah launched in May, 2010, it came with a clear and resolute mission: to produce original content from diverse individuals about global events that matter. Despite our editorial commitment to that mission, the challenges of staying afloat as a small, independent magazine always loomed large. In the endeavor to re-strategize and address those challenges, Muftah decided to take what it believed would be a short break in 2019. With the sudden development of the COVID-19 pandemic, however, that short break turned into an unexpected five-year hiatus. The future looked uncertain, and in 2023, the magazine considered permanently closing its doors after nearly a decade of operation. But, as fortune would have it, Muftah found a new lease on life when its founder and former editor-in-chief, Maryam Jamshidi, decided to revive the magazine under the direction and ownership of new management.

So here we stand today, and we are happy to be back. While things will be a little different this time around, we hope whatever change we bring will ultimately be to the satisfaction of our readers. First, as you may have noticed, our website has been redesigned. And as the weeks, months, and years go on, we will likely continue to modulate our presence, presentation, and publication. Second, Muftah is now a biannual magazine (at least for the moment). Until its hiatus in 2019, Muftah was a region-focused publication, producing daily (or near-daily) content primarily on the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia, and Eastern Europe. Today, we move at a different pace and, accordingly, have slightly updated our mission statement: to probe key issues of the metamodern through diverse perspectives. Readers can expect the magazine to function as a platform for dialogue on the pertinent ideas that influence and impact our original regions of focus, but also the worlds beyond them.

You will have noticed the inclusion of the word “metamodern” in our new mission statement. We selected this term in part to reflect our shift to a more “ideas-based” model, in part to indicate our view of the new world(s) we now enter, and in part to provoke readers to ask: “what does that mean?” We hope you will keep asking questions like this, and we hope, in time, to answer them together. Yet there is another reason we included the word “metamodern” in our updated mission, beyond the three reasons just mentioned. We believe the metamodern is a key term by which to start thinking with greater self-awareness about many of the debates and tensions—political, social, cultural, religious, and so on—that situate the modern and the postmodern in proximity to one another. When this magazine first launched fourteen years ago, the name “Muftah” was chosen because it means “key” in Arabic and, as our founder put it, she “wanted the magazine to open the minds and perspectives” of its readers. The function of the metamodern in our mission is, therefore, continuous with the spirit of the magazine’s founding telos, and its very name.

In line with this amendment to our mission, and in keeping with the tradition of Muftah’s founding purpose and identity, we decided that the first issue of our return should be on the theme of “Openings.” Included in this issue are twelve long-form essays on an eclectic mix of topics related to our central theme. We examine the nuances of the metamodern, and what the future of critique may herald. Discussions extend into how the digital age moderates our relationship with death, and we explore both the possibilities and limitations of digital currencies. Our other essays consider what it means to find an opening as a prisoner, the transformative horizons of Saudi Arabia, and critically, the ongoing genocide in Gaza and its profound implications on the present and future.

In fact, four of the twelve essays in this issue are about Gaza in particular or Palestine more broadly. As the Israeli campaign of mass murder rages on, and as college campuses across North America (and, increasingly, the rest of the world) erupt in calls for the end of genocide, occupation, apartheid, and institutional complicity in these realities, we decided it was important to center Palestine and the Palestinians in our issue. Some readers may recall that, when Muftah first launched in 2010, it did so with a collection that foregrounded Palestine. Fourteen years later, as the aspirations of Palestinian liberation remain unfulfilled, we reopen in the same manner. Our Openings issue is therefore dedicated to the people of Gaza, to the Palestinian people, and to everyone struggling in the name of their freedom.

In closing, we hope you will find our Openings issue to be stimulating and edifying. It represents a glimpse of what we hope the future holds for the magazine. We look forward to publishing our next issue later this year and, until then, we invite our readers to subscribe to our newsletter and support our journey into the future.