Asian Review of Books

Not too long ago, in the 2000s and 2010s, many felt that the internet–even one behind the Great Firewall–would bring about a more open China. As President Bill Clinton famously quipped in 2000, Beijing trying to control the internet would be like “trying to nail jello to the wall.”

Things don’t look quite so certain now. China’s internet is now more controlled than it was a decade ago, with platforms, content creators, and tech companies now firmly guided by rules and signals from Beijing.

Yi-Ling Liu charts the story of the Chinese internet in her book The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet (Knopf, 2026), with profiles of creators like Ma Baoli, the founder of one of China’s, and the world’s, largest gay dating apps, or Chinese hip hop pioneer Kafe Hu.

Yi-Ling’s work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, WIRED, and The New York Review of Books. She has been a New America Fellow, a recipient of the Matthew Power Literary Reporting Award, and an Overseas Press Club Foundation Scholar.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Wall Dancers . Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.
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Delhi is haunted—by its ghosts, its ruins, and its unending capacity for rebirth. In the shadow of medieval mosques and Mughal tombs, the past refuses to stay buried. Saints, Sultans, poets, and lovers—all linger in the city’s imagination, their stories shaping how we remember what once was.

In Ghosted, historian and storyteller Eric Chopra journeys through the capital’s most beguiling sites—Jamali-Kamali, Firoz Shah Kotla, Khooni Darwaza, the Mutiny Memorial, and Malcha Mahal—to unearth a Delhi that exists between worlds: a palimpsest where Sufis bless kings, jinn listen to grievances, and begums occupy dilapidated hunting lodges. What begins as a search for Delhi’s haunted monuments becomes a meditation on why we are drawn to the dead and how ghost stories become vessels of collective memory.

Blending archival research with folklore, myth, and reflection, Chopra paints an intimate portrait of a city forever in dialogue with its former selves. Through invasions and rebirths, he reveals that Delhi’s spirit resides not just in its monuments but in the unseen presences that linger among them.

Ghosted is a lyrical, haunting journey through the city’s spectral landscape— an invitation to listen to what its echoes tell us about memory and identity.
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Today, much of the Middle East is “Arab”—an identity that now extends across North Africa and up through the Near East to Syria. Yet how did this region become Arab? How did this identity spread? Was it due to migration, or conquest?

Historian Yossef Rapoport, in his book Becoming Arab: The Formation of Arab Identity in the Medieval Middle East (Princeton UP, 2025), makes a different argument: That the region’s medieval peasants adopted the Arab identity in response to shifting political power, changing land rights, and the spreading Muslim faith.

Professor Yossef Rapoport of Queen Mary University London is a historian of the Islamic, Arabic-speaking Middle East in its Middle Ages, from about 1000 to 1500 CE. Among his publications are books on marriage and divorce in late medieval Cairo and Damascus, on the fourteenth-century religious reformer Ibn Taymiyya, and on medieval Islamic maps.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Becoming Arab. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.
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What does it mean to be a historian? How do you try to explain the past when sources are lacking? And how do we talk about history when it’s so politicized?

In the new book Speaking of History: Conversations about India’s Past and Present (India Allen Lane, 2025), Namit Arora and Romila Thapar discuss some of the challenges facing historians in India today, what it means to be an academic historian, and how ideas around gender, caste and religion may be getting distorted in India’s public history.

Namit joins us on the show today. He is a writer, social critic and the author of three books, including Indians: A Brief History of a Civilization (India Viking: 2021) and The Lottery of Birth. Trained in science and technology, he has spent over three decades educating himself in the humanities, history and other social sciences.

You can find our previous interview with Namit on Indians here!

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.
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In 1924, the Republic of Turkey voted to abolish the Ottoman caliphate, ending a 400-year-long claim by the Ottomans that they were the leaders of the Islamic world. Abdülmecid II—who had been elected to the position by the Republic of Turkey just two years before—decamped for Europe.

What followed was a bold plan by Indian Muslims and the Nizam of Hyderabad, one of the world’s richest men at the time, to potentially revive the caliphate, as told in Imran Mulla’s book The Indian Caliphate, Exiled Ottomans and the Billionaire Prince (Hurst, 2025)

Imran Mulla is a journalist at Middle East Eye in London, before which he studied history at the University of Cambridge.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Indian Caliphate. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.
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