Unwritten Lives

It has been one year today since the world’s first openly gay imam, Muhsin Hendricks, was murdered in South Africa on 15 February 2025. To date, there have been no arrests, demonstrating once more the impunity with which hatred and violence against members of the LGBTQI+ community in South Africa are met. To mark the first anniversary of Hendricks’ murder, Unwritten Lives is today reposting Muriithi Kariuki's seminal essay on the routine silence and everyday erasure that underpin homophobic violence. "The destruction of queer lives does not begin with a hammer, a bullet, or a judge’s gavel … It begins with silence. With isolation. With erasure."

Leaving this world in an age of lies and cruelty, my last message is simple: don’t give up on truth. Carlos Hernández de Miguel was a Spanish journalist and writer. He died on 3 February 2026.

Most Muslims in India’s capital city live in areas often called “Muslim ghettos”. Under the right-wing rule of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), as minorities continue to live uncertain lives, more people are pushed into already condensed and crowded neighbourhoods. Here, a former resident of one such “ghetto” takes a deep dive into the history, politics, and ontology of life in these precarious settlements.

It has been 20 years since the UK’s first same-sex civil unions took place on 19 December 2005. Adnan Ali and Eric Stobbaerts were one of the first gay couples in London to form a civil partnership on that historic day. They are both busy men with global lives. Unwritten Lives was glad to catch up with them in London, where the couple spoke with Ishtiyaq Shukri.

Sami al-Saei has defied social stigma to speak out about what a report calls a ‘grave pattern’ of sexual violence in Israeli prisons

While South Africa’s historic categorisation of Gender-Based Violence and Femicide as a national disaster has intensified the spotlight on the country’s appalling statistics of violence against women and girls, the perpetrators remain mostly unmentioned. A society that cannot speak about its male perpetrators can never understand its female victims and survivors.

It has been five years since renowned Delhi University linguistics professor Hany Babu was arrested on 28 July, 2020. He is being held without charge in India’s notorious Taloja Central Jail on the outskirts of Mumbai. Here his former student takes a roll call to remember his name, because “naming is work we do for one another.”

For a snapshot of the authoritarian era to which today’s launch of Unwritten Lives is a response, we don’t have to rewind too far, just to the recent past, to moments that still reside fresh in recent memory.

I, a mother of Gaza, amidst the trill of missiles with cries submerged, In the fumes of bombs I have now turned blind

Eric Stobbaerts was a senior humanitarian on the ground in the former Yugoslavia from late 1993 to early 1995. Three decades after the Srebrenica genocide in which more than 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys were killed by Bosnian Serb forces under Ratko Mladic, he remembers the painful failures on the part of the international community that led to the massacre, and the lessons that should have been learned.