Fugitive Thoughts by Mohammad Ishrak is a searing collection of thirty-eight essays written between 2019 and 2025 that interrogate the crises of politics, identity, and meaning in contemporary Bangladesh. Ranging from reflections on secularism, Islamism, and postcolonial modernity to meditations on love, masculinity, and truth, the book maps how power shapes not only institutions but also emotions, desires, and knowledge itself. Ishrak writes as an intellectual outsider—at times a fugitive in literal terms—who resists both the dogmas of militant secularism and the reactionary certainties of political Islam. His essays weave global theory with local experience, placing Bangladesh in conversation with thinkers from Plato to Talal Asad, while refusing the binaries that have long dominated its public discourse. What emerges is a deeply personal yet rigorously analytical portrait of a society struggling to reconcile its Islamic heritage, colonial scars, and democratic aspirations. Ishrak exposes the hypocrisies of liberalism, the complicities of elites, and the hollowing of education, masculinity, and love under neoliberal modernity, all while insisting on justice, memory, and dignity for the marginalized. Fugitive Thoughts is not a neutral chronicle but a manifesto of intellectual defiance—an attempt to reclaim the right to think freely in a time when doing so invites erasure, exile, or death. It offers readers not comfort, but clarity: a path through the ruins of old certainties toward new possibilities of ethical life.
