As the world agonises over the disintegrating states of the Middle East, it may be heartening to note that Cyprus – an island already more famed for tourism than turbulence – could prove to be the exception to the rule on the region’s westernmost edge. The uneasy union of the Greek Christian majority and the Turkish Muslim minority collapsed in 1974, when a Greek military coup attempted to unite Cyprus with the Greek mainland, provoking a Turkish occupation of the North. Now, as many nations in the area fall apart, there are hopes that the Greek-speaking Republic of Cyprus and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus may, once again, form one undivided union. Indeed, relations between the two entities have markedly improved since the 2004 Annan Plan, the last attempt at resolving the issue. Vehicles and pedestrians are now free to cross the border with minimum checks; the Presidents of both units, Anastasiades and Akıncı, have openly discussed an agreement. And, with distinguished politicians from Jean-Claude Juncker to Philip Hammond expecting reconciliation soon,  most consider reunification to be inevitable. This begs the question: could Cypriot unity be one of the biggest geopolitical stories of 2016?

Such an event would have enormous benefits for the island. In December, The Telegraph suggested that reunification would boost Cypriot GDP by €5bn within five years – a significant increase given that the GDP of the southern and most developed republic was €21.1bn in 2014. Tourists have been largely undeterred by the unusual situation in Cyprus, with 1.2 million of them visiting the northern republic in the past year, but reunification could increase numbers still. Fikri Toros, President of the Turkish Cypriot Chamber of Commerce, predicts that tourist numbers for the whole island will surge from 4.2 million to 10 million in a matter of years. Ultimately, however, it is the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, recognised only by Turkey, which has the most to gain from a united Cyprus. The government of the Greek Republic, itself a member of the EU since 2004, has blocked efforts to integrate the north into the European market. Full admis- sion to the EU would facilitate Turkish Cypriot businesses’ dealings with other member states, bringing wealth into a nation currently feeling the effects of a trade embargo, reducing unemployment and diminishing its dependence on Turkey.

Of course, before such gains can be made several obstacles will have to be surmounted, some more daunting than others. The religious conflict blighting the region is unlikely to be an issue here. Despite the heterogeneous population, Cypriot Muslims are some of the most secular in the region, while the Christians seem equally peaceable in their outlook. The legal transition should also be smooth, President Akıncı of Northern Cyprus having ensured that the breakaway republic has kept up with the legal innovations of the southern Greek Republic and of the EU. Even the presence of 35,000 Turkish troops in the north of the island would cease to be a problem if a settlement were reached. President ErdoÄŸan of Turkey – the man most able to prevent a settlement – has expressed  frustration at having to sponsor the northern state, according to The Guardian, and ultimately supports a reunification which could accelerate Turkey’s own acceptance into the EU.

Having noted all this, it is easy to see why Mehmet Ali Talat, a former leader of Northern Cyprus, might be quoted by Politico as expecting “a solution in March and then a referendum in summer.” Nonetheless, this prediction may be overly hopeful. Firstly, the issue  of property would have to be addressed; the 1974 evacuations of Turkish and Greek Cypriots to the north and south regions of the island respectively meant that many residents had been forced to abandon their property before fleeing. There has been intense debate on how to remedy the situation, with some suggesting that refugees be compensated for their losses, whilst others advocate the more controversial solution of handing back property to the original owners. In all likelihood, debate is set to rage on around this particular point of contention. But perhaps the biggest hindrance to reunification in 2016 is the bureaucratic inertia pervading a potential settlement. Many speeches have been made, with some of the world’s most illustrious statesmen and diplomats declaring themselves optimistic about a speedy resolution. In the past year, however, little concrete progress has been made toward a complete political union. So with 20 UN talks since May 2015 on the issue having ended without a conclusion, one would have to agree with Anastasiades’ verdict that reunification in 2016 may be “too optimistic”.

In short, although we are set to witness the birth of a united Cypriot nation at some point and a hasty resolution is not entirely impossible, we may have to wait until after the year’s end to see it happen. For now, the Middle East, Cyprus included, continues to be simultaneously held back and hampered by division.

In a year beset with tragedy heaped upon tragedy, one would be forgiven their misgivings about what lies ahead in 2016. Increasingly familiar scenes of discord and distress, all too regularly visited upon our communities, have now, unfortunately, become commonplace. 

When terrorist attacks on Paris cease to shock, when Islamophobic rhetoric becomes normalised and when a nation is uprooted, its homes destroyed, its communities shattered and its people dispersed in flight, the fallout is immeasurable. Not least does this impact upon our Muslim friends and neighbours here at home, where tensions have recently been on the rise. According to the Islamic Human Rights Commission, 60 per cent of British Muslims have witnessed incidents of Islamophobia, up from 40 per cent in 2010. Similarly, Tell MAMA reports that the victims of such crimes are disproportionately women – many of whom, it must be said, are specifically targeted because of their traditional Islamic dress. 

Yet these are not the only issues encountered by Muslim women in contemporary Britain. Seven out of every 10 Muslim women are economically inactive; there is a distinct lack of female leadership among Muslim organisations and mosques; and, in some cases, young women find themselves victims of forced marriages and ‘honour-based’ attacks. 

Launching their #MakingAStand campaign in September 2014, Sara Khan, director and co-founder of Inspire, and one of the top 10 influencers on the BBC’s Woman’s Hour 2015 Power List, is determined to make a change by putting women at the forefront of strengthening communities. Established in 2009, Inspire believe that “women have a role to play in public life”. Practising what they preach, Mrs. Khan replied to my email almost instantaneously, eager to explain the origins of her NGO and the aims of their work. 

“For my part, I spent 15 years or so engaging with Muslim communities and mainstream organisations. Then, a few years ago, a couple of us just became really frustrated with what was on offer.

“There were two concerns for us; one of them was that we were seeing more and more young Muslims being drawn into extreme interpretations of Islam. We didn’t think that there were many Muslim organisations doing enough to counter that, especially where having women’s voices in among all of this was concerned. That was one of the reasons why we stepped up – to try and address issues surrounding Islamist extremism. The second issue is actually around gender inequality in Muslim communities because again we were frustrated about having spent so many years working with local initiatives, but we weren’t really seeing much progression around gender equality and tackling discriminatory attitudes that existed within these communities.”

In response to a report conducted by the Runnymede Trust back in 2013, Khan spoke of how “the glass ceiling is incredibly low for Muslim women.” Further studies, such as those carried out by Dr. Khattab of the University of Bristol, only serve to corroborate this. Unemployment is as high as 18 per cent among Muslim women versus nine per cent and four per cent for their Hindu and Christian counterparts respectively. 

“Muslim women are sidelined by almost everyone in society. Within Muslim communities they’re not often encouraged to take up positions of leadership in key institutions or mosques. In fact, a lot of mosques still, even to this day, do not allow the entry of women, do not provide adequate facilities or representation for women. And also, on the flipside, there are problems with the way Muslim women are treated in wider society, too. Muslim women are more likely to be subjected to Islamophobic hate or discriminatory practices, simply because they are so visible.” Khan also went on to note “the hateful activities” of far-right groups such as the EDL, to whom almost half of online Islamophobic abuse is traceable. 

“But at the same time,” cautions Khan, “I’ve seen how some on the political left or certain liberals have turned a blind eye to measures that negatively affect the lives of many women.”

“There was a case two years ago, back in December 2013, with Universities UK where they issued out guidelines suggesting that gender segregation on campuses should be respected if the Islamic society is calling for it. Preachers like Haitham al Haddad, who has spoken at some twenty Isocs in the last two years, has argued that women should withdraw from public life, hoping to disempower them by denying them their economic self-determination and silencing them through their invisibility. Here, the rights of Muslim women are being ignored. Their rights have not been recognised in the same way as other women in this country because it’s almost as if we should assume all Muslim women want to follow a very conservative interpretation of Islam.”

This echoes sentiments expressed in The Guardian by Lucy Ward, who discussed, in light of recent research, how Muslim women “believe [that] they are widely misrepresented in the media” and consequently, “end up as ‘pawns’ in national debates” of issues that are of great concern to them. 

“A lot of Muslim women are not conservative,” explains Khan. “They have no interest in following a very dogmatic interpretation of Islam. And I, like some, believe in the more egalitarian form of the faith. But often I felt that British institutions and liberals don’t seem to recognise that, and they appear to hearken toward the more conservative elements. And again, I believe that, in doing this, you’re sending Muslim women down the river. For me, all I’m really advocating for is for Muslim women to be treated fairly, in keeping with the Equality Act, the Human Rights Act and all of those values which we, as a society, take for granted.” 

Such criticisms come amid mounting unease with the restricted parameters of intercommunal dialogue. Successive governments have tended only to consult male-dominated groups on policy, such as the Muslim Council of Britain, where, the Guardian reports; women’s perspectives are ‘either absent or extremely marginalised.’ 

Khan admits of this dilemma. “Governments are trying to engage with what they see as a representative body but it’s a only one piece of the puzzle.” This is because they are not ‘representative’, not in the truest sense of the term. “It’s completely farcical to think that there’s such a thing as ‘a Muslim community,’” argues Khan. “Nobody can claim the right to speak on the behalf of the 2.7 million Muslims in this country precisely because we are so diverse.” However, due to misinformation and the portrayal of Muslim women in the media, “We paint this very homogenous, monolithic picture of ‘the British Muslim’ as if it applies across the board.” Indeed, all this in spite of the fact that we really ought to know better:

“There was a report by CLG a few years ago highlighting that there were 13 different ethnic make-ups of Muslims in this country. You have Somali Muslims, Sudanese Muslims, white English Muslims, South Asian Muslims – so it’s a richly diverse intersection of society.” 

As a result of this narrow conception, conflicts within ‘the Muslim community’ go largely unnoticed, or unabated. Khan points toward some activist groups that “try so hard to confront these issues, but at the same time promote intolerance toward Shi’a Muslims, or promote hatred against Ahmadiyya Muslims, or perhaps embrace homophobia.” LGBT Muslims need “our solidarity and support,” says Khan, something that respected LGBT activists have not necessarily catered for well in the past. Likewise with Muslims who carry out “counter-extremism work” or “subscribe to secular democracy.” But it takes time for these ideas to become popularised. 

“For example, throughout the 80s and 90s, it took 20 years really, for society to come to terms with the fact that FGM is not a cultural practice that we should respect and appreciate, but an affront to the rights and dignity of women that is actively harmful.” 

Speaking on the trouble of radicalisation, Khan was keen to stress that no one factor or set of circumstances is solely responsible for one’s extremist beliefs.

“There is no single profile for a person who has been radicalised, who has been drawn to extremism. So you will find people who are quite wealthy, who are well-educated, who have been very successful at university, who earn a good wage and so on, that have been attracted to Islamist extremism. People sometimes refer back to the case of the doctor and engineer, Bilal Abdullah and Kafeel Ahmed, who tried to carry out a suicide bombing attack on Glasgow International Airport in 2007, with regard to this fact.

“However, generally speaking, one commonality, if anything is that, one, there is an issue around belonging and identity. Some people suffer from alienation, a feeling that they are misfits or perhaps, aren’t accepted by British society. And secondly, bearing in mind that there is no single profile, what I see with people who have gone off to join ISIS or to fight in Syria is that for some young people religion isn’t the main driving factor, but it’s often used as the final justification for them to go and fight. This may be fuelled by other issues and grievances, mainly to do with ideology or personal hardship.” Nevertheless, for every person that has left Britain to join ISIS, there are a considerable number more Muslims “who are dying because they are standing up and opposing Islamic extremists, particularly in Iraq and Syria.” And sadly that aspect of the situation is not emphasised nearly enough. 

With regard to government policy, Khan expressed some reservations about the implementation of Prevent, but fully agreed with it as a strategy. “There’s a lot of myth and false information on what Prevent actually is about, and that’s not helpful. Can it be improved? Of course, but it is exactly what is needed, in the same way we take preventative measures against knife crime, or drug crime, or gang crime.

Tinged with a touch of sorrow in her voice, Mrs. Khan lamented the near synonymy between Islam and terrorism in 21^st Century parlance. “My religion has been tarnished, and it pains me greatly to say it, but at the same time I see that as a driving factor, and from a spiritual past perspective, I feel spurred on in my duty as a Muslim to reclaim my faith back from the grasp of extremism and terrorists.” 

I suppose one of the perks of being a tutor is getting to discuss ideas that you find interesting with intelligent students. When it all works, it’s great. With students passing through every few years, you end up meeting and getting to know lots of new people – I’ve made some good friends among my past students, and still keep in touch with them.

One of the most time-consuming parts of teaching for me is preparing for the tutorials. I’m not one of those people who can read and retain large swathes of information indefinitely, so I like to give myself a bit of a refresher prior to the tute – this is needed less and less the more you teach a given paper, as if you teach something enough you’ll end up knowing it off by heart. But I think that some students believe that you have it all in your head all the time, like a computer – maybe my colleagues do, but I don’t!

Since matriculating in 2000 (I attended Regent’s Park college), some aspects of Oxford have changed – student politics is quite a bit diff erent now from what it was, as far as I recall, and the popularity of nightclubs goes in phases – but with so many impressive listed buildings I think the landmarks of the city, which are the bits people tend to remember when they’re away, will always make Oxford seem familiar when you come back. The things that really change quickly are the shops – the chains have started moving in to Cowley Road and even the Covered Market, which is a bit of a shame, as we’ve lost some great one-off shops: Bead Games, which was covered with beautiful hand-painted murals, the Excelsior café, one of the last greasy spoons left in Oxford, and Palm’s Delicatessen, which was the only place I could source soft turrón as a treat for my mother.

I’ve also noticed that every time a shop closes down in Oxford, for some reason it either gets replaced by a coffee shop or a barber’s, to the point where I can’t imagine it’s economically sustainable (unless there’s some correlation between caffeine and hair growth that I’m not privy to.)

I feel quite sentimental about Oxford. I come from a rural part of Kent, just a small village with a phone box and a pub, so coming here felt like coming to a bustling metropolis, albeit one with nice green spaces. I remember once I got mugged on Magdalen Bridge by a couple of young gents; one of them took all my money, but the other (who, to be honest, I found much more congenial) insisted on giving me £5 back “for the bus fare home. You know that you’re in a civilised city when muggers off er you cashback.

I’ve lived here long enough now to have had a fair few formative experiences here, to get to know the city, to be a ‘regular’ who has ‘the usual’ at certain places (no, not the Cowley Road ‘private shop’). Even when I was doing my PhD in another city, I used to commute in from Oxford – it just feels like home now.

If Richard Dawkins is knocked from his bicycle and murdered on the Banbury Road, Terry Eagleton insists he will not have been responsible. That is, roughly, the full extent of his kind words for “New Atheism”. We are all familiar by now with its circus-troupe of acolytes, who somehow marry intense pomposity with grave obsequiousness in the face of “Ditchkins”, the twin-headed atheist hydra Eagleton sees embodied in Richard Dawkins’s sneer and in Christopher Hitchens’s warmongering. Against this enemy, Eagleton enters the field of battle in the name of theology and revolution in equal measure.

Eagleton’s Marxism is welcome relief from Ditchkins’s nominally radical brand of politics, which combines impassioned disdain for the ignorant multitude with a striking lack of anger about the crimes of our own ruling powers. That, Eagleton thinks, is not very left-wing at all. Nor is it cutting-edge and provocative; instead, these “New” atheists are only an archaic remnant of the nineteenth-century. They exemplify the long, establishment tradition of “bourgeois rationalism”. That phrase reveals a great deal about Eagleton’s position. Like Dawkins, he is concerned with truth and irritated by stupidity – the biologist “could hardly formulate a theological belief accurately enough to reject it”, he suggests in that spirit – but like Hitchens his primary complaint is political, not abstractly philosophical.

Echoing the nineteenth-century Young Hegelians satirised and skewered by Marx, New Atheists visualise religion as chains of hogwash imprisoning the human spirit. Marx the materialist insisted the real chains were provided by capitalist society, and religion, the “heart of a heartless world”, only made life bearable. We might thus recommend a modicum of sensitivity, that norm scorned as hopelessly conservative by Ditchkins. Eagleton is surely right that for those working gruelling 15-hour days in factories or down mines anything advertised as the “opium of the people” can seem a perfectly sensible purchase.

On this view, depicting religion as the root of the problem is either astoundingly unsympathetic or it is evidence of the poor thinking of historical idealism, which dislocates ideas from the social and political conditions that give rise to them. People who blame religion for sins from patriarchy to paedophilia and tragedies from Ireland to Palestine let the true culprits off the hook. A young Marx once observed that to be radical is, etymologically, to address problems “at their root”. The historical idealism of contemporary atheism is far from that. Eagleton is keen to point out Richard Dawkins’s opposition to Jeremy Corbyn; most atheism, he thinks, fits impeccably into establishment thinking.   

This does not quite get Eagleton to where he needs to be, if he is to rescue theology for the Left. To say that religion is the symptom and not the cause of the problem is a very different thing from lauding it. Indeed, Marx begins his classic critique of the Young Hegelians by implying they have successfully “completed” the criticism of religion, and their offence is only overreach; rightly incensed by religion, they wish unfairly to lay all ills at its door.

We have a century and a half of extra history now, and Eagleton warns against drawing too many general insights from Marx’s suspicions about faith in 1840s Prussia, which sided very firmly with a retrograde state apparatus. He offers an anecdote instead – seeing his wife head to a secular, rationalist church service of the kind popular among nineteenth-century atheists (and recently revived by the pseudo-philosopher Alain de Botton; each of these New Atheists really does have a Hegelian precursor), Marx allegedly grumbled: “you’d be better off reading the Hebrew prophets”.

What are we to garner from that episode? Eagleton wants Marxists and other radical left-wingers to be much less embarrassed about our connections to religion. “Secularised faith!” shout atheist savants at all who seek a starkly better world. Terry Eagleton would have us nod vigorously in response. The metaphysical, he says, disrupts the blandness of everyday secular, rational existence in much the same way that political transformation does. Both ought to be cherished.

For that reason, the secular desire to rid politics of faith should be regarded as highly suspect by all of the discontented. Needless to say, the project invariably fails; it is precisely because human beings are dynamic creatures not inclined to settle for injustice that we cling to belief in something more than this world, and where religion dissipates other, equally transcendent ideas move into the vacuum.

The politically important issue, then, is not whether we should hold anything sacred – we always do – but what we should hold sacred. Over recent years and especially in his book Reason, Faith and Revolution, Eagleton has launched a spirited defence of Christianity as an answer to this question. If divine characteristics serve as exemplars for earthly norms, he suggests that making a god of Jesus is a move with profoundly radical political implications. God, in the Christian view, is a carpenter born in a stable and not a robed monarch or a “big bastard with a stick”. That sets potent precedents, or at least it should do. He contends too that the Gospels encourage a kind of radical self-dispossession reflected in revolutionary praxis, in which faith involves the potential of being killed for the sake of a project that demands loyalty on grounds other than immediate, particularistic self-interest. I make a dissenting claim for Judaism, and we reach something like a compromise. Eagleton admits that Christianity is necessarily Judaic (which doesn’t satisfy me at all), that referring to the Hebrew Bible as the “Old Testament” wrongly implies it has passed its sell-by date (moving in the right direction, definitely), and then that “Marx is very Jewish” (a victory, I think). Marx’s opposition to utopianism is thus rendered as a product of the Jewish theological prohibition on prophesying the future.

None of these are new concerns for Eagleton. At Cambridge in the 1960s he edited the left-wing Catholic journal Slant,and was once a comrade of Christopher Hitchens in the International Socialists, forerunners to the Socialist Workers Party. Later, Hitchens remarked that the Trotskyist tradition in Europe, though never numerically particularly significant, has long been intellectually precocious. Its influence on Eagleton is still clear, not least in his biting condemnation of Stalinism in his 2011 book Why Marx Was Right. He brings to his current arguments the accumulated memory of rich political traditions.

What does such a wizened observer make of student politics today? The ascent of identity politics, he says, is “paradoxical”. Above all, he sees a rich deepening of left-wing politics at the hands of feminism, anti-racist struggles and the politics of sexual liberation. Against the tendency to dismiss these matters as the concerns of the middle-class, he insists that questions of the body, difference and marginality are often central to the challenges faced by the most wretched of the earth. He worries, though, about a “displacement” – not simply of class as an analytical register, it seems, but of social transformation as the constitutive goal of radical politics. It is an anxiety worth considering.               

He refuses the label optimistic, but this ’68-er is refreshing for avoiding the hackneyed clichés of middle-aged disillusion. He proclaims both his realism and capitalism’s dynamism; history, then, did not end with the passing of the Cold War. The welcome election of “our friend” Jeremy Corbyn only adds further evidence to that contention, and he thinks it “excellent” that Oxford students have built a campaign against the legacy of Cecil Rhodes – “let’s not mince our words”, he declares, savouring the unminced vernacular: “Rhodes is a nasty crook”. None of this is intended to obscure the scale of the challenges for the Left today. The international picture is bleak, though Eagleton, like Walter Benjamin before him, believes firmly in miracles.

Closer to home, my question about #RhodesMustFall prompts a sudden assertion of empathy for students at Oxford who feel utterly marginalised by its insertion into rituals of class power that exclude them. He recalls days spent as an undergraduate at Cambridge, mumbling into a beer glass while aristocrats bellowed in clipped tones as if they owned all the world’s decibels. Tittering at the memory of University authorities reacting with horror to the classes on Marxism he ran at Oxford, he counsels in favour of hope. Things have changed, he says. Some students will wonder how much really has.

Guardian journalist Dina Rabinovitch, in whose legacy Pink Week was founded, recorded her experiences fighting breast cancer in her weekly column. In early 2007, these columns were published as a book entitled Take Off Your Party Dress. Throughout the production of the book, Rabinovitch continued to write a blog called Take Off Your Running Shoes. The blog marks the final stages of her experience with breast cancer, as she passed away in October of the same year.

In her first blog post, Rabinovitch explained the reasoning behind the title: “The point now is to raise some money for cancer research […] I think I can raise more. Without, hopefully, having to run a marathon.” Raising money for charity through marathons is certainly an impressive feat, but not necessarily for everyone. The philosophy of Pink Week is continued in Rabinovitch’s legacy, and not everyone needs their running shoes to help.

The Oxford Pink Week team have adopted a series of events that include everyone to help raise money and awareness for three target breast cancer charities. Half of the week’s proceeds will go to Breast Cancer Care, the official Pink Week Charity, with the remaining funds split equally between Coppafeel and Hello Beautiful. The latter two are charities specifically selected by the Oxford Pink Week team for their unique approaches to both fund-raising and support for those who suffer from breast cancer.

Jason Carroll, Principle Investigator at the Carroll Lab Cambridge Research Institute, says, “A number of new, exciting treatments are coming through clinical trials now and these new treatments are having a big impact on survival rates […] our work needs to be done alongside fundraising events, such as Pink Week, to create effective clinical practice.”

The Oxford Pink Week events will range from Monday’s Pink Night at Freud’s to a limited-edition G&D’s ice cream flavour launch, and everything in between. In addition, there will be speakers from the charities being supported, as well as talks from oncologists in the field.

Individual colleges will be participating, with bars offering proceeds from special Pink Week cocktails towards charity, and some college formals will also make donations towards the cause.

Yet the commercial aspects of the week are not without its concerns. Though the official breast cancer campaign colour may have, in an outdated age, originally been associated with those born biologically female, the Oxford Pink Week team have made it clear that pink is not a gendered colour, but rather representative of a vital charitable cause.

The week, and the events which substantiate it, are to raise awareness for people of all genders suffering from breast cancer and to help make an invaluable difference to their lives and the lives of those who support them.

Rabinovitch’s blog left a particularly important legacy to the Oxford Pink Week in emphasising literature, something with which we are all familiar, and more importantly, creative writing. The third charity the Pink Week team have chosen to support, Hello Beautiful, helps guide those fighting breast cancer with the help of creative projects.

The foundation recently ran its first Hello Love Festival: a four-day art and design festival comprising gallery viewings, the launch of Stella McCartney’s double mastectomy bra and an auction of woobs (wooden boobs.)

It is through channels such as these that the charities being supported will help other patients discover the creative release involved in Rabinovitch’s projects (her column, subsequent book, and blog), as well as contributing to new research in the area.

One of Rabinovitch’s final blog posts is entitled ‘Is it possible to make any money out of writing?’ She wouldn’t have been the first writer to ask the question, yet she did manage to locate the answer: “Yes…you are the proof.” Pink Week, both in Oxford and across the UK, will seek to keep proving her right, by encouraging people to take off their running shoes and find new ways to raise funds and awareness for breast cancer charities, thus furthering her legacy

Oxford Pink Week runs from 24th to 40th January 2016