In early July 2020, Turkey’s supreme court issued a verdict to revert the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul into a mosque. The 1,500-year-old structure was built during the Byzantine Empire in the Greek Orthodox tradition, and served as a church until the rise of the Ottoman Empire, when it was first converted into a mosque. With […]
Ikram Basra
Posted inCommunity/News
The ‘long and terrifying’ journey of two friends fleeing India for Iowa City
Shubham Singh is lean, 5-foot-5 and just 22 years old. Once a civil engineering student at a technology institute in India, now Singh works in the kitchen at Masala, an Indian restaurant here in Iowa City. He is waiting for his request for political asylum to be processed by U.S. immigration. We drink tea on his afternoon break, and he tells me the
