I am a PhD researcher in Data Privacy and Cyber Security at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. I also work as a journalist at Ekattor TV, Bangladesh. My work sits at the intersection of technology, politics, and society.

Thoughts

Daily reflections on solitude, language, memory, and the texture of ordinary life.

March 3, 20263 min

Words That Don't Translate

Some feelings exist in other languages as single words and come to us only in paragraphs: if they come at all.

March 29, 20263 min

The Unreliability of Memory

Memory is not a recording: it is a retelling, and like all retellings, it drifts from the original with each repetition.

March 15, 20263 min

Cities at Night

A city at night is a different city. The same streets, the same geometry: but everything means something else.

February 22, 20263 min

The Practice of Attention

Attention, Simone Weil wrote, is the rarest and purest form of generosity. I have been thinking about this for weeks.

April 8, 20262 min

On Reading Slowly

We have forgotten that reading is a form of hospitality: you invite another consciousness into the rooms of your mind.

April 12, 20263 min

On Solitude

There is a particular quality to the silence of early mornings that I have never been able to describe to anyone who hasn't experienced it themselves.

Stories

Short fiction and narratives — characters caught in moments that change them slightly.

Literary Fiction6 min

Inheritance

After her mother died, she found forty three unsent letters in a shoebox under the bed. All of them were addressed to people her mother had never mentioned.

March 22, 2026

Flash Fiction3 min

Still Life with Open Window

The painting had been in the family for three generations and had changed, they all agreed, since they first got it.

January 30, 2026

Short Fiction4 min

The Last Train

The 11:47 to the terminus was never crowded. Just the man who always read the same page, and the woman who slept before the doors closed.

February 14, 2026

Short Fiction5 min

The Cartographer of Forgotten Places

He drew maps of places that no longer existed, and his maps were always wrong: but wrong in exactly the right way.

April 5, 2026

Quotes

Lines borrowed from writers I return to. Sentences that stayed.

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

Simone WeilFirst and Last Notebooks

Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions : trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel.

Virginia WoolfModern Fiction

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

Jorge Luis BorgesPoems of the Night

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

Albert CamusReturn to Tipasa

We are all just walking each other home.

Ram Dass

I am not resigned: I am not afraid. I do not even bother to be brave.

Sylvia PlathThe Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

James BaldwinAs Much Truth As One Can Bear

Writing is the unknown. Before writing, we know nothing of what we will write. In all its fullness.

Marguerite DurasWriting

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

Vladimir NabokovSpeak, Memory

Poetry

Original poems — small pressings of language against feeling.

April 10, 2026

Cartography

I am learning to draw the map

of what I cannot find:

the country that exists

only when I close my eyes,

where the roads go wherever

I believed they would,

and every door I knock on

opens before I touch it.

I have been mapping this place

for years. The borders shift.

The rivers run backward

in the rainy season.

Still, I return. Still,

the light there is the light

of the word almost:

which is the most honest light I know.

Written after reading Borges on libraries.

Recitations

Passages from books I love, set down here to be read slowly.

Darpan Kabir

Recited by Mafi Islam

Not Spring, but Neglect

"It was not spring that first knocked on my door, but neglect."

Rudra Mohammad Shahidullah

Disturbed Coast, February 1979: Recited by Mafi Islam

In the Other Time

"Too much of the world has entered the body and nature: was it really necessary!"

Virginia Woolf

The Waves (1931)

The Waves Opening

"The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it."

Rainer Maria Rilke

Letters to a Young Poet (1929)

Letters to a Young Poet Letter Four

"I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves."

James Baldwin

The Fire Next Time (1963)

The Fire Next Time Opening

"I underwent, during the summer that I became fourteen, a prolonged religious crisis."

Italo Calvino

Invisible Cities (1972)

Invisible Cities Cities and Memory 1

"When a man rides a long time through wild regions he feels the desire for a city."

Research

Academic publications, working papers, and research at the intersection of Data Privacy and Cyber Security.

Conference Papers

2026View →

Network for Education and Research on Peace and Sustainability

Mafi Islam

Theses

2025View →

Political Bias in Generative Artificial Intelligence and its Impact on German Political Polarisation

Mohammad Mafizul Islam

2024DOI →

Information Seeking with ChatGPT : Factors Influencing Media Students Behavioural Intention to Use ChatGPT

Mohammad Mafizul Islam

2021View →

Tailors, Merchants, and Consumers of Misinformation : Unearthing the Patterns of Misinformation in Bangladesh

Mohammad Mafizul Islam

Career

A timeline of roles, institutions, and the journey across journalism, academia, and technology.

Education

2025 - Present

Doctoral Candidate

Goethe University Frankfurt · Frankfurt am Main, Germany

Topic: Data‑Sharing Behaviours with Generative Artificial Intelligence

2022 - 2024

Master of Science : Media, Technology, and Society

Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences · Germany

Thesis: Information Seeking with ChatGPT: Factors Influencing Media Students Behavioural Intention to Use ChatGPT

2019 - 2021

Master of Science : Media and Communication Studies with a Major in Political Communication

University of Gothenburg · Sweden

Thesis: Tailors, Merchants, and Consumers of Misinformation: Unearthing the Patterns of Misinformation in Bangladesh

2012 - 2015

Master of Arts : English Literature

North South University · Bangladesh

Advanced studies in English literature and critical theory.

2008 - 2011

Bachelor of Arts with (Honours) : English Literature

Stamford University Bangladesh · Bangladesh

Foundational studies in English language and literature.

Experience

2014 - Present

News Anchor & Staff Reporter

Ekattor TV · Bangladesh

Reporting on politics, technology, and social issues.

2012 - 2014

Customer Manager-Online Communication

Grameenphone Ltd · Dhaka, Bangladesh