Politics, tech and media issues from a Muslim perspective
This event took place at SOAS, part of the University of London, last night (15th February) and was organised by the university’s “Fem Soc”. It brought together some long-standing anti-FGM campaigners along with a...
In this morning’s Times there is an interview with Shamima Begum, one of three girls from east London who ran away from their families to join ISIS, or at least live in ISIS territory...
This April a new low-emission zone, the Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ), will take effect in central London. This will mean that drivers or owners will have to pay a charge to drive a...
Today my social media was abuzz with people, mainly women, laughing uproariously at a picture sourced form the Daily Mail in which an “interiors therapist” with a background in feng shui, named Suzanne Roynon,...
Today, the Mail on Sunday devoted more than a dozen pages to a new ‘exposé’ of Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, in a feature which declares him “unfit for office”, most of it culled...
This morning a British rapper, Blaine “Cadet” Johnson, from south London was killed in a car accident on the way to a show at Keele university in Staffordshire. He was 28. Some people I...
Earlier this week I saw a piece on the BBC news website asking why more young women do not identify with feminism or as feminists. According to a 2018 YouGov poll, 34% of women...
Recently a new organisation has been set up in the USA, the National Council on Severe Autism, based in California and run by a combination of parents and academics, a combination which has attracted...
Yesterday there was a debate at Intelligence Squared in London on whether the West should cut ties with the kingdom of Saudi Arabia because of its use of torture and such crimes as the...
Last night, at the rather late hour of 10:15pm, Channel 4 broadcast an hour-long Dispatches programme, presented by the children’s commissioner Anne Longfield, about concerns that home-schooling is being used as a cover for...
Last week the number of successful prosecutions for female genital mutilation (FGM) in Britain went from zero in more than 30 years since a specific FGM law was passed, to one. A Ugandan woman...
Recently I came across the podcast by In the Days of Noor, presented by sister Noor (right), an Islamic studies teacher from New Jersey (she also has a YouTube channel). In a recent episode...
So, poorer Brexiters voted to be worse off? There’s nothing wrong in that by Gary Younge (the Guardian, Friday) This piece makes the case that working-class Leave voters were voted by ‘values’ rather than...
There’s an image which has been circulated on Facebook which compares two articles about violent crimes in London. One refers to a ‘thug’ named Kersan Euell who kicked a female police officer into the...
So, a few weeks ago the new version of WordPress, the content management system I use to run this site, came out. Its major (if only) new feature was the new block-based editor, developed...
Earlier this week there was a story in the Daily Mail, among other places, about an autistic woman who contracted HIV while living in a care home in north-west London some time between 2006...
There’s a letter in today’s Guardian in response to a debate about the virtues of Pimlico comprehensive school, a concrete-and-glass building designed by the architectural team at the then Greater London Council which was...
The past few weeks I’ve been in contact with the mother of an autistic teenage girl who was admitted (initially informally) to an adolescent mental health unit last July. She had been bullied at...
Today is Holocaust Memorial Day, and according a poll published today which was commissioned by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, 8% of people surveyed (roughly 1 in 20) believe that the Holocaust was exaggerated....
After my last-but-one post about the behaviour of Corbyn supporters on social media, a long-standing friend cut contact with me as I explained in my previous entry, and I had another exchange with the...