British Muslims should stand up and say it: there is nothing Islamic about child marriage (at the New Statesman and also the Huffington Post)
Mehdi Hasan argues that it is British Muslims’ responsibility to stand up and say that “child marriage” is against Islam because “child, or underage, marriage is very much a part of British society” and it is usually Muslims doing it. The evidence consists of the fact that some spies looking to make a TV programme contacted 56 imams around the UK and that “imams at 18 of those 56 mosques – or one in three – agreed to do so”, in one case despite being told explicitly that the girl did not want to get married. He makes a number of spurious claims about Islamic scholarship and its positions on these issues, which is foolish because both Muslims and hostile non-Muslims know that they have no basis to them, while they reinforce the politics of suspicion, i.e., demanding condemnation for things most Muslims in the UK are not doing.
On Sunday I read, via 
Recently, as I posted here last week, I upgraded my main phone (a Nexus 4) to run CyanogenMod 10.2 which is based on Android 4.3 — they are starting work on the next version (11) which is based on Android 4.4, but this is likely to take months if the time this version took is anything to go by (Android 4.3 was released in late July 2013). As soon as the pre-release (which has proven to be more than stable enough for my purposes) was put out, people on the Google Plus page started asking why the CM team wouldn’t just stop working on this version and start on getting a CyanogenMod version of Android KitKat put out, and demanding to know if their particular device was going to be supported — this despite the repeated requests not to demand support for other devices as there are often reasons why they can’t be supported.
I bought a Nexus 4 a couple of months ago when it was reduced to clear, having previously been using a Galaxy Nexus which ran CyanogenMod 10.1, which was based on Android 4.2. This past week, Google released the new version of Android (4.4 Kitkat) and a new Nexus 5 phone to run it. Other devices are going to get upgraded to Kitkat “soon”, which means weeks. In the meanwhile, CyanogenMod have just released the first “milestone” version of their version of Android 4.3, which I had been waiting for eagerly as I had seriously missed some of its features which are lacking in stock Android. Google have also announced that they’re not making Kitkat available on the Galaxy Nexus, a major disappointment to those of us who bought that phone more recently.
This week Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon), the erstwhile leader of the English Defence League, announced that he was leaving the organisation he helped found to start some kind of new anti-extremism organisation which wasn’t “street-based”. Lennon was 
I wrote this letter last Thursday after seeing a series of very hostile letters in the Guardian following 
The BBC just reported that the trial at the Hague of William Ruto, the Kenyan deputy president, for crimes committed after the 2007 general election, has been suspended so that he can go back and deal with the crisis at the Westgate shopping centre, in which Somali militants have already murdered some 60 people and there are still hostages and others missing. His lawyer, Karim Khan, argued that Ruto had a duty to be present and the BBC correspondent said that nobody in court had any objection. Ruto is accused of plotting to establish militias and encouraging his supporters to “uproot weeds”, i.e. people of other ethnic groups to his.
