Politics, tech and media issues from a Muslim perspective
MediaGuardian.co.uk: "Private family chatter became a sensational story" Roy Greenslade of the Guardian (and formerly of the Sunday Times) reveals how Mazher Mahmood's record of broken confidences seems to stretch back further in his...
Last week Ken Livingstone (mayor of London) announced that he had become convinced of the need for bicycles, and their riders, to be registered and for the bikes to carry number plates in order...
There’s been quite a bit of activity on the issue of the filming of Brick Lane, a film based on Monica Ali’s novel of the same name. Monica Ali belongs to a certain set...
Last weekend Janet Street-Porter wrote for the Independent rubbishing the entire medium of blogs, while Yasmin Alibhai-Brown last monday wrote for the same paper suggesting that bloggers must have no life (you can read...
The BBC is commonly accused of being biased against Israel and of being unwilling to call terrorists what they are, but an interview with a representative of the Muslim Brotherhood on yesterday's Today programme...
Guardian Unlimited: The racists are driven by envy of Asian success Faisal Bodi (of Q-News and fairly regular contributor to the Guardian) on the social breakdowns which affect many of the mainly white estates...
BBC NEWS: Is this the end for 'fake sheikh'? An analysis of the attempt by Mazher Mahmood, a reporter on the Murdoch-owned News of the World who entraps people into dropping themselves in it...
Yesterday I went to the second LugRadio Live event in Wolverhampton, organised by the Wolverhampton Linux User Group who do a fornightly "podcast" in which they discuss the state of the scene and interview...
From Thursday's Times, a report on a meeting by Israelis including former PM Binyamin Netanyahu to "commemorate" the bombing in July 1946 of the King David Hotel, in which 92 people died, unveiling a...
Being at work and too tired to blog in the evening, I missed the whole story of the opposition in Brick Lane to the filming of Monica Ali's novel of the same name. The...
The Guardian today has an interview with French-Algerian "feminist" Fadela Amara. Here is described the second of two incidents which were influential in this woman's career, which took place in October 2002: French women...
The BBC reports that the Government has banned al-Ghurabaa and the "Saved Sect" (along with the Baluchistan Liberation Army and a number of Kurdish groups, including PKK fronts). It has not, however, banned Hizbut-Tahreer,...
Six Apart have now released version 3.3 of Movable Type, complete with an enterprise version for organisations with thousands of users which, among other things, supports the Oracle database as well as the usual...
Martin Bright’s documentary on British Foreign Office dealings with “radical Islam” finally aired on Channel 4’s 30 Minutes slot last night, and did not really contain any surprises for me. Martin Bright’s position is that the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO), in its dealings with the Muslim community, has largely restricted itself to dealing with groups led by the Muslim Brotherhood and Jama’at-e-Islami, to the exclusion of ordinary, moderate “Sufi” Muslims.
Via Islamophobia Watch, a hilarious exchange among Jamie Glazov of Front Page Magazine and Norman Geras and Nick Cohen, to which David Horowitz is later introduced. The "interview" was supposed to be about the...
While listening to the discussion of the dreadful bombings in Bombay yesterday, I could not help noticing the BBC falling over themselves to make sure they called the city by its "real name" of...
It's still open season on niqabis, as the Independent prints four letters in response to Deborah Borr's attack on them in Saturday's edition. The letters can be read here in the left-hand column (not...
Radical Middle Way Event: Shaikh Walead Mohammed, an American graduate of al-Azhar (who has also studied in Damascus) is to give a talk this Tuesday in London and next Sunday in Oxford on the...
A woman called Deborah Orr (or should that be Deborah Borr) wrote an article for today's (Saturday's) Independent attacking Muslim women who cover their faces ([1], [2]), alleging that face coverings are "are physical...
[Karen Armstrong in today’s *Guardian*](http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1815604,00.html) on how extremists in Islam, like those in other religions, are deliberately outside the mainstream of their religion and in fact have contempt for it: >Sayyid Qutb (1906-66), whose...