Indigo Jo on August 25th, 2010

Last week, Richard Dawkins delivered a polemic on the British digital TV channel, More 4, against the principle of government support for faith schools. (It is available for viewing at 4 On Demand, although possibly only in the UK.) Faith School Menace set out a number of the most common arguments about why faith schools […]

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Indigo Jo on August 11th, 2010

Just going through the moon sighting reports on this page (it may still be giving virus warnings when you try to load it; it doesn’t affect me as I use Linux) and one negative sighting is very notable: Not Seen: Muhammad Sohail (MCW member) from Iquique reported: I have not seen the moon for Ramadan; […]

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Continue reading about No moon in Iquique, Chile

Indigo Jo on July 8th, 2010

Am I the only long-term Deenporter who is dismayed with the tone the conversation on that site has started taking recently? There are two big problems: one of them is that, any time a discussion strays onto “difficult” or emotive topics, before long the entire discussion thread gets deleted. The other is that the place […]

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Continue reading about DeenPort in decline

The last week or so has seen yet another falling-out in the Muslim blogging community after Muslim Matters carried a guest column by a sister who said she couldn’t cheer for Rima Fakih, the recent winner of the Miss USA beauty contest, who is of Lebanese origin. Exception was taken by some women I know […]

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Continue reading about Miss USA, Muslim role models and the state of our blogging community

Indigo Jo on April 28th, 2010

The last couple of weeks, a debate has been going on on various blogs about polygamy, originally provoked by Achelois who made this post attacking polygamy based on various unpleasant incidents she knows of in one of the Gulf countries she has lived in. I responded with this; this was her response, which provoked a […]

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Indigo Jo on April 22nd, 2010

The last week or so I’ve seen two articles about Muslim men who don’t respect women, one of them on Achelois’ blog, the other by Mariella Frostrup in last Sunday’s Observer, which Fareena Alam linked on Facebook. The first used a couple of ugly incidents involving men in polygamous marriages in a Gulf state and […]

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Continue reading about Polygamy, “evolution” and mistreatment of women

Indigo Jo on April 11th, 2010

Yesterday I got an old post at Muslim Matters, Muslims Need To Calm Down About Boycotts, tweeted to me while I was out in town, and I resolved to write a blog post about the subject because, as I responded, “Muslim boycott mania is often so irrational & oppressive to deal with & even shaikhs […]

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Continue reading about Where conspiracy theories meet prejudice

Indigo Jo on April 8th, 2010

What has Britain come to when it takes a Muslim like me to defend Christianity? | Mail Online This article appeared in today’s Daily Mail, and is meant to be in defence of Shirley Chaplin, a nurse in Devon who took her healthcare trust to court to secure her right to wear her cross while […]

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Continue reading about Taj Hargey defends Christians by attacking Muslims

Indigo Jo on March 29th, 2010

Earlier today I read an opinion piece in the Guardian by Martin Kimani, “an associate fellow at the Conflict, Security and Development Group at King’s College London” currently writing a book about the role of the Catholic church in the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda, contrasting the Pope’s recent apology to the people of Ireland for […]

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Continue reading about Who’s protesting the Pope?

Indigo Jo on March 20th, 2010

A couple of weeks ago I posted an entry about Dr Tahir ul-Qadri’s fatwa condemning suicide bombings. It seems to have provoked the biggest debate of pretty much any recent post on here since I introduced moderation a number of years ago. However, much of it was about matters which I really wasn’t concerned about […]

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Indigo Jo on February 27th, 2010

The London Evening Standard yesterday had a two-page feature on a forthcoming fatwa by the leader of the Minhaj-ul-Quran group, Dr Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri, which unequivocally condemns suicide bombings. The feature is dominated by a picture of an al-Muhajiroun demonstration, but features a long article by Allegra Mostyn-Owen, a former wife of Boris Johnson who is […]

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Continue reading about Qadri’s fatwa breaks no new ground

Indigo Jo on February 16th, 2010

Various newspapers have reported that two sculptures to be erected at both ends of Brick Lane in east London, a narrow street which has become a trendy hang-out place and which is supposedly full of Bengalis, have been dubbed the “hijab gates” and have become the focus of a lot of local opposition. Quoted in […]

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Indigo Jo on February 9th, 2010

Last Thursday BBC Radio 4 broadcast a Report programme in which they attempted to “investigate” the links between British university Islamic societies (or ISocs) with terrorism, on the basis that Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalib, who attempted to blow up a plane near Detroit last Christmas, had been president of the ISoc at University College London. In […]

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Continue reading about Attempt to link Islamic societies to terrorism

Indigo Jo on January 17th, 2010

I didn’t watch the Muslim Driving School programme, which was on BBC2 last Tuesday (at the right time to clash with Defamation, which I reviewed in my last entry), but I finally got round to seeing it just now, and I was pleasantly surprised. It was all shown in the north of England around Manchester, […]

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Continue reading about Muslim women driving, and contrasts on niqab

Indigo Jo on November 16th, 2009

folio » Blog Archive » Chasing wild geese I wanted to fillet Johann Hari’s article in which he interviews three leading members of the Quilliam clique plus Anjem “Andy” Choudhary, but never having known them and always being far from the centre of all things HT — Newham and then SOAS (I was at Coulsdon […]

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Continue reading about Tim Bowes on Maajid Nawaz

Indigo Jo on October 27th, 2009

“But You Have to Tell them” « Ginny’s Thoughts & Things Ginny on one of my pet hates about dealing with (some) born Muslims: those who think any convert can easily “make someone Muslim”, and expect us to start preaching Islam as soon as we convert even though they may never have done any such […]

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Indigo Jo on October 25th, 2009

Recently some of us have been debating on Facebook whether to take part in a forthcoming coutner-demo to an al-Muhajiroun front group demo, which was to take place on the 31st. The event was titled “Say no to Andy’s fanatics!” (Andy being the nickname of Anjem Choudhary of al-Muhajiroun from the time when he wasn’t […]

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Continue reading about Splitters!

Indigo Jo on October 24th, 2009

Hey Mozzie, Over Here…I’ve Got a Conspiracy to Sell You… « Oy, Habibti…. Sis. Sabiwabi on the popularity of conspiracy theories among Muslims, among them the perennial “Shadows” tapes (or series of tapes) and the more recent rumours about how the polio vaccine was part of a conspiracy to stop Muslims, or perhaps African people […]

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Indigo Jo on October 19th, 2009

Arun Kundnani of the Institute of Race Relations has published a pamphet, Spooked: How Not to Prevent Violent Extremism (PDF), on how the government’s “Preventing Violent Extremism” programme has turned into an intelligence gathering exercise, in which educators and youth workers were encouraged to tattle on people regarding so-called ‘extreme’ opinions regardless of whether they […]

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Continue reading about Spooked: pamphlet on failures of ‘Prevent’

Indigo Jo on October 14th, 2009

Last Friday and last Sunday, Shelina Zahra Janmohamed appeared on BBC Radio debating the issue of hijab with two foreign anti-hijab agitators. One of them is part of London’s small but well-connected Iranian exile community, namely Diana Nammi; the other is Marnia Lazreg, who has just published a book entitled Questioning the Veil, through Princeton […]

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Continue reading about Shelina Zahra takes on anti-hijabists