Last week there was a news story about a man who faced the prospect of having a spinal cord injury inflicted on him surgically in Saudi Arabia as an Islamically-prescribed retaliatory penalty. The usual penalty for bodily injuries in Islam, if the victim insists on it, is retaliation in kind whether the injury consists of […]
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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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I’ve never made much secret of the fact that I hate football. I have done since I was forced to play it at school as a child, but I equally dislike the acrimonious rivalries, the overblown salaries and transfer deals, the diva-like behaviour of some of the players, the bad-loserism and the boorish behaviour of […]
Ben Goldacre on a hilarious, but tragic, example of obvious bogus science and how the Iraqi police were taken in, to the tune of £19m ($32m): A British company called ATSC is selling a device which can detect guns, ammunition, bombs, drugs, contraband ivory – and truffles. The ADE651 uses “electrostatic magnetic ion attraction” and […]
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I’m sure many of you have heard the story of the young girl who suffered terrible injuries in a gang rape in Aleppo last month; you can read the story in English here. There has been a Facebook group set up to show solidarity (it’s mostly in Arabic) and a few websites have reported it, […]
In the past couple of weeks I’ve noticed something startling appearing on the Muslim ‘net: conservative Muslims attacking the Pakistani Taliban. These include a series of posts from Abu Eesa ([1], [2] with links to four more) and the news that a great-grandson of Maulana Qasim Nanotwi, a founder of Darul-Uloom Deoband, has condemned the […]
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Once again, the topic of promoting “Sufism” as a means of countering the aggression of “salafi”-inspired jihadist movements, as in Pakistan presently, has come up, thanks to the establishment of a seven-member “Sufi Advisory Council” in Pakistan. The council, according to Ali Eteraz in Foreign Policy, is headed by a former minister in the Zia-ul-Haq […]
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BBC NEWS Magazine: Clive James on feminism and democracy Clive James is arguing that the reason feminists are not loud on the issue of promoting democracy abroad when the alternatives are far worse for women is because this reminds them that there is an intractable difference between the genders after all: Democracy is the best […]
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