Politics, tech and media issues from a Muslim perspective
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
This really quite shocking story appeared in the Guardian today: a ship chartered by a British firm, Trafigura, dumped toxic waste in Abidjan, the capital of Ivory Coast, in 2006, making some 100,000 people...
I’m sure we’ve all heard by now about the Egyptian government’s move to slaughter all of the country’s stock of pigs, kept by the Coptic Christian minority, supposedly in response to the outbreak of...
Gary Younge has a fantastic piece in today’s Guardian which rips apart the government’s attitudes towards representatives of the Muslim community: Somewhere out there is the Muslim that the British government seeks. Like all...
BBC News: Sad goodbye to ‘cosmopolitan’ Cairo The BBC laments how the old nightclubs and belly-dancing joints of Cairo have either closed down or are shadows of their old selves. The problem is that...
William Dalrymple charts Pakistan’s descent into chaos | World news | The Guardian This appeared in the G2 supplement in the Guardian yesterday. Dalrymple has in general been sympathetic to Pakistan in his writings,...
Recently a young female was executed for adultery in Kismayo, Somalia. Initially we were told that she was 23, and had gone to the Shabaab militia, who control that part of the country, to...
Leila Shahid: An urgent call for aid for Nahr el Bared in Lebanon (Comment is free) Leila Shahid (PLO representative to the UN) on the failure of Arab governments (as opposed to organisations) to...
Recently three people I know visited Cairo. One of them, a Muslim of Somali origin who lives in Canada, spent two weeks there on the way to Dubai and Somalia; the other two, both...
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown has a confused ramble in today’s Independent, lamenting the fact that joining the European Union has decreased in popularity since 2002, when the figure was 70% in favour (by 2006, it was...
Last week, a woman and her husband were arrested for having sex on a beach in Dubai; this news made it to the front pages of at least one major British newspaper. The woman...
Having just watched a More 4 documentary of Malalai Joya, the woman who was elected to the Afghani parliament after getting thrown out of the Loya Jirga for standing up to condemn warlords, it...
Before the week begins in earnest, I thought I might offer a round-up of stories which caught my eye the past week: Stuart Jeffries in the Guardian on the stupid, racist gibberish which has...