Politics, tech and media issues from a Muslim perspective
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...
I was just watching a BBC programme called The Real Hustle, in which the TV people play supposedly real cons on unsuspecting members of the public, and then reunite them with their money or...
MySpace is forced to slash workforce as social network users flock to Facebook | Technology | The Guardian So, why is MySpace losing out? Has anyone been on any MySpace sites lately? The inconsistent...
There is a letter in today’s Guardian in response to the long saga of the intervention by the Prince of Wales in the planning dispute in Chelsea. The letter is from Georgine Thorburn of...
Letters: Time for moderation in the blogosphere | Technology | The Guardian A letter from yesterday’s Guardian in response to the scandal over the unmasking of the “Night Jack” police blogger by the Times...
Tom Meltzer on the phenomenon of fair-weather rage | Life and style | The Guardian This article has an astonishingly charitable attitude towards cyclists who hit pedestrians and then get angry with them, but...
I've been getting a lot of tweets lately about talk of a ban on the so-called burqa in France, the latest chapter in the long saga of the French obsession with what Muslim women...
More video footage has turned up of British police using violence against political activists, this time two women protesting against the proposed Kingsnorth power station. As with some of those who were involved in...
After writing my last entry linking to Yahya Birt's response to the abortive "debate" at Conway Hall, London, between Anjum Choudhary of al-Muhajiroun and Douglas Murray of the so-called Centre for Social Cohesion, my...
Yahya Birt has posted an article on the incident earlier this week at Conway Hall, London, in which the "Centre for Social Cohesion" (run by Douglas Murray; a Civitas offshoot run out of the...
Recently while in London, I’ve seen adverts for the new high-speed commuter trains to go from London to Kent, which run along the new Channel Tunnel link. That line runs out of St Pancras,...
Back in the 1990s, I was a big fan of the Liverpool-based TV soap Brookside (I got into it just as the body-under-the-patio story was hotting up and got out after the storylines got...
Fear and Hatred on the Streets of Luton from the Sunday Times A very long and comprehensive article (you can also see it in four parts here: [1], [2], [3], [4]) on the unrest...
An update about a case I blogged about a few months ago: Fata Lemes, a 33-year-old Muslim woman of Bosnian origin who sued her employer, a Mayfair bar, for sexual discrimination after they made...
Yesterday, there was another of Nick Cohen's rambling pieces in the Observer, drawing a moral equivalence between those who deny that the 9/11 attacks were the work of al-Qa'ida (so-called truthers) and Holocaust deniers....
Yesterday I upgraded my install of WordPress to version 2.8, and although I was apprehensive about upgrading (being an adherent of the school which prefers patched, i.e. bug-fixed, versions to fresh ones), it turned...
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...
Did you change your name when you converted? I did what I suspect most did: adopted a Muslim name to use with my Muslim friends, and kept my old one to use with everyone...
Just as one man's freedom fighter is another's terrorist, one man's cute, fluffy endangered species is another's vermin. Last week Prince Charles called for an eradication drive against the evil grey squirrel, an "invasive"...
Recently, I have been hearing over Twitter that one of my contacts has been thinking of moving one of his websites off WordPress onto Expression Engine, a proprietary content management system. I have never...