Two weeks, two reports
A week ago, a report on a maternity care scandal in the Nottingham area was published. The Ockenden Maternity Review had been set up in May 2022 “following significant concerns raised regarding the quality...
Category: Community
The feminists who don’t listen to women
In the last couple of weeks, two articles by white feminists have been published in the British right-wing media attacking the niqab, and peddling some very familiar generalisations about women who wear it. The...
We don’t all know each other
The grooming gangs issue has been all over social media the past few weeks: three weeks ago, a group called Open Justice UK published the transcripts of the 2019 Bradford trial in which nine...
Sara Sharif review and its implications for race relations
Today an independent review into the murder of a ten-year-old girl of mixed Pakistani and Polish parentage, Sara Sharif, was published. The review (PDF) by the Surrey Safeguarding Children Partnership (SCP), identified five particular...
When is a British value not a British value?
When it’s Muslims doing it. This past week there’s been a big brouhaha in the British media about a mosque in east London which put on a fun-run in a local park as a...
Grooming gangs, rape and racism
Last week Louise Casey’s report (PDF) on the long-running issue of grooming gangs, a system of criminality in which young girls are ‘groomed’ through younger boyfriends, plied with alcohol and free food and then...
New twist on moonsighting fitnah
The issue of when to start Ramadan and when to have Eid has been a bone of contention as long as I’ve been Muslim and probably for much longer. I was made aware of...
The Drumlanrig jolly
Yesterday we heard that various minor British Muslim leaders had presented an ‘accord’ to the king that they had agreed with the leaders of British Judaism, including the Chief Rabbi, a major rabbi from...
Muslim men behaving un-dadly
In the UK there is a charity called “Men Behaving Dadly” which supports fathers and other male carers to improve their relationships with their children through play and other activities (the name is also...
Women need the mosque
The issue of women’s access to the mosque and the inadequate space for women in many mosques in the UK has been a thorny issue in the community for decades, way back before blogs...
Tories show their repressive side with ban on HT
Yesterday (Monday), out of nowhere as far as I could tell, the Tories announced that they were going to proscribe Hizb ut-Tahrir, a political party founded in Palestine whose name means Liberation Party, as...
On the Daniel Jou “virginity test” controversy
The other day I watched a YouTube video by a sister called Aisha Murray, who wears the niqaab, lives in Scotland and has made videos for BBC social media as well as her own...
Khalid Mahmood should lose the Labour whip
A clip has been circulating on Twitter of the Labour MP Khalid Mahmood addressing a webinar on the recent Prevent programme review by the Tory-aligned think tank Policy Exchange, a notorious source of anti-Muslim...
Age like wine, age like milk?
This morning I was alerted to a video on Twitter by an Internet personality who calls himself “The Sunnah Guy”, a young man with no apparent qualifications dishing out advice to whomever might be...
It’s not just about cooking
I saw this post on Facebook this morning from someone who calls himself “Shaikh JJ”, a Canadian living in Istanbul. I should add at this point that although we know what he looks like,...
Welcome to Islam. Now prepare for schnookdom.
There’s a scene at the end of the mob film Goodfellas, the last few seconds after Henry Hill, the lead character who has had a ringside seat on the edge of the New York...
Muslims, parents and nursing homes
The last couple of days there has been a big row on “Muslim Twitter” about people putting their elderly parents in nursing homes and whether that makes them bad Muslims or ungrateful children or...
Marxism versus Zionism: is it even a competition?
Recently there was a debate among Muslims on Twitter whether Marxism was a bigger danger to Muslims, either in terms of their life and liberty or their faith, than Zionism. Abdullah al-Andalusi firmly said...
Rushdie, Khomeini and Muslims here and there
I was a child, and a long way from becoming Muslim, when the Rushdie affair happened. My mother was in college going through teacher training, and one of her college friends had a sister...
Loyalty is part of Islam
Last year, it was discovered that two men had been spying on major Islamic organisations in the USA and taking money from a hate group run by someone known since the 90s for spreading...