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...
Category: Community
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...
Celebrity imams and dodgy marriages
In the last week or so, two Muslim celebrities, one a social media celebrity with a spot on a mosque board and the other a well-known Qur’an reciter who could draw crowds and was...
Do they know what representation means at all?
Last Thursday the BBC radio programme Woman’s Hour (10am, Radio 4) interviewed Zara Mohammed, the new secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain and the first woman to be elected to that role, and...
Should White Muslims marry each other?
Yesterday some of the Muslims I follow on Twitter were discussing a blog article published last September by “Robert of Canada”, who runs a website and Facebook page both titled Islam 4 Europeans, which...
Not a religion of platitudes
Earlier this week ‘Ed’ Husain, author of a biographical book called The Islamist, a former member of Hizb-ut-Tahreer (from when the group that became al-Muhajiroun was using the name in the UK) and co-founder...
On obscene generalisations
Last week a video circulated of a Canadian-based Somali imam making some ugly generalisations about African-American people, claiming that most of them were products of one-night stands and did not know who their fathers...
We can’t blame ‘Wahhabis’ for everything
In response to Boris Johnson’s article from 2007 on what he regarded as being ‘wrong’ with the Muslim world, and how Islam itself was to blame for it, the Guardian printed an article yesterday...