Politics, tech and media issues from a Muslim perspective
Last Friday night I went to a City Circle event in London entitled Independent Voices: Challenging the Myth of Monolithic Communities, addressed by two founders of dissenting ethnic organisations, namely Brian Klug of Independent Jewish Voices and Sunny Hundal of the New Generation Network (and Pickled Politics) as well as Ehsan Masood, who writes for Prospect magazine.
The Guardian today has a long article, entitled simply Faith, about religion and the heated debates it has recently provoked in the UK. Discussed are the usual matters of faith schooling, creationism and the...
In the past couple of weeks, three events led to much heated discussion about the idea of "communities" in the West, and "community leaders" in particular: a Policy Exchange report (PDF) suggesting, among other...
Umar Lee recently posted a ten-part history on the rise and fall of the "salafi da'wah" in the USA (last post, with comments and links to the other nine, here). The whole series made...
The Conservative Party leader David Cameron wrote in today's Observer about the "British values" issues which were under much discussion this past week. Of merit is his debunking of stupid suggestions like having a...
How racist is Britain? Julian Baggini on why he doesn’t believe most white Britons are racists – even though he heard racist language almost everywhere he went (from today’s Guardian) This was in the...
Having seen Channel 4's documentary Undercover Mosque, which was shown earlier this evening (see earlier entry), I am now more reassured regarding the material quoted from the preachers they showed; however, the programme-makers repeatedly...
On Wednesday evening the Evening Standard ran an “exposé” on the central mosque in London, alleging that its bookshop was run by Wahhabis and that the mosque is run by Saudi Arabia. The specific accusation is that the bookshop sells DVDs by Khalid Yasin and one Shaikh Feiz which contains content the average white Briton might find offensive, among them that women are deficient in intelligence compared to men, that Jews are comparable to pigs and that Christian missionaries deliberately spread AIDS in Africa under the cover of vaccines for common dangerous diseases.
Sarfraz Manzoor, a regular contributor to the Guardian and Observer on the so-called Muslim values which gives our community its supposed strength: Muslim parents also tend to be less interested in child-centred parenting and...
Comment is free: Lifting the veil Rajnaara Akhtar (chair of Protect Hijab) on the recent fake scandal involving the Somali who was involved in murdering the policewomen Sharon Beshenivsky and supposedly might have escaped...
Guardian Unlimited: No retreat Sara Wajid interviews the novelist Alice Walker, best known for writing The Color Purple and – uh, not much else. They discuss the recent elections, 9/11 and the reaction to...
This morning, Vanessa Feltz took her BBC London radio show to a new low by recycling a story from the Black Hole, otherwise known as the Daily Star, about non-Muslims supposedly being banned from...
The contrived controversy over the Channel 4 “Alternative Christmas Message” dragged on today, with the Daily Mirror featuring an interview with the lady in which she told the interviewer that she, being a patriotic British citizen, will be watching the Queen rather than her own message. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, however, comes out with the usual attack on the niqab, alleging that Channel 4 “has decided to glamorise and validate the veil, showing cool indifference to the meanings of one of the most violently contested symbols in the world today”. The article appeared in the Evening Standard, which does not generally publish its opinion pieces online.
Via Deenport and Pickled Politics, we hear that Channel 4 is planning to have a woman in niqab to read their “alternative Christmas message” this year: A veiled Muslim woman will deliver this year’s...
BBC 'Magazine' feature: An end to one law for all? A very interesting (and, I'm sure, controversial) feature on the largely little-known system of arbitration in the UK. The best-known example is the Jewish...
The Guardian yesterday carried a major feature on the fundamentalist Mormon polygamists who dominate two small towns in the Utah/Arizona border area: Husband and Wives gives the whole historical background, the details of the...
Neurocentric: Denial / Defamation In which the author refutes the common claim that the Muslims are silent in the face of Muslim extremism: the real culprits (this is my observation also) are the authorities,...
I always find myself surprised when I agree with anything Melanie Phillips says, but when she’s not talking about global warming (or the lack thereof) or anything to do with Islam, Israel, or the so-called “War on Terror” and its offshoots, which is nowadays what she’s best known for, I often do. In this case, it’s the declaration of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists in favour of the “active euthanasia” of severely disabled babies. In the Netherlands, infant euthanasia is allowed “for a range of incurable conditions, including severe spina bifida and the painful skin condition called epidermolysis bullosa”.
From the Guardian: One Friday This is an article, which lasted several pages in the print edition with photos, about a number of British Muslims and what they did the Friday before last. They...
First up: there is a programme on tomorrow (Monday) evening on Channel 4 entitled Women Only JIhad, about the struggle for Muslim women to gain admittance to a number of mosques in northern England....