The myth of the “conference of 72 sects”
The other day on Twitter someone retweeted a Qadiani (a member of the so-called Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam) repeating a much-rehearsed claim: that according to a newspaper report at the time, 72 sects of...
Category: Community
Zac Goldsmith, an authority on FGM?
Earlier today, BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour featured a 6-minute segment on FGM, tomorrow apparently being "International Zero Tolerance on FGM Day" and who better to invite on than the co-chairs of the All-Party...
It was the Muslims
So, last Friday the school in Newham, a borough in east London with a large Asian and Somali Muslim presence, which had introduced a ban on girls under age 8 wearing the hijab or...
Please sign this petition: leave our hijab alone!
Petition · Lyn Brown MP: Make Neena Lall remove the hijab and fasting ban at St Stephens in Newham! · Change.org This is a petition to the local MP in Newham, east London, against...
Hijab and primary school girls: not compulsory, but …
In the past week the 'issue' of primary school age Muslim girls wearing hijab to school has been on the front pages of some newspapers as the chief inspector of schools announced that her...
On British Muslims and US racial politics
Recently I've noticed a trend among Muslims in the online community of associating Muslims and Islam with 'brown-ness' and in opposition to 'whiteness' as well as the uncritical parroting of dogmas which are in...
Hijabi versus liberal Muslima
The other day Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan, a popular Muslimah poet and blogger, drew my attention to an advertisement she'd seen in a mosque in Birmingham. It was from a BBC radio producer looking for "an...
Honi soit qui mal y pense
[Outcry over sexualised hijab schoolgirl](http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/the-times/hijab-girl-in-childrens-books-is-sexualising-fouryearolds/news-story/ba831356aa747865914da54ffe24367a) (from *The Australian*) *Honi soit qui mal y pense* is a Norman French phrase, meaning “shame on he who thinks ill of it”. It appears on the British royal...
Polygamy and being Muslim
Earlier a Facebook friend (an African-American Muslim woman) posted a status that Black Muslim men should just accept that most Black Muslim women hate polygamy and that "no amount of guilting and shaming is...
In defence of the friends of Nabra Hassanen
Early last Sunday morning in a northern Virginia town, a young lady was kidnapped off the street during or after the taraweeh prayer (the night-time prayers held during Ramadan) having gone to get food...
On hijab, ‘neutrality’ and threat
Last week I heard a conversation between Shelina Janmohammed, the author of Love in a Headscarf and Generation M and a columnist for The National, a Dubai-based newspaper, and the LBC presenter Sheila Fogerty,...
The United Airlines school of Sufism
Last week there was outrage after a man was manhandled off a United Airlines plane in Chicago, having boarded and taken the seat he had paid for, when the airline decided that their crew...
Nothing ‘neutral’ about the hijab ban
Last week, the European Court of Justice ruled that workplaces in Europe could ban workers from wearing "any political, philosophical or religious sign" if a company has a policy requiring "neutral" dress, a judgement...
How prevalent is FGM in the UK really?
Last Monday was apparently FGM Awareness Day, and that means there were a lot of FGM stories in the media with vain attempts to interpret figures in a new way to make a story...
Listen to women — but which women?
Last Friday the highest court in France, the Council of State (Conseil d'État), struck down the ban on full-body swimsuits or so-called burkinis which had been imposed by some 30 municipalities in southern France...
Let’s be clear: the French swimsuit ban is about hate
In the past couple of weeks several coastal regions of France, including the districts that include Cannes, Nice and Menton, have banned women from wearing the full-body swimsuits known as 'burkinis' that are popular...
Converts more liable to become terrorists? Really?
ThinkProgress, a site some of us had taken for a progressive opinion site, recently published a piece titled "Why Converts To Islam Are So Susceptible To Becoming Terrorists", by one Beenish Ahmed (right). That...
‘House Muslims’, whatever we call them, are a thing
The other day Tell MAMA, which monitors hate crimes against Muslims, published an anonymous article claiming that certain unnamed "moral guardians of the Internet", mainly aged between 20 and 35 "who spend their time...
Anti-FGM crusade brings out the busybodies
The crusade against FGM is out of control – Spectator Blogs Brendan O'Neill wrote the above article on the incident reported recently in the British press, in which Baroness Jenny Tonge took a flight...
How France can really ‘protect all religions’
France 'to protect all religions' (BBC News) The French president, François Hollande, has announced that France "will protect all religions" and that Muslims are the "main victims of fanaticism" in a speech at the...