Politics, tech and media issues from a Muslim perspective
Yesterday the Spectator, a British conservative-leaning political journal (which was formerly edited by Boris Johnson and printed a series of very prejudicial articles about Islam and Muslims during that time) published an article on...
This is about a letter to Pamela Stephenson Connolly, the Guardian’s agony aunt for all things sexual. The letter is from a 27-year-old woman who had developed an eating disorder as a result of...
Last night, at the rather late hour of 10:15pm, Channel 4 broadcast an hour-long Dispatches programme, presented by the children’s commissioner Anne Longfield, about concerns that home-schooling is being used as a cover for...
Last week the number of successful prosecutions for female genital mutilation (FGM) in Britain went from zero in more than 30 years since a specific FGM law was passed, to one. A Ugandan woman...
There’s an image which has been circulated on Facebook which compares two articles about violent crimes in London. One refers to a ‘thug’ named Kersan Euell who kicked a female police officer into the...
There’s a letter in today’s Guardian in response to a debate about the virtues of Pimlico comprehensive school, a concrete-and-glass building designed by the architectural team at the then Greater London Council which was...
There is a letter in the weekend section of today’s Guardian from a teenage girl to an advice columnist called Annalisa Barbieri, who answers a question each week about difficulties with family relations. This...
There was an anecdote I forgot to insert into my previous entry about the stereotype of the "liberal elite". Back in the early 2000s I was working as a van driver for a major...
‘Gaslighting’ is a term coined fairly recently to refer to a kind of behaviour displayed by abusive individuals (particularly domestic and intimate-partner abusers) in which they use tricks to cast doubt on their victim’s...
A favourite claim of the alt-right, populist right, whatever you want to call them, is that their liberal opponents (whether they be in the Labour party, the Lib Dems themselves, the pro-European wing of...
Today, the Daily Mail launched a campaign to recruit a "volunteer army" to "help" the NHS starting next Spring, in conjunction with a "new social movement called Helpforce". The roles that volunteers are expected...
This morning the Today programme on Radio 4 covered the story of Gerard Batten, the new leader of UKIP, hiring Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, the former leader of the English Defence League, anti-Muslim agitator and self-styled...
I've been a fan of the BBC dramas Casualty and Holby City since the 1980s, although I only started watching them on a regular basis again more recently (Casualty was a fixture when I...
Last Thursday, on the BBC's Question Time programme (a weekly late-night political panel show in which a panel of politicians and an academic, writer or other lay 'expert'), there was a contribution from an...
Lost Boys? What's Going Wrong for Asian Men (BBC iPlayer, available in UK only until about 12th September) Last Sunday there was an hour-long programme on BBC2 purported to be about the problems facing...
In an earlier entry I discussed the unhelpful 'defence' of niqaab that only a few thousand women wear the garment. However, a side argument is that only a few hundred wear the burqa, the...
Yesterday some of the papers reported that, according to a report by the charity Save the Children, child migrants mostly from sub-Saharan Africa were "being sexually exploited" or in earlier versions "selling sex" in...
A few months ago The Economist put out a video on its Facebook page which tried to make the case that polygamy made a society more violent and prone to civil war. I noticed...
I saw a post on Medium last weekend, "Burning Down the House: Identity Politics and its Discontents", which posited that white working-class voters who had voted for politicians like Donald Trump had faced "a...
Last year, the Times carried a story that a young girl of Christian background had not been allowed to eat pork under her Muslim foster carers' roof, on their front page. They also claimed...