Reflections on the fall of Bashar al-Assad
Last week the 53-year-old Assad dynasty in Syria was finally overthrown by one of the rebel militias which had broken out of Idlib, a city near the Turkish border in the north-west, two weeks...
Category: Muslim world
Afghanistan and women’s education: why is it even a debate?
In the past week the Taliban, who seized back control of Afghanistan from the corrupt and ineffectual US-backed government last year, issued a decree banning women from the country’s universities, after already having shut...
Hatred is not a phobia
The term Islamophobia was popularised, as I recall, in the 1990s to refer to hostility to Muslims in the European context. The logic behind it seems to be that people were hostile to Muslims...
Shamima Begum, ‘grooming’ and responsibility
Last week it was revealed (or rather, re-reported, as this matter had been known for some time) that the man who helped Shamima Begum and her two friends over the Turkish-Syrian border to join...
Tunisia and tyranny: just part of life?
The Guardian reported today that the electoral commission in Tunisia, controlled by the president who staged a coup against his own government and the country’s elected parliament last year, has reported that more than...
Are democracies’ economies weaker?
Arabs believe economy is weak under democracy (BBC News) Last week the BBC highlighted the results of a survey conducted in a number of Arab countries which found that people are losing faith in...
Not just a child
Last week the UK’s Supreme Court ruled that Shamima Begum, the “ISIS bride” who ran away from home to join the self-styled Islamic State aged 15 in 2015, had no right to come back...
Expel Keith Vaz
Today the Labour MP Keith Vaz was suspended from the House of Commons for six months for offering to buy cocaine for male prostitutes in August 2016 in an encounter at his flat recorded...
Riots don’t start; people start them
There is a video going round on Twitter of the American representative (from Hawaii) Tulsi Gabbard responding to a question about the Indian prime minister’s role in the 2002 Gujarat pogrom, in which hundreds...
Ignorance and poverty, not religion, lie behind abuse
Yesterday the Mail Online website published a story about a “Qur’an school” in Kaduna, northern Nigeria, from which 300 boys and men were rescued last week having been held in chains in squalid conditions...
How does any society build civil society?
In 2016 the American imam, Hamza Yusuf, gave a lecture in Turkey which was a commentary on certain hadith including the famous hadith of intention (that actions are judged according to intention) in which...
It’s the communications, dummy
I follow a few Kashmir activists on Twitter and a theme that has been coming up a lot lately is Indian Hindus and secularist Muslims lecturing Indian Muslims (and Muslims in the Indo-Pak diaspora)...
Shamima Begum: should she be allowed back?
In this morning’s Times there is an interview with Shamima Begum, one of three girls from east London who ran away from their families to join ISIS, or at least live in ISIS territory...
Should we cut ties with Saudi Arabia?
Yesterday there was a debate at Intelligence Squared in London on whether the West should cut ties with the kingdom of Saudi Arabia because of its use of torture and such crimes as the...
Why Egyptian TV covers American police violence
Earlier today I saw a tweet by Shaun King, an American race activist, about Egyptian media coverage and popular interest in American police shootings and resulting protests: I am in Egypt.The murder of Stephon...
Polygamy and “violent societies”
I saw this video being tweeted out by the Economist, a London-based weekly news magazine, this morning. It posits the idea that polygamy is strongly linked to violence in a society. Polygamy is still...
Review: House of Saud, episode 1
So, last night the first episode of a three-part series on BBC2, House of Saud: A Family at War was broadcast. I commented on the trailer last night as the language had been troubling...
What is a revolution anyway?
I’ve been seeing trailers on BBC TV for a documentary on the changes being forced upon Saudi Arabia by the new crown prince, Muhammad bin Salman (his father, the actual king Salman is believed...
ISIS terrorists, wannabes and “peace in Muslim societies”
So, today a man detonated a bomb in New York, at the Port Authority bus terminal. The man, a 27-year-old from Bangladesh who lives in Brooklyn and was a cab driver before his licence...
Persecution of the Rohingya is nothing new
The persecution of the Rohingya in Burma (Myanmar in the main native language) has picked up in the last few weeks, with obvious signs of genocide or as the UN has called it “classic...