Should we be rescuing Brits from Libya?
Yesterday I heard a discussion on the Radio 2 mid-day discussion programme in which Vanessa Feltz (sitting in for Jeremy Vine who is on holiday, along with several other Radio 2 presenters) debated with...
Category: Muslim world
Cloud coup-coup land?
OK, my title isn’t exactly original — it was a nickname for the Comoros islands in the Indian Ocean, which for some time had coups on a fairly regular basis (often engineered by the...
Disability, punishment and attitude
I got a comment earlier today from WildKat (Kimberley Robbins) in response to a post I’d made in August about the incident in Saudi Arabia in which a man who had been paralysed in...
Retaliation and the story of Khidr
I saw an article today posted at Harry’s Place and also at Foreign Policy Journal, entitled “The Problem of Honor Killings” by one Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, described in his biography as “a student at...
Replicating spinal cord injuries in Saudi Arabia
Last week there was a news story about a man who faced the prospect of having a spinal cord injury inflicted on him surgically in Saudi Arabia as an Islamically-prescribed retaliatory penalty. The usual...
Polygamy, “evolution” and mistreatment of women
The last week or so I’ve seen two articles about Muslim men who don’t respect women, one of them on Achelois’ blog, the other by Mariella Frostrup in last Sunday’s Observer, which Fareena Alam...
Egyptian football stupidity
I've never made much secret of the fact that I hate football. I have done since I was forced to play it at school as a child, but I equally dislike the acrimonious rivalries,...
Iraq police suckered by fake bomb detector
Ben Goldacre on a hilarious, but tragic, example of obvious bogus science and how the Iraqi police were taken in, to the tune of £19m ($32m): A British company called ATSC is selling a...
TMI about Aleppo rape victim?
I’m sure many of you have heard the story of the young girl who suffered terrible injuries in a gang rape in Aleppo last month; you can read the story in English here. There...
Muslims’ needs and the cause of Islam
In the past couple of weeks I’ve noticed something startling appearing on the Muslim ‘net: conservative Muslims attacking the Pakistani Taliban. These include a series of posts from Abu Eesa ([1], [2] with links...
Cuddly Sufis versus aggressive Salafis
Once again, the topic of promoting "Sufism" as a means of countering the aggression of "salafi"-inspired jihadist movements, as in Pakistan presently, has come up, thanks to the establishment of a seven-member "Sufi Advisory...
Clive James on feminism and democracy
BBC NEWS Magazine: Clive James on feminism and democracy Clive James is arguing that the reason feminists are not loud on the issue of promoting democracy abroad when the alternatives are far worse for...
British company dumped toxic waste in Africa
This really quite shocking story appeared in the Guardian today: a ship chartered by a British firm, Trafigura, dumped toxic waste in Abidjan, the capital of Ivory Coast, in 2006, making some 100,000 people...
Why not slaughter all the pigs?
I'm sure we've all heard by now about the Egyptian government's move to slaughter all of the country's stock of pigs, kept by the Coptic Christian minority, supposedly in response to the outbreak of...
The government’s preferred Muslim spokesmen
Gary Younge has a fantastic piece in today’s Guardian which rips apart the government’s attitudes towards representatives of the Muslim community: Somewhere out there is the Muslim that the British government seeks. Like all...
No sad goodbye
BBC News: Sad goodbye to 'cosmopolitan' Cairo The BBC laments how the old nightclubs and belly-dancing joints of Cairo have either closed down or are shadows of their old selves. The problem is that...
William Dalrymple on Sufis in Pakistan
William Dalrymple charts Pakistan’s descent into chaos | World news | The Guardian This appeared in the G2 supplement in the Guardian yesterday. Dalrymple has in general been sympathetic to Pakistan in his writings,...
Somalia: Executing rape victims
Recently a young female was executed for adultery in Kismayo, Somalia. Initially we were told that she was 23, and had gone to the Shabaab militia, who control that part of the country, to...
Why won’t Arab governments give money for Lebanese Palestinians?
Leila Shahid: An urgent call for aid for Nahr el Bared in Lebanon (Comment is free) Leila Shahid (PLO representative to the UN) on the failure of Arab governments (as opposed to organisations) to...
Why long-distance day trips are a bad thing
Recently three people I know visited Cairo. One of them, a Muslim of Somali origin who lives in Canada, spent two weeks there on the way to Dubai and Somalia; the other two, both...