But freedom for whom?
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown has a confused ramble in today's Independent, lamenting the fact that joining the European Union has decreased in popularity since 2002, when the figure was 70% in favour (by 2006, it was...
Category: Muslim world
No dogging in Dubai
Last week, a woman and her husband were arrested for having sex on a beach in Dubai; this news made it to the front pages of at least one major British newspaper. The woman...
Niqaabs for Afghanistan?
Having just watched a More 4 documentary of Malalai Joya, the woman who was elected to the Afghani parliament after getting thrown out of the Loya Jirga for standing up to condemn warlords, it...
Round-up: Austria, Hassan Butt, Julian Baggini in Rotherham, life in Yemen
Before the week begins in earnest, I thought I might offer a round-up of stories which caught my eye the past week: Stuart Jeffries in the Guardian on the stupid, racist gibberish which has...
A country for a plaything
Recently there has been a flurry of stories about foreigners being jailed in the United Arab Emirates for unbelievably petty drug “offences” which would not be detected, yet alone prosecuted, anywhere else. The story...
Freely: lesser-known facts about the Turkish headscarf ban
Maureen Freely: Cover Stories from Comment is Free Maureen Freely (translator of Orhan Pamuk's books, who has spent a fair amount of time in Turkey) on the politics behind the recent move by the...
Bhutto: get over it!
This afternoon during my lunch hour, I had an MSN conversation with someone in Sindh, the home region and power base of the late Benazir Bhutto. Naturally, since I knew where she lived (not...
Benazir Bhutto and democracy
I’m not the most knowledgeable person about Pakistani politics, and I really have no opinion as to who is behind the murder of Benazir Bhutto, given that fingers are pointing in each direction right...
Message in a gunboat (Sending in the SAS)
Technorati Tags: gillian gibbons In the further discussion of the Gillian Gibbons case on the radio this morning, the question of whether the teacher should be militarily rescued was discussed. Vanessa Feltz said she...
Insult, what insult?
Technorati Tags: gillian gibbons Just when the latest round of knock-ons from the Undercover Mosque hatchet job were starting to fade away, the story of the British teacher jailed in Sudan for a supposed...
Defending written Arabic
New Statesman – The talking cure This is a review by Samir el-Youssef, a regular in the New Statesman, attacking a new book entitled Why Are the Arabs Not Free? by Moustapha Safouan (a...
The other side of Burma’s “peaceful” monks
The other, invisible suffering of Burma « Islam, Muslims, and an Anthropologist In the recent rush to support the monk-led uprising against the military junta in Burma, the situation of the long-suffering Muslim minority,...
Libel law censorship
Yesterday, several British political blogs were pulled down, including Bloggerheads, that of the former ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray, Bob Piper and Boris Johnson, when their web host gave in to threatening letters from lawyers acting for the Uzbek/Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov, who is trying to buy Arsenal football club. The threats were in response to allegations posted on Murray’s blog, which were reproduced here among other places. I can’t testify that what Murray says is true, of course, but Murray himself says has not received any correspondence from Usmanov’s lawyers. They have gone for the easy option of simply censoring his claims by leaning on his web hosts. (The whole article is still available at Indymedia.)
The threat to ruin Damascus
A new edition of Islamica Magazine is on the shelves in London now (try Borders) and there's a disturbing article about a plan to demolish large areas of the old city of Damascus involving...
Back to democracy, back to Bhutto
A friend of feudalism (the Guardian, yesterday) William Dalrymple (of White Mughals fame) on the depressing spectacle of Benazir Bhutto trying to cut a deal with Busharraf in order to get back in power...
Hypocrisy over divestment
muslimmatters.org » Beware the Do-Gooders in Body Armor: The True Motives of those in Support of Divestment in Sudan A number of articles and blogs recently have picked up on the inconsistency of those...
Swimming in Saudia: not such a big splash after all
I was going to blog on this BBC article when I saw it a few days ago, but sister Nzingha in Saudi Arabia has done so for us: My Fellow Swimming Sisters In Saudi....
Atatürk’s wife’s hijab
Various Muslim blogs have published pictures of the reprobate founder of the Turkish republic and his wife, wearing the standard hijab that his followers in modern Turkey want to ban – see Tariq Nelson,...
Radio 4: Muslims leaving the UK
BBC Radio 4 – I'm a Muslim, Get Me out of Here! This programme (to which you can listen until this time next week) examines the phenomenon of educated, professional Muslims leaving the UK,...
Abdul-Hakim Murad: the churches and Bosnia
Abdal-Hakim Murad – The Churches and the Bosnian war This is something br. Mas’ud Khan posted to his website a couple of weeks ago, which I only just got round to looking at for...