Politics, tech and media issues from a Muslim perspective
The latest edition of the British anti-fascist magazine Searchlight on last month's incident where chemical precursors to explosives were found at a house belonging to a member of the British National Party, which was...
First up: there is a programme on tomorrow (Monday) evening on Channel 4 entitled Women Only JIhad, about the struggle for Muslim women to gain admittance to a number of mosques in northern England....
Islamophobia Watch this weekend drew attention to the Sunday Times’ article on Nyamko Sabuni, Sweden’s answer to Ayaan Hirsi Ali who scarpered to the USA once doubt had been cast on her grounds for any status in the Netherlands. She is the “integration and equality” minister in the recently elected conservative government, and advocates such policies as adolescent girls being checked for evidence of having undergone genital mutilation, the criminalisation of arranged marriages, no state funding for religious organisations, and that “immigrants should learn Swedish and find a job”.
Nzingha has an excellent article, ma sha Allah, regarding some of the popular perceptions about what women can and can't do in a veil, in response to a particularly stupid article in the Arab...
The Guardian today printed an article by the journalist Zaiba Malik about her experiences wearing the niqab for a day around London. This follows last night's Tonight with Trevor McDonald slot in which Saira...
What follows is an account of the experiences of a young sister in Canada who has been wearing the niqab since she was 17 and at school. Her name is Ardo; she is of Somali origin and lives in Ottawa, and is presently in her fourth year at university. I wanted to present a real sister’s experience and perhaps defence of the niqab, because although I strongly defend the right of Muslim women to wear it (and, insha Allah, I may post a more comprehensive defence either here or at the Sharpener either today or tomorrow), I am not best-placed to do so as a man, so I sought Ardo’s experiences. What she told me was both enlightening and sometimes depressing.
Three articles today's papers on the ongoing niqab controversy. First off, here's the actor Steven Berkoff in today's Independent letters: For Jack Straw it concerns his ability to read the mind on the human...
First up, here's Abu Eesa: "this is an excellent opportunity for qualified Muslims to debunk the mysteries behind such a visually obvious, mysterious and perhaps even shocking statement of a Muslim woman’s identity". As...
Iain Dale: Sir Ian Blair Says New Terror Attack Could Lead to Internment British blogger Iain Dale on a meeting at the Reform club in London, at which the Metropolitan Police commissioner Ian Blair...
A junior minister, David Woolas, has offered his two-pennyworth on the niqab controversy in today's Sunday Mirror, not online, by suggesting that it could play into the hands of the far right: "It can...
It seems to have been open season on Muslims in the media the last few days, with three inflammatory anti-Muslim stories becoming front page news in either the morning or the evening papers in as many days. First it was the Pc Bashar story, which turns out to have been exaggerated anyway, but nonetheless made the front pages of the tabloids and was the lead story on Vanessa Feltz’s phone-in, with the host branding it “pick-and-mix policing”. Then there was the “Jack Straw on veiling” controversy, and then the petty incident of the Muslim cab driver who refused to carry a blind woman with a guide dog.
New Statesman – Watching you watching me Brendan O'Neill (of Spiked fame) on the huge popularity of CCTV cameras in the UK, including a visit to a hidden "spy bunker" beneath London's Trocadero centre,...
Rachel from North London and Kitty Killer have recently posted on the Blair-Brown "succession" controversy. My position on this has long been very simple: Brown is not fit for the job, because he considers...
Raed in the Middle: back from the mideast Raed Jarrar, an Iraqi-American blogger, on his trip to Lebanon, Syria and Jordan and what happened when he tried getting on a plane from New York...
To be honest, I actually thought there would be a state funeral for Maggie given how long she was in power and the fact that her central policies really still hold sway today, a...
Via Islamophobia Watch, a hilarious exchange among Jamie Glazov of Front Page Magazine and Norman Geras and Nick Cohen, to which David Horowitz is later introduced. The "interview" was supposed to be about the...
It's still open season on niqabis, as the Independent prints four letters in response to Deborah Borr's attack on them in Saturday's edition. The letters can be read here in the left-hand column (not...
A woman called Deborah Orr (or should that be Deborah Borr) wrote an article for today's (Saturday's) Independent attacking Muslim women who cover their faces ([1], [2]), alleging that face coverings are "are physical...
Zia Sardar in the current edition of the New Statesman on the folly of “intelligence-led” police operations:
Don’t be fooled by the mantra that intelligence is an extremely difficult business, prone to absurdly wide margins of error. If that were so, Britain would have lost the Second World War. The remarkable success of British intelligence, including counter-intelligence, during that war proves that we can produce reasonable – say, 25 or even 50 per cent – rates of success.
Two interesting articles regarding the British government's enthusiasm for adopting US policies into British criminal law: First, from this week's New Statesman: Martin Bright explains why our ministers seem always to look to the...