Women, the niqab and the mosque
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....
Indigo Jo Blogs Blog
Shaikh Hilali, Westerners and rape
In the past week, the storm over the sermon delivered a month ago by the Egyptian imam Taj al-Din al-Hilali, the imam of a major mosque in Sydney, Australia, and supposed “mufti of Australia”, has broken, with commentary on a number of Muslim blogs (and no doubt many more non-Muslim ones), the sermon being front-page news even here in the UK and becoming a main topic of conversation on this morning’s Vanessa Feltz show. Feltz blatantly misquoted the imam, suggesting that he had compared any woman covered less than completely to uncovered meat, which is not what he said at all. What he did say was pretty offensive, however.
Windsor arson “not racially motivated”
Via Pickled Politics, it's been revealed that Thames Valley police believe that the arson attack on a house that was due to be inhabited by injured Iraq veterans, widely reported to have been carried...
The latest native informer
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”.
What a veiled woman can do
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...
Why British Asian women are moving home
The Guardian: Going Back to My Roots This is an interesting article from today's Guardian about British women of Pakistani origin who are content to settle in Lahore which, despite the oppressive image of...
Moral Maze fails to rebut Mel’s misrepresentations
This week the BBC's panel discussion programme The Moral Maze discussed the issue of religious symbols, in a week following not only the infamous niqab debate but also an incident where a flight attendant...
Enough of the silly veil-dabbling articles
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...
Muslim pupils “more liberal and tolerant”
BBC NEWS: Muslim students 'more tolerant' A Home Office-funded study of three schools in Burnley and Blackburn, two notoriously segregated towns in northern England, discovered that Muslim pupils had more liberal and tolerant attitudes...
The other side of micro-credit
The Micro-Credit Cult This is an article from a free-market libertarian website (called *The Free Market*) regarding the Grameen Bank, the institution run by the latest Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Younus. Among other...
An insider’s view on niqab
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.
Not offended by Apple Store
Muslim Website Says Muslims Aren't Offended By Apple Store – altmuslim.com It seems people are trying to manufacture a "Muslim outrage" over the new Apple Store building in New York, which is of a...
Garton-Ash, Bennett and Berkoff on niqab
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...
The Chechen silence
Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | The Chechen silence Thomas de Waal on the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, which he says “leaves a terrible silence in Russia and an information void about a...
UK Asian girls and forced marriages
EducationGuardian.co.uk: Do not contact the parents This story appeared yesterday in the Guardian's education supplement and concerns young Asian girls (often Muslims) taken out of school to go "back home" to get married, often...
More on the niqab situation
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...
Ian Blair on internment
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...
Woolas: “appease the far right!”
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...
Open season on Muslims
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.
PC Bashar not ‘excused on moral grounds’
Here is a police statement regarding the malicious story circulated in the press yesterday regarding PC Alexander Omar Basha, who was excused duty guarding the Israeli embassy in London for the duration of this...