Politics, tech and media issues from a Muslim perspective
Guardian Unlimited: The racists are driven by envy of Asian success Faisal Bodi (of Q-News and fairly regular contributor to the Guardian) on the social breakdowns which affect many of the mainly white estates...
BBC NEWS: Is this the end for 'fake sheikh'? An analysis of the attempt by Mazher Mahmood, a reporter on the Murdoch-owned News of the World who entraps people into dropping themselves in it...
Yesterday I went to the second LugRadio Live event in Wolverhampton, organised by the Wolverhampton Linux User Group who do a fornightly "podcast" in which they discuss the state of the scene and interview...
From Thursday's Times, a report on a meeting by Israelis including former PM Binyamin Netanyahu to "commemorate" the bombing in July 1946 of the King David Hotel, in which 92 people died, unveiling a...
Being at work and too tired to blog in the evening, I missed the whole story of the opposition in Brick Lane to the filming of Monica Ali's novel of the same name. The...
The Guardian today has an interview with French-Algerian "feminist" Fadela Amara. Here is described the second of two incidents which were influential in this woman's career, which took place in October 2002: French women...
The BBC reports that the Government has banned al-Ghurabaa and the "Saved Sect" (along with the Baluchistan Liberation Army and a number of Kurdish groups, including PKK fronts). It has not, however, banned Hizbut-Tahreer,...
Six Apart have now released version 3.3 of Movable Type, complete with an enterprise version for organisations with thousands of users which, among other things, supports the Oracle database as well as the usual...
Martin Bright’s documentary on British Foreign Office dealings with “radical Islam” finally aired on Channel 4’s 30 Minutes slot last night, and did not really contain any surprises for me. Martin Bright’s position is that the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO), in its dealings with the Muslim community, has largely restricted itself to dealing with groups led by the Muslim Brotherhood and Jama’at-e-Islami, to the exclusion of ordinary, moderate “Sufi” Muslims.
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...
While listening to the discussion of the dreadful bombings in Bombay yesterday, I could not help noticing the BBC falling over themselves to make sure they called the city by its "real name" of...
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...
Radical Middle Way Event: Shaikh Walead Mohammed, an American graduate of al-Azhar (who has also studied in Damascus) is to give a talk this Tuesday in London and next Sunday in Oxford on the...
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...
[Karen Armstrong in today’s *Guardian*](http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1815604,00.html) on how extremists in Islam, like those in other religions, are deliberately outside the mainstream of their religion and in fact have contempt for it: >Sayyid Qutb (1906-66), whose...
Rod Liddle has dedicated his “Liddle Britain” column this week in the Spectator (free registration required, but paywalled after a week) to slagging off the upcoming “Muslim day” at Alton Towers, the leisure park in the English Midlands, organised by Islamic Leisure. Liddle obviously thinks the reason this event is taking place is because Muslims don’t like rubbing shoulders with non-Muslims
Brian Whitaker at Comment is Free on the recent case of the R&B producer Dallas Austin, who was busted in Dubai with some cocaine he’d picked up back home. He got a four-year prison term, but returned to the USA today after being pardonned by the ruler of Dubai, Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum. As is noted, there are at least three laws in force there: one for locals, one for rich westerners and one for poor foreigners:
Qays Arthur on the recent rise of the Islamic Courts in Somalia, which prompted him to find out if the people behind them are really practising traditional Sunni jurisprudence or something else – the...
On the same day that the Times (and the ITV evening news) featured a Populus opinion poll which supposedly showed that 13% of Britain’s Muslims think that the four men who carried out the...
This week’s Media Guardian on the invasion of Beeston, the home town of three out of the four people who bombed London last July, by reporters who had no idea of what sensitivity means:...