Politics, tech and media issues from a Muslim perspective
The British parliament is currently debating bringing in a law banning incitement to “religious hatred”, in order to plug a loophole in an existing law banning incitement to racial hatred. The latter law is...
Spencer has obviously forgotten the distinction between personal law and “sociopolitical law”, and indeed, the existence of “socio-personal law”, that is, law governing how people interact with each other and behave around each other....
Theological Lessons from the Sumatra Earthquake, by Abdul-Hakim Murad, at Mere Islam: Part of the brilliance of the Qur’an is that it makes no compromises over God’s transcendence, as it battles against pagan and...
She had gone to bed early claiming that she couldn’t stand the bulls**t. She was right, there was a lot of bulls**t, but Sandy’s wife would have detected bulls**t in a house brick, as...
It’s been reported that a Christian missionary organisation based in Virginia have relocated 300 Acehnese orphans to a Christian home in Jakarta: The appeal said WorldHelp was working with native-born Christians in Indonesia who...
Yet again it seems that Ken Livingstone is in trouble over his meeting with Shaikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Ken (as we all call him) has posted a defence (in PDF form) of his meeting on...
One of the most interesting things about the recent invasion of Iraq is the different interests which have become united in both their support for, and their opposition to, the invasion. I’ve attended several...
Or rather, a Mac mini. I’d have used Mini Mac myself, because then you can write it miniMac and it sort of fits into Apple’s usual scheme – iMac, eMac, iBook (Mac laptop), iLife,...
The BBC’s got this amusing feature on how parents so often rely on their children for support with the computers they presume their children know so much about (IT Support for your Parents). I’ve...
Al-Jazeera’s English site has published an article, Beware of Neo-Muslims and Rand Robots, warning Muslims to beware of people within the community who follow the Rand Corporation’s agenda: Their assignment is to trigger multiple...
There is a website of amazing pictures of mosques in Aceh which survived the recent tsunami disaster in Aceh. Aceh was the nearest land (except for the small islands off the west Sumatra coast)...
The Register reports that a company called Truvia in San Francisco (which specialises in luxury furniture) is offering “designer” PCs starting at “only” $50,000: Truvia will design the furniture you want around a high...
The Times reports that AB Krongard, until recently the executive director of the CIA, has stated that the world might be better off with OBL (or Bin Hidin’ as we call him) left uncaptured,...
I was going to call this a disaster, until I realised that disaster implies a lot more than the minor inconvenience I suffered today. You can call your wedding party a disaster if a...
They were discussing on Vanessa Feltz’s afternoon show the news that the Dutch “naked street” experiment is to be copied in London, appropriately enough in Exhibition Road, in west London. A naked street is...
There is a film being released this week, Vera Drake, about the career of a back-street abortionist in the slums of London in the 1930s. The film has won awards from film critics in...
News from Indonesia today … that the government there turned down the British government’s offer to send a group of 120 Gurkha troops from Brunei to help with the Aceh rescue / clean-up operation....
Yet again I’ve received what amounts to an “Islamic” chain letter, this time asking people to add their names onto a list of people objecting to a forthcoming offensive film about Nabi ‘Isa (‘alaihi...
Two British-based pro-Palestinian groups, the Friends of al-Aqsa and the Palestine Solidary Campaign, have had their bank accounts withdrawn by the Royal Bank of Scotland and the Alliance & Leicester bank respectively. This is...
I’d like to start off by saying I have no familiarity with the life and works of the recently departed Susan Sontag (apart from having merely heard of her), but I couldn’t help noticing...