Who’s protesting the Pope?
Earlier today I read an opinion piece in the Guardian by Martin Kimani, “an associate fellow at the Conflict, Security and Development Group at King’s College London” currently writing a book about the role...
Indigo Jo Blogs Blog
What’s up with these online services?
Has anyone else noticed that web services like YouTube and Facebook have become more and more flaky and unreliable the last few weeks? The problem has got worse with Facebook in the last couple...
Impressions of BBC4’s Women series
BBC4 recently broadcast a three-part series entitled Women, which was meant to give some kind of history of feminism from the radicals and “libbers” of the late 1960s and early 1970s through to the...
IJB fourth most influential “pro-Islamic” blog, says government report
Last night I got word that my blog had been named in a British government report as the fourth most influential “pro-Islamic” blog. The report, published by the Home Office as a PDF file,...
Bombs in breast implants?!
The Sun today put out a story alleging that female suicide bombers were being fitted with bombs disguised within breast implants so that they couldn’t be detected by airport screening devices, according to “terrorist...
What is the true meaning of halal?
The true meaning of halal | Catherine Fildes | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk Catherine Fildes has published a response to Nesrine Malik’s article from last week, on the Guardian’s website, which argued that...
Tip for Android owners who use Twitter
Ditch Peep. I went hunting for alternative Twitter clients the other day because I came to the conclusion that Peep wasn’t up to much. It’s terribly slow and unresponsive, selecting a web location in...
Further thoughts on Qadri fatwa
A couple of weeks ago I posted an entry about Dr Tahir ul-Qadri’s fatwa condemning suicide bombings. It seems to have provoked the biggest debate of pretty much any recent post on here since...
Robert Spencer, Patrick Sookhdeo and me
It seems I’ve been getting a lot of referrals from the ghosts of the American right-wing Islamophobic blogosphere lately, as shown in my Incoming Links on my control panel. They all had to do...
Harassment “commonplace” for those with learning disabilities
Last Wednesday in Manchester, a 64-year-old man with learning disabilities, David Askew, collapsed and died after two youths broke down his garden gate and tampered with his mother’s scooter. He had not been physically...
Niqaab and rickets in the UK
Today I found a post at the blog The Answer’s 42 alleging that the so-called burqa was to blame for the increased incidence of vitamin D deficiency in Asian women in the UK and...
Why get sanctimonious about Tantawi?
About 24 hours ago, Muhammad Tantawi, the shaikh of al-Azhar in Cairo, died of a heart attack at Riyadh airport. Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’oon. Formalities over …
Erwin James on the Angola Three
37 years of solitary confinement: the Angola three | Society | The Guardian I had heard of the Angola Three before today, but this article puts the whole case into very clear detail for...
Why I still blog
Last week, Umar Lee posted his parting message to the Muslim blogging community, after his blog had been offline for some weeks. His reasoning was twofold: one is that all the best blogs (Sunni...
Tory think tank compared to “madrasa”
Today the Guardian carried a front-page story about how various Tory MPs and activists are being given training by an offshoot of the party’s youth wing, Conservative Future, named the Young Britons’ Foundation ([1],...
Old wounds opened by Venables re-arrest
One of the two men who were convicted of the murder of James Bulger as boys was recalled to prison about a week ago, something the public found out yesterday and was all over...
Ricky Gervais on ME, and other bad comedy
Yesterday I had a brief exchange of tweets with Organica, who told me of her enthusiasm for the British comedian, Ricky Gervais, best known for writing and starring in The Office, his stand-up shows,...
London minicabs and public service ads
A few months ago, Transport for London published a set of advertisements aimed at encouraging people, particularly women, not to take the unlicensed “minicabs” which attempt to pick up passengers by the side of...
Qadri’s fatwa breaks no new ground
The London Evening Standard yesterday had a two-page feature on a forthcoming fatwa by the leader of the Minhaj-ul-Quran group, Dr Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri, which unequivocally condemns suicide bombings. The feature is dominated by a...
Sportsmen as paragons of virtue
I heard the public apology by Tiger Woods last Friday on the BBC London evening news show, and was kind of satisfied when fate had me go through a long stretch of tunnel during...