What future for the House of Windsor?
This week’s New Statesman has a lengthy feature on the monarchy, clearly coming out in favour of abolishing it and establishing a republic. Ted Vallance gives a long history of British public hostility and...
Indigo Jo Blogs Blog
Gary McKinnon and the Daily Mail crusade
The Daily Mail has recently been running a campaign over several issues to stop the British computer hacker, Gary McKinnon, from being extradited to the USA to face charges over cracking American military and...
Borders to shut London flagship store
I read a short article in the Evening Standard yesterday evening that Borders was to shut its flagship bookshop in Oxford Street; after looking it up I discovered that four other Borders stores are...
Demonstration and public meeting this evening
There is a demonstration to call for a withdrawal from Afghanistan tonight at Downing Street, London at 5pm, organised by the Stop the War Coalition. There is also a public meeting at 7pm in...
Review of “Does God Hate Women?”
Does God Hate Women? is a 178-page tirade by Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom, editors of the atheist website Butterflies and Wheels, co-authors of A Dictionary of Fashionable Nonsense and both senior editors on...
Ungrateful bloggers! (And credit where it’s due)
Is WordPress A Thankless Community? | Weblog Tools Collection Are you using third-party WordPress plugins and themes without having sent the author a thank-you note or donated money? I have to say that, in...
Don’t tell me what to write
Zaid Shakir recently wrote a reply to some guy who had ridiculed him by calling him a “Muslim rock star” for writing about the death of Michael Jackson when, supposedly, Cynthia McKinney was being...
Terrorists getting easy ride from media and law
New Statesman – Know your enemy Mehdi Hasan, the New Statesman’s senior politics editor, on a man stopped in his tracks while preparing to use tennis balls as bombs, whose case hardly got any...
Soaked in blood indeed
Rahila Gupta, in today’s Guardian, delivers a confused ramble about the issue of “choice” in wearing or not wearing the hijab in the West and in Saudi Arabia and Iran: I believe it is...
The obligatory Jackson post
Since so many other Muslims seem to be blogging about Michael Jackson’s death, I thought I might as well, as the papers have been full of coverage, with the Guardian and then the Observer...
Divan 2.0 (featuring moi) is up
Divan 2.0 | Multimedia | The Radical Middle Way This is the video of the Divan 2.0 meeting of Muslim bloggers at the London School of Economics, organised by Radical Middle Way, on 7th...
The price of bigotry (and it’s for real this time)
A few months ago I blogged a piece called something like "The Price of Vilification", regarding incidents of attacks against Muslims in the USA, one of which turned out to be a hoax and...
Review of Channel 4’s “Revelations: Islamic school”
Revelations: Islamic school (Channel 4, 5th July 2009) was an 50-minute documentary following two Muslim girls in Nottingham through a year at a fee-paying Islamic school (a mixed primary with an all-girls secondary). The...
Alcohol and rape story was distorted
PR and prejudice: why rape story erred (from the Guardian) Ben Goldacre writes a regular column, Bad Science, which is often dedicated to debunking stupid newspaper stories based on distortions of statistics and science....
Let Biggs rot
I agree with Jack Straw’s decision not to let Ronnie Biggs go free. He has served, in total, a third of his sentence, and the parole board, despite recommending his release (on the grounds...
Elephant in the carriage
Yesterday, the government decided to withdraw the franchise of National Express, a coach operator, for running long-distance trains on the East Coast Main Line, which despite its name, runs from London to the north-east,...
Denis MacEoin misrepresents the Shari’ah again
Yakoub Islam drew my attention to Denis MacEoin's promotional piece for his Shari'ah-bashing report for Civitass, published on Comment is Free. It contains a series of stupid misrepresentations of aspects of the Shari'ah, obviously...
Responses to Civitas report on Shari’ah courts
Another baseless MacEoin report – this time on Shari’ah councils Denis MacEoin has published yet another of its Islam-bashing reports, this time attacking “Shari’ah courts” in the UK, or rather, Muslim arbitration tribunals (more...
Muslims’ needs and the cause of Islam
In the past couple of weeks I’ve noticed something startling appearing on the Muslim ‘net: conservative Muslims attacking the Pakistani Taliban. These include a series of posts from Abu Eesa ([1], [2] with links...
How real is this hustle?
I was just watching a BBC programme called The Real Hustle, in which the TV people play supposedly real cons on unsuspecting members of the public, and then reunite them with their money or...