Politics, tech and media issues from a Muslim perspective
From the South African Independent: Poor dietary and lifestyle habits during Ramadan pose grave health risks to fasting Muslims, local doctors and dieticians have warned. Night-time binge eating and consuming too much sugar and...
Last Wednesday, Jonathan Freedland, a former Guardian US correspondent, wrote this article suggesting that the international judgement will be harsh if the Americans elect McCain and Sarah Palin, with her record of putting religion...
When I first saw this story, I thought they meant goats kept by prisoners as a possible food source, but no, they really were there awaiting trial: The beasts were due to appear in...
Will there be no end to the repetitions of the myth that faith schools are the cause of the problems in Northern Ireland? A professor called David Canter has published a study, based on...
Linda Grant wrote this article in last Thursday's Guardian, on why small-town Americans vote Republican, even those who are well-educated like one she spoke to. Those she actually knows perceives "whitebread Republicans" as "like...
Zoe Williams, in today's Guardian, on the mawkish obsession with the horses and other pets which belonged to the family believed to have been murdered by its indebted father a couple of weeks ago...
With the fasting moving back to the very beginning of autumn and the first couple of days fasting being the most difficult they've been since, well, whenever they were last in April, I have...
Yesterday, a new organisation was launched called the Accord Foundation, which claims to be "a new broad-based coalition calling for inclusive schools and an end to special arrangements for state funded religous schools". Its...
The Channel 4 Dispatches programme last night returned to its theme of sending a reporter undercover to gather information on what's being taught in mosque study circles and being peddled in mosque bookshops. The...
Here is a transcript of the conversation I had with Anne Diamond, on the subject of the Daily Express complaining about Tower Hamlets council workers (in east London) will be asked not to eat...
I got through to speak to Anne Diamond (sitting in for Vanessa Feltz who's off having her gall bladder removed) today! The issue was a story picked out of the Daily Express (or Daily...
This morning, I was driving to work and was listening to the BBC London breakfast show, which features Jo Good and Paul Ross, who is every bit as irritating as his brother Jonathan (I...
Recently three people I know visited Cairo. One of them, a Muslim of Somali origin who lives in Canada, spent two weeks there on the way to Dubai and Somalia; the other two, both...
Radio 4’s programme Sunday, its weekly religious affairs programme broadcast at 7am on Sunday mornings, today featured the “Islamic” marriage contract issue. You can listen to it here until next Sunday when the next...
The Guardian today published a lengthy article about an MI5 report they had obtained (which was restricted), which stated that there was no real profile which could indicate what sort of young Muslim would...
The so-called Islamic marriage contract recently proposed by the Muslim Institute has attracted a lot of attention in the Muslim blogosphere lately, much of it negative, for reasons anyone who has read it will...
Haitham al-Haddad (a "salafi" imam based, if I remember rightly, at al-Muntada al-Islami in west London) has given a lengthy response to the recent "Islamic" marriage contract published by the Ghayasuddin Siddiqui front organisation,...
As you can see, I have changed the theme for this blog. I had not intended to do this when I upgraded my Movable Type installation last week, but the old templates did not...
Recently I had an exchange with an old school acquaintance who accused me of defending an enemy of my country, namely Abu Hamza, on my blog. Abu Hamza is currently in jail, having served...
Yesterday, the Policy Exchange published a report which suggested that the government should stop trying to revive the north, and instead build lots of new houses around London, Oxford and Cambridge and encourage ambitious...