Politics, tech and media issues from a Muslim perspective
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...
The Khalifites are, thankfully, a group one does not encounter often as a Muslim these days, but they seem to come in waves when they appear. In the mid-1990s, during the heyday of the...
Ziauddin Sardar, in the current New Statesman, has a worthwhile argument about some recent government idea to "set up a board of Muslim theologians" in order to "steer the more radical elements of the...
The Guardian today had this feature on descendants of Nazis, including a shirt-tail relative of Adolf Hitler, who became Jews, and in one case a rabbi, supposedly to cleanse themselves of the sins of...
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown has a confused ramble in today's Independent, lamenting the fact that joining the European Union has decreased in popularity since 2002, when the figure was 70% in favour (by 2006, it was...
Last Tuesday a British court upheld the right of a Sikh girl living in south Wales to wear the kara, or Sikh bangle, to school. Her school, Aberdare Girls', bars all religious symbols and...
Douglas Murray on Islamophobia in Standpoint Standpoint magazine is a recently-launched magazine published by the Social Affairs Unit, and appears to be an attempt at a serious political and cultural magazine for the centre...
Following last Sunday's report (PDF) by the "Centre for Social Cohesion" (in reality, a right-wing think tank largely geared towards raising suspicion about Muslims) alleging that a large proportion of Muslim students support killing...
Yesterday, with the water off in my part of town because of a burst water main in Wimbledon (which flooded not only the street but also South Wimbledon tube station), I headed up London...
Technorati Tags: max mosley Yesterday Max Mosley, the president of the International Automobile Federation (FIA), which manages Formula 1 racing, won £60,000 from the News of the World which printed a story about his...
Technorati Tags: ed husain, islam channel Azad Ali at Islamic Forum Europe on yet another example of Ed Husain dictating to the media, and to various Islamic organisations, as to who he will and...
LugRadio Live 2008 pictures Last Saturday I went to what was billed as the last ever LugRadio performance. LugRadio is (or rather was) a podcast produced by the Wolverhampton Linux Users’ Group, and since...
Last week, Channel 4 broadcast a film by Antony Thomas (of Death of a Princess fame) called The Qur'an (see it here), which attempted to explore "what the Qur'an actually says". Karima Hamdan has...
For years until last December, I avoided installing any version of Windows on my personal computers; I had a Mac, which I used for things like word processing, and a Linux-based PC which I...
It was reported today that the government had decided to honour Margaret Thatcher, the prime minister of the UK from 1979 to 1990, with a state funeral when she dies (she is 82 and...
A Moroccan Muslim woman has been refused citizenship in France for wearing the so-called burka and supposedly living in "total submission to her male relatives". Her initial refusal was in 2005, but she has...