‘What’s in the news this week?’ I asked my wife as she browsed the first newspaper we had seen for a whole week, having hitherto been blissfully disconnected from the rest of the country, without phones or the internet.
‘Muslims, largely,’ she replied, flicking from page to page, ‘a bit on in-and-out, but mainly it’s the Muslims.’ Oh, good. A perpetual optimist, I had rather hoped that during our week away the frequently promised Islamic Reformation might have taken place and peace and enlightenment spread all those many miles from the jungles of Banda Aceh to the dilapidated terraces of Kirklees. But nope, apparently not. They were still up to their stuff, a good few of them.
For a start, there was the fallout from Trevor Phillips’s excellent film about Islam in Britain, in which he reported, via an ICM poll, that two thirds of British Muslims would refuse to grass on a fellow Muslim, no matter how much ricin he was storing in his lock-up.
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