Society

Usama Hasan, an imam attached to the Quilliam Foundation, argues in the Times that Islam is steadily adapting to modernity. It has been doing so since the nineteenth century, when the Ottoman Empire launched certain reforms. Islam should not be judged by a few marginal hiccups in this process. ‘Isis follows a fundamentalist and selective reading of scripture which is ahistorical and heretical. They are linked to Islam and the Koran in the way the Ku Klux Klan and Anders Breivik are linked to Christianity and the Bible.’ This is not helpful. For extremely reactionary Christians have not gained power in a large proportion of the traditionally Christian world. He

As a graduate student in the Harvard Government Department in the late 1980s, I became slightly jaded about the number of visiting professors who warned about the imminent demise of the West. The thrust of their arguments was nearly always the same. The secular liberal values we cherish, such as freedom of speech and the separation of church and state, won’t survive in the face of growing, religious disenchantment with modernity unless they’re rooted in something more meaningful than rational individualism. They were talking about Islamic Fundamentalism, obviously, although sometimes they threw in Christian Fundamentalism as well in order not to seem ‘Orientalist’ or ‘ethnocentric’. These political scientists were, without exception,

It’s already started — the festive flood of shoddy champagne on BOGOF deals in the supermarkets. Well, BOGOF indeed. Such fizz might bear the magical name of champagne, but all too often these wines will have been made from the second or even third pressing of inferior fruit from the less good plots, and aged for the bare legal minimum of 15 months rather than the more usual four or five years. If I can’t have or can’t afford Pol or Bol or something similar, then I’d far rather stick to the 2013 Blanquette de Limoux, ‘Saint-Hilaire’, Aimery, a wonderful sparkler made by the champagne method in the Languedoc and