Society

You may be forgiven, if you are a regular reader of this column, for thinking that my primary motivation in cooking is showing off. I’m always banging on about lovely dishes you can serve to unsuspecting guests that will guarantee plaudits and amazement. But while there is more than a kernel of truth in this, I think that it’s actually simpler than that: what I crave from cooking is satisfaction. And I don’t mean satiation of hunger (although that too: I am greedy), but the sense of achievement that cooking – almost – invariably brings. True, this achievement can often be found in presenting a beautiful cake to an assembled

Muhsin Hendricks, the world’s ‘first openly gay imam’, was shot dead in Bethelsdorp, South Africa, on Saturday. While the police are still probing the murder, Imam Hendricks had repeatedly cited death threats – including in the 2022 documentary The Radical – owing to radical Muslims finding his preaching, and officiating of same-sex marriages, as an affront to Islam. According to reports, he had recently performed the ceremony of a lesbian couple, and was on his way to officiating the wedding of a Muslim woman with a non-Muslim man, which too is deemed against Islamic teachings. In addition to sanctioning unorthodox marriages, Hendricks’s Al-Ghurbaah Foundation provided support to those marginalised on

‘I was different,’ Bill Gates describes his childish self, ‘School… felt slow. I found it hard to stay interested in what we were learning; my thoughts wandered. When something did catch my attention, I might leap up from my seat, frantically raise my hand or shout out an answer.’ In his autobiography, Source Code: My beginnings, the schoolboy who went on to become the original tech bro, co-founder of Microsoft and global philanthropist, describes his fascination with learning outside the box. Let classmates dutifully repeat their multiplication tables; he was discovering that the Adelie penguin could hold its breath for six minutes under water and that sound was a propagation

‘When the Lord returned the captives to Zion,’ Psalm 126 goes, ‘we were like dreamers. Our mouths were filled with laughter and our tongues with songs of joy.’ Watching the images of Alexander Troufanov, Sagui Dekel-Chen, and Iair Horn paraded by their captors after almost 500 days of torment, there was no laughter and not a hint of joy. That the three Israelis have been reunited with their families will bring immense relief to those who know and love them, but it cannot give this nightmare the illusion of a dream. These captives have been returned, but others remain. Iair’s brother Eitan is still in Palestinian hands. Their mother Ruti