Islam

I’ve always admired the liberal Muslims in the Quilliam Foundation. It is hard to take accusations of betrayal from your own community. Harder still to keep fighting when the thought feeling keeps nagging away that out there, somewhere, there are Islamists who might do you real harm. But Quilliam keeps fighting. To mark the launch by students of the Right2Debate campaign, which seeks to make universities live up to their principles and respect the right to speak and dispute, they have collected accounts from atheists and secularists of the wretched state of higher education. I should pause to explain that last sentence to the confused. You might have assumed that

I have never been to the island of Guernsey. This is a large world and we have a finite amount of time on it and must make our decisions about where we visit based on necessarily limited information. We cannot know everything. I have never been to Japan, for example, because I do not wish to be crushed to death by a mass of jabbering humanity, nor take part in unpleasant sadomasochistic sex acts, nor watch people disembowelling themselves in order to affirm their masculinity. I realise that this is not all that Japan has to offer. There is also sushi, for example, and buttock-clenched politeness. I could get both

There are things that happen when you grow older — bad things, harbingers of death and decay. Past the age of 55, I mean. For example, a friend and fellow columnist confessed recently that upon rising from a sitting position he almost always unintentionally farts. A delicate little ‘glip!’ from his bottom, every time he stands up. I am a little older than him and have yet to experience this demeaning imposition, this additional whiff of misery as we trundle downhill, via the unctuous and grimly cheerful hospice attendants, to the crematorium. But I am so terrified of it happening that nowadays, when I stand up, I rise very slowly and

A freedom-of-information request by Sikhs has turned up some curious statistics from the Metropolitan Police. They show that of the more than 400 ‘Islamophobic hate crimes’ recorded in the first half of last year, 28 per cent were not attacks on Muslims at all. They were either attacks on people thought to be Muslims (often Sikhs) or attacks classified as Islamophobic because of the absurd criteria (invented by the Macpherson Report on the death of Stephen Lawrence) which define such incidents as ‘any offence which is perceived to be Islamophobic by the victim or any other person’. Muslim bodies attracting government grants obviously have an interest in there being as

The news that the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia has issued a fatwa against the game of chess should come as no surprise. There has always been a chequered history of relations between Islamic clerics and practitioners of the world’s most popular board game. Abdul-Aziz ibn Abdullah Al ash-Sheikh is the most powerful Sunni religious figure in Saudi Arabia and issued the fatwa while answering viewers’ questions during his weekly television broadcast ‘With his Eminence the Mufti’. The show was first broadcast in 2014, ‎but the Grand Mufti’s censorious condemnation of chess, during which he compared it to the pre-Islamic Arab game of Maisir, has only this week achieved prominence. According to the Mufti,

I am far abroad at the moment but have just learnt the sad news from home of the death of George (Lord) Weidenfeld, at the age of 96. As a publisher, philanthropist, convener, guru and friend he was one of the most extraordinary people in 20th and 21st-century Britain. Born in Vienna in 1919, he fled the Nazis and came to the UK in the 1930s where he was housed and looked after by a Christian family. Throughout the extraordinary life and career that followed he constantly acted on the gratitude he felt towards the country and people that had taken him in. Only last year he set up a

The new Charlie Hebdo cover is feeble. God with a machine-gun, looking over his shoulder, and the line ‘The Assassin is still at large’. It makes Richard Dawkins look nuanced. Religion is to blame? All religion? It feels dishonest, timid: a refusal to face the fact that it’s a particular form of religion that is the problem. In fact satire in general is pretty feeble, when it comes to religion and terrorism. Satire is good at attacking established power, and religious terrorism is obviously an intensely marginal thing – far more marginal than satire itself. There is a wider target: Islam in general, but in the West this too is