Islam

Thursday

Anthony Sattin

Were the Ottoman Turks as European as they thought themselves?

This is the best of times to be writing history, since so much of what has been taken for granted, especially in the West, is being revised. Assumptions about the past that we accepted as fact, and events we once looked upon with pride, are now being questioned. A dark cloud hovers over the Benin Bronzes, Elgin Marbles and Rosetta Stone in the British Museum and looks likely to burst. The same applies to figures who were considered heroes and placed on pedestals. If the statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square had not been covered recently, it might have followed the fate of Edward Colston’s. Into this febrile atmosphere

Friday

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

The Council of Europe was right to pull its hijab campaign

This week, the Council of Europe was forced to pull an advertising campaign promoting the hijab following a backlash from the French. As part of a campaign to promote respect for Muslim women, the European body released a number of campaign posters, one of which read ‘Beauty is in diversity as freedom is in hijab’. Shortly afterwards there was an outcry from French politicians, who called for the campaign to be dropped. Sarah El Haïry, France’s youth minister who is of Moroccan descent, said she was vocally ‘shocked’ by the campaign. The posters were also condemned by many Muslim heritage women and secular activists around the world. Some of the

Thursday

Peter Frankopan

The war that changed the world in the early seventh century

It was not a war to end all wars, writes James Howard-Johnston at the start of this illuminating and thought-provoking book about the confrontation between the empires of Rome and Persia that began at the start of the 7th century and lasted the best part of three decades; it was not even a war with ambitious goals. The ‘last great war of antiquity’ started when the Shah of Persia, Khusro II, decided that the assassination of an unpopular emperor in a palace coup in Constantinople gave him the excuse and the window he needed to try to put right a punitive settlement that had been imposed on Persia a decade

Saturday

Hannah Baldock

The Deobandi sect and the Taliban’s cheerleaders in the UK

The Taliban is now bedding in for its second regime in Afghanistan and desperate Afghans continue to flee what is likely to become a brutal, heavily armed theocracy. Meanwhile in the UK it has come as a shock to many that some British Muslims applaud the Taliban’s resurgence. Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Sunday programme, the Islamic sharia council member Khola Hasan claimed that ‘every single person that I know, as a Muslim’ was celebrating the return of the jihadist group and that ‘The problem is that we don’t give [the Taliban] a chance’, sparking outrage from more liberal minded British Muslims. ‘What an atrocious lie it is to say

Tuesday

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Pakistan’s profane blasphemy laws

An eight-year-old Hindu boy is currently in custody in the southern Punjab. He is the youngest person in Pakistan to be charged with blasphemy. The boy, accused of urinating in a local madrassa, was released last week on bail — in retaliation, a Muslim mob vandalised a local Hindu temple. Meanwhile, on Thursday, a day after the temple attack, a transgender person was arrested on blasphemy charges in Abbottabad, around 100 miles north of the capital Islamabad, for allegedly burning the Quran. These are but the latest in an unrelenting spree of blasphemy cases, a victimless crime that carries the death penalty in Pakistan. Indeed, this punishment is reserved solely

Wednesday

David Patrikarakos

Tehran is repeating the Shah’s mistakes

The Iranian province of Khuzestan is oil-rich but water-poor. At the best of times, the southwestern region is a problem for Tehran. On the border with Iraq, it’s home to an Arab minority that has long been targeted. The province has separatist inclinations, which led to a failed uprising in 1979 and sees the occasional attack continue to this day. Unsurprisingly, it is not favoured by central government. It’s impoverished and lacks many basic services; quality of life is poor. Khuzestan is now in its sixth straight day of protests after water shortages in its major cities. Video footage filmed from protests reportedly shows tanks on fire after protestors set

Friday

Hardeep Singh

Leave, convert or perish: The fate of Afghanistan’s minorities

President Biden’s decision to ‘end the war in Afghanistan’ means the complete withdrawal of 3,500 US troops by the 20th anniversary of 9/11. However, what may be domestically popular — particularly among Trump voters — will soon have consequences for the Afghans left unguarded by foreign troops. The Taleban and other jihadist militias are already making significant territorial gains while nuclear Pakistan will be strengthened by the vacuum left by the US military. But it is Afghanistan’s non-Muslims who will really suffer. Extinction is a word normally associated with dinosaurs — but it’s no exaggeration to say some minority religions (including my own) will now face that fate at the

Thursday

Harald Maass

Is anywhere in the world still safe for China’s Uighurs?

Amannisa Abdullah was in the last weeks of her pregnancy when her husband, Ahmad Talip, was arrested in Dubai. ‘He was on his way to buy a dress for our unborn girl,’ she says. Ahmad, who had lived and worked in Dubai for nearlyten years, never arrived at the shop and his family have not seen him since. He was held at a local police station for several days and then was deported to China in 2018, where he is reportedly in prison. ‘He just disappeared. We don’t know where he is or what he is accused of,’ says Amannisa, who fled to Istanbul. Ahmad is a Uighur Muslim. His

Tuesday

Stephen Daisley

Labour’s worrying descent into communalism

Labour’s candidate in Batley and Spen, Kim Leadbeater, reportedly pulled out of a hustings featuring George Galloway over the weekend. This makes sense. Not only is Galloway a master of bluster whose pompous bombast has a steamroller quality in a debate, but Leadbeater would have been debating the person of whom she is currently doing a dubious impression. If the organisers were concerned about getting Labour’s perspective, they could have stuck a mirror in front of Galloway and given it equal time. The no-show came as Leadbeater, whose sister Jo Cox was murdered by a right-wing extremist five years ago, told the Independent: I think sadly there are a number

Thursday

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Austria’s ‘Islam map’ is dangerous

Austria’s government has unveiled a map detailing the locations of mosques and other Muslim associations all over the country. The publication has been swiftly condemned by Austrian Muslim groups, including the Muslim Youth Organisation which announced a lawsuit in response. But Austria’s government is so far refusing to back down.  The ‘Islam map’ is a project of the government-backed Political Islam Documentation Centre and the University of Vienna. The map has been designed ostensibly in response to growing Islamist radicalism in Austria, especially in the aftermath of November’s Vienna shooting. It marks a continuation of chancellor Sebastian Kurz’s self-proclaimed fight against ‘political Islam’. But whatever the intention, the map is unlikely to do much other than to ensure Austrian

Thursday

Anthony Sattin

The empire that sprang from nowhere under the banner of Islam

When the British formed the basis of their empire in the 1600s by acquiring territories in India and North America, they already had many centuries’ experience of foreign involvement. One of the most remarkable aspects of the force that reshaped Eurasia 1,000 years earlier is that there was no prelude: the Arab conquests, and the Islamic empire that they created, came out of nowhere. By the time of the death of the Prophet Mohammed in 632 most of the tribes of the Arabian peninsula had united under the banner of Islam, some out of faith, others from expediency. But few people outside Arabia knew who Muslims were or worried about

Tuesday

Stephen Daisley

The Tories, Islam, and the importance of pluralism

The Conservatives will be relieved that an independent investigation has not found the party to be institutionally racist, though relief is about all they can feel. Professor Swaran Singh’s report, which has taken two years to arrive, paints a picture of a party at best complacent about how its members talk about Muslims.  Professor Singh examined 1,418 complaints about 727 incidents between 2015 and 2020, of which two-thirds were allegations of anti-Muslim discrimination and three-quarters were from social media. The former commissioner of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) concludes that: Anti-Muslim sentiment has been evidenced at local association and individual levels, as demonstrated by a number of social

Wednesday

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Richard Dawkins is an ally to the oppressed

Richard Dawkins is no longer a humanist. At least, not one that deserves to be honoured as such, according to the American Humanist Association (AHA), which excommunicated him from the Humanist of the Year award last week. The fatwa issued by the AHA, which generously includes ‘critical thinking’ in a list of its own Ten Commitments, accused the evolutionary biologist of ‘demean[ing] marginalized groups’ when he asked his Twitter followers to ‘discuss’ the vilification of critics of transgender theory. Proponents of the new blasphemy codes have seemingly forgotten the decades of humanist work in favour of free speech. More qualified persons can better comment on Dawkins’s implied scepticism of modern

Thursday

Douglas Murray

What the demise of Quilliam teaches us about Britain and Islam

There was much rejoicing among Britain’s Islamists last week when the thinktank and campaigning organisation Quilliam announced that it was closing. The Islamists were pleased because for the 14 years since its founding Quilliam has been the most prominent Muslim-run organisation arguing for a progressive, non-Islamist Islam. The exact reasons why Quilliam has shut down are not clear. The co-founder, Maajid Nawaz, has blamed the difficulties of sustaining a non-profit in the era of Covid. Perhaps it is that, or perhaps it is something else. The group never had an easy ride. But the fact that it didn’t, and that so many prominent British Muslims are celebrating its demise, points

Sunday

Fiyaz Mughal

How Covid will change Ramadan

Ramadan is one of the five pillars of Islam, based on spiritual self-discipline. It is meant to strip away materialism and to connect Muslims to God through self-reflection, fasting and prayer, thereby enhancing the spiritual connection of Muslims to the Almighty. But just as it was for Christians celebrating Easter and Jews celebrating Passover, this year’s Ramadan will be quite different in a Covid world. For the virus continues to strip away so many of the familial and personal connections that we once took for granted. The virus continues to strip away so many of the familial and personal connections that we once took for granted In times of crisis

Friday

Yahya Cholil Staquf

Why Muslims like me are worried about the Batley protests

To some, the persecution of a schoolteacher who showed his pupils a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed may seem like a local quarrel. Does it really matter, many Britons will ask, that a few dozen men gathered at the gates of a school in West Yorkshire? Surely it will blow over before long, goes the thinking. Alas, this view – all too common in officialdom throughout the western world – is deeply naïve. To those of us in the Muslim world who work to counter Islamist extremism, what is happening at Batley Grammar School is disturbingly familiar. What may look like a local incident is in fact one with national

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Why will nobody publish my religious cartoons?

I am having very little success in getting my collection of cartoons of great religious founders published. Perhaps it is because I am not known as a draughtsman and publications are notoriously conservative in hiring new talent. It is all very dispiriting. My drawings are, I think, puckish and yet respectful. For example, there is one of the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, the man somehow regarded as divine by Rastafarians. He is depicted in a game of ten-pin bowling with Benito Mussolini, the controversial former leader of Italy. Both men seem to be enjoying themselves — Benito is holding a pint of lager while Selassie is biting into an almond

Tuesday

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Bangladesh could pay for failing to crack down on its Islamist threat

Bangladesh turned 50 last week and the country has much to celebrate. Having inherited a dismal GDP growth rate of -14 at its birth in 1971, Bangladesh’s most recent figures for the growth in the size of its economy (7.8 per cent) edged out India (6.1 per cent), and comfortably outdid Pakistan (5.8 per cent). Bangladesh overtook India in per capita income last year. And of the 14 World Development Indicators measured by the World Bank – including fertility rate and life expectancy – Bangladesh is faring better than Pakistan in all but one (air pollution), and outranking India in seven. The country’s life expectancy average of 72.3 is ahead

Fiyaz Mughal

The Batley protestors don’t represent me

The protestors outside Batley Grammar School could be heard shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ — God is great. It’s a term I often use when I need spiritual strength, a basic prayer. But this time, the prayer was being used as a war cry by those who seemed to think that re-affirming their Muslim identity would help them sack a teacher in a school. It amounted to nothing less than the defamation of Islam. There are perhaps three million Muslims in Britain, the vast majority of us proud to live in one of the most tolerant countries on earth and feeling no conflict between our faith and our nationality. British values are liberal

Monday

Jesse Morton

The Batley Grammar school row is the perfect jihadist recruitment tool

As controversy continues to rage after pupils were shown an image of the prophet Muhammad by a teacher at Batley Grammar School, the primary beneficiaries will be violent extremists, both jihadist and far right. As a former jihadi extremist who once used similar circumstances to spew hate and spread dissension worldwide, I should know. But, here’s the truth: I couldn’t have cared less about the portrayal of the cartoon, and neither did those preachers I once worked with. In the wake of 9/11, I ran Revolution Muslim, which was described as a ‘relay station for Al Qaeda’s broader message’. Then, in April 2010, when the writers of South Park announced the show’s 201st episode would portray