Islam

Settling down to watch 24 Hours in Police Custody, the new Channel 4 programme brought to us by the team behind the excellent 24 Hours in A&E, I was expecting some proper gripping telly. What I did not envisage was to be further educated about the level of plonkery that some men are capable of. And I don’t just mean the criminals. The custody sergeant this week was checking in a 60-year old man who was under arrest for an alleged assault and kidnap. The case was called ‘honour-based violence’, which usually refer to crimes against women and girls perpetrated by religious maniacs. There are countless such cases in the UK: revenge attacks on women who refuse to

From The Spectator, 7 November 1914: We are glad to note that the Indian Government has issued a reassuring proclamation as regards the Holy Places. We trust, however, that before long France, Russia, and Britain, all of whom are Powers with large numbers of Mohammedan subjects, will join in a common declaration to the Moham- medan world that in no circumstances shall we interfere with the Holy Places or the religious feelings of Mohammedans. Moslems may be perfectly certain that no rearrangements made after the war will compromise in the very slightest degree religious rights in Arabia. We owe such a declaration to our Mohammedan subjects and to ourselves. It

Malaysian pharmacist Syed Azmi has emerged from hiding to apologise for organising ‘I Want to Touch a Dog’ earlier in October, a canine-petting event that drew a few hundred mostly Muslim Malaysians. So: not all Muslims hate dogs. Only some do. Syed has been getting death threats for the initiative, and is being investigated by the federal Islamic Development Department, whose director general warned via the Malaysian press that petting dogs might lead to the ‘terrible consequence where they [Muslims] will keep dogs in their house’. The Koranical hadiths, mind you, are muddled at best in establishing the tradition that good Muslims hate dogs. So I checked with my go-to source

The attacks in Canada probably seem non-sensical to some people. After all, much of the press and political class in the West has spent years trying to cover over the motivations of people like those who have spent this week targeting soldiers and politicians in Canada. ‘Why did they target Canada?’ headlines are asking today. And well they might. There has been a great push in recent years to put the causes of Islamic jihad not onto the perpetrators but onto the victims of this problem. So, for instance, when America has been attacked, it has regularly been suggested that ‘the United States had it coming’ (as Mary Beard so

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_16_Oct_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Sean O’Callaghan and Govinda Clayton join Lara Prendergast to discuss talking to terrorists.” startat=808.5] Listen [/audioplayer] In a world often devoid of good news, there has been a fine development on the farthest-flung shores of insanity. The British National Union of Students aspires to represent students, though traditionally tends only to represent those students who are politically ambitious and possess left wing views. In any case, its latest idiocy is that it has tied itself in knots over the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria – Isis. A condemnation of the ebullient Islamic group was tabled by a student of Kurdish descent. The Kurds, some people will recall,