Islam

Thursday

Paul Wood

A new Islamist alliance among Syria’s rebels has given Assad the enemy he wants

   Amman — Beirut — Istanbul I recently bumped into a senior officer with the rebel Free Syrian Army who was waiting in the passport queue at the Turkish border. I didn’t recognise him at first, out of uniform and without his entourage, and I told him so. He was following the example of the 7th-century Second Caliph, Omar bin al Khattab, he replied. The caliph was so humble he took turns with his servant riding a horse to Jerusalem to receive the city’s surrender. There was no imagery from Islamic history when I first met the officer a year ago. He was one of those ‘rebels’ western officials have

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

Samuel Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations’ is still upsetting the complacent

It is twenty years since Samuel Huntington’s essay ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’ was first published in Foreign Affairs. On Monday night I took part in a discussion on BBC Radio 3’s Nightwaves about the article (and the resulting book) which turned oddly nasty. I have always been a qualified admirer of Huntington’s most famous work (‘qualified’ because like most people who have read the book I admire its range and grasp while disagreeing with certain of its conclusions). But broadly admire it or not, it appears to be a difficult work to discuss. This is largely because it suffers the double-bind of being misunderstood by people who have not read it. Nine

Thursday

Aidan Hartley

Al-Qa’eda targeted Kenya not because it’s a banana republic, but because it’s a symbol of African success

If Al-Shabaab was behind the terrorist attack in Nairobi, then the group has come a long way since its foundation in a derelict shampoo factory called Ifka Halane — ‘Clean and Shiny’ — in Mogadishu in 2006. I know a little about the group because I am the only westerner to have met its founder, Aden Hashi Ayro, before he was killed in a US air strike. In those days Al-Shabaab was a small militia providing muscle for the Islamic courts in Mogadishu. For a brief spell the courts did a good job of bringing a degree of law and order. Then Washington foolishly backed an Ethiopian invasion of the

Monday

Shiraz Maher

Ignoring Islamic terrorism didn’t make it go away

Not so long ago politicians were hailing the end of al-Qaeda and the global jihad movement. By the middle of 2011, key ideologues like Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki were dead. Arab Street also appeared to have embraced peaceful protest, with popular uprisings unseating seemingly entrenched regimes in Tunisia and Egypt. A new dawn, we were told, was breaking. The weekend’s events have brought that hopeless optimism into sharp relief. The terrorist siege of the Westgate shopping mall in Kenya continues, with around 70 people dead so far. Elsewhere, at least 80 Christians were killed in a suicide attack outside a church in the Pakistani city of Peshawar yesterday.

Douglas Murray

No, Mr Cameron. The Kenyan massacre is all about Islamism

Here we go again. A group of Islamist terrorists armed with guns and grenades head into a shopping mall in Kenya. They separate out the Muslims from the non-Muslims, let the former go free and massacre the latter. Cue the usual responses. The British Prime Minister, David Cameron, says: ‘These appalling terrorist attacks that take place where the perpetrators claim they do it in the name of a religion – they don’t.  They do it in the name of terror, violence and extremism and their warped view of the world. They don’t represent Islam or Muslims in Britain or anywhere else in the world.’  I don’t think any sensible person would argue

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Why does David Cameron refuse to admit that the terrorist attack in Nairobi is linked to Islam?

Do you know the name of Muhammed’s mother? No, me neither. I can manage the names of two of his wives and his Christian concubine, plus his daughter, but not his mother. The matter was, however, of more than academic interest when gunmen took over the Westgate shopping centre in Nairobi. According to witnesses, members of the public were lined up and then gunned down if they failed to name the mother of the founder of Islam or recite verses from the Koran. Those lucky enough to be able to speak Arabic — possibly passages from the Koran — were let go. The rest were fair game. Now, whatever else

Ed West Ed West

The silence of our friends – the extinction of Christianity in the Middle East

The last month and a half has seen perhaps the worst anti-Christian violence in Egypt in seven centuries, with dozens of churches torched. Yet the western media has mainly focussed on army assaults on the Muslim Brotherhood, and no major political figure has said anything about the sectarian attacks. Last week at the National Liberal Club there was a discussion asking why the American and British press have ignored or under-reported this persecution, and (in some people’s minds) given a distorted narrative of what is happening. Among the four speakers was the frighteningly impressive Betsy Hiel of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, who has spent years in Egypt and covered Iraq and Afghanistan.

Thursday

Charles Moore

Charles Moore’s notes: Liberal-leaning Muslims are the people most opposed to the niqab

We are not allowed to know any details about the Muslim woman, charged with intimidating a witness, who has been ordered to take off her full-face veil to give evidence in court. But when it is all over, it will not be surprising if she turns out to be a convert. All mainstream religions have some sort of teaching about what to wear. Within living memory, for example, it was all but compulsory for women to have their heads covered in church. But general teachings in favour of modesty have different cultural applications, and it is usually false to claim that a religion absolutely insists upon a particular garment. What

Paul Johnson

The Story of the Jews, by Simon Schama – review

The recorder of early Jewish history has two sources of evidence. One is the Bible. Its centrality was brought home to me by David Ben-Gurion when I went to see him in Jerusalem in 1957. He had a big Bible on his desk, and banged it repeatedly with his fist: There, it’s all there, the past, present and future of the Jewish people. God? Who knows God? Can you believe in someone you don’t know? But I believe in the Bible. [Bang, bang.] The Bible is a fact. [Bang.] A record and a prophecy. [Bang.] It’s all there, Mr Johnson. Read your Bible, understand your Bible, and you won’t go

Thursday

Rod Liddle

What are we supposed to say when a grooming ring comes to light?

It is a tragedy that some of us are born in the wrong times. According to that increasingly gobby conduit of right-on morality, the NSPCC, girls these days feel compelled to act like porn stars in order to ingratiate themselves with boys. I am not sure quite what, in day to day life, this involves. I only know that they made no similar attempts during my adolescence, or if they did I didn’t notice. I vaguely recall one young lady in my school class telling me, when I was 14, that she had engaged in sexual intercourse the previous night with a boy from a neighbouring town. ‘What was it

Thursday

Taki

Taki: Stephen Fry and the gay lobby should cool it over the Winter Olympics

Gstaad I’ve met Stephen Fry twice in my life, both times long ago. The first time at a dinner given by the then editor of The Spectator, Dominic Lawson, in London, and the second time in a restaurant in New York with the writers Jay McInerney and Brett Easton Ellis. The first time I was completely out of it, the second he was, hence we didn’t exactly connect. Fry has been in the news lately for demanding a boycott of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. His beef is Russian anti-gay legislation. Now there’s a hell of a lot of things that are wrong with Russia — first and

James Walton

Lion Heart by Justin Cartwright – review

Justin Cartwright is famously a fan of John Updike — and here he seems to owe a definite debt to one of his hero’s lesser known novels. In Memories of the Ford Administration, Updike interwove the sexual adventures of a 1970s history professor with substantial chunks from the professor’s notes on President James Buchanan, a man whose life Updike had earlier researched for his only play. In Lion Heart, Richard Cathar, an Oxford postgraduate and somewhat solemn philanderer, provides similarly lengthy extracts from his investigations into Richard I and the fate of the True Cross — which were also the subjects of a 2001 TV documentary by Justin Cartwright. As

Thursday

Nick Cohen

Richard Dawkins attacks Muslim bigots, not just Christian ones. If only his enemies were as brave

It’s August, and you are a journalist stuck in the office without an idea in your head. What to write? What to do? Your empty mind brings you nothing but torment, until a thought strikes you, ‘I know, I’ll do Richard Dawkins.’ Dawkins is the sluggish pundit’s dream. It does not matter which paper you work for. Editors of all political persuasions and none will take an attack on Darwin’s representative on earth. With the predictability of the speaking clock, Owen Jones, the Peter Hitchens of the left, thinks the same as Craig Brown, Private Eye’s high Tory satirist. Tom Chivers, the Telegraph’s science blogger, says the same as Andrew

Thursday

Shiraz Maher

How the Egyptian army handed the Muslim Brotherhood a victory

You don’t have to be a supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood’s clerical fashion to recoil at the draconian treatment of its members yesterday. Indeed, some reports now suggest that more than 500 people were killed with thousands more injured. By conspiring against it the army has inadvertently handed the Muslim Brotherhood a remarkable victory. Before he was forced from office, Mohammed Muris’s administration was failing in almost every respect. That is why ordinary Egyptians railed against it with the slogan ‘bread not beards.’ Even when those protests intensified there was value in letting Mursi’s administration run a little longer, if only to illuminate the full extent of its shortcomings. Then,

Wednesday

Shiraz Maher

The Muslim Brotherhood’s fight for existence

Speak to members of the Muslim Brotherhood and you get a sense of just how imperilled they feel. Ever since Mohammed Mursi was overthrown, members of the group have come to believe they’re engaged in a fight for the Muslim Brotherhood’s existence. Indeed, there is a popular perception among Brotherhood members that the entire movement’s trajectory will be determined by what transpires in Egypt now. Western governments have traditionally indulged themselves with the fantasy of a stratified Brotherhood consisting of ‘extreme’ and ‘moderate’ elements. This view confuses strategic pragmatism with ideology. Focus on the group’s core beliefs and what you’re left with is a unified movement striving for the same

Monday

Ed West

The name game

The ONS have published its list of popular names, and so it’s time for that annual ritual of debating whether Mohammed, if you include all eight spellings, is really the most popular name in Britain. It depends; if you include spelling variations in a name, do you also include diminutives, in which case Oliver and Ollie, and Henry and Harry, outnumber all Mo’s. But then diminutives are sort of separate names where variations are not, Isabella, Lisa and Jack all having started as diminutives, now surely names in their own right. Why on earth does this pedantry pop up? Whether you think Mohammed tops the list says a lot about

Sunday

Rod Liddle

British jihadis, go to Yemen

The British embassy in Yemen is to be closed for a couple of days because the Americans have got wind of a terrorist threat. The Foreign Office has gone so far as to urge all Britons to leave the fractious, arid, maniac-bedevilled wasteland right now. I think they should stay where they are. Any Britons visiting Yemen are either mentally ill or actually involved in plotting the very terrorist violence the FCO is worried about. If only we could persuade all of our trainee jihadis to export their talents to this desolate agglomeration of rocks and sand, Britain would be a happier and safer place to live in.

Thursday

Con Coughlin

Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood should have learnt from Nasser

Egypt used to be good at revolutions. When Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Free Officers overthrew the monarchy in July 1952, hardly a shot was fired in anger, and jubilant crowds took to the streets of Cairo chanting ‘Long live the revolution’. Even the deposed King Farouq seemed to agree that Nasser had done the right thing. As the doleful monarch prepared to sail off into exile aboard the royal yacht Mahroussa from Alexandria, to the resounding echo of a 21-gun salute, Farouq cryptically remarked to General Muhammad Naguib, the head of the Egyptian armed forces, ‘You’ve done what I always intended to do myself.’ The creation of the Egyptian republic was

Charlotte Keenan

Tunisia is not following Egypt’s path

In recent days Tunisia has seen major unrest after the assassination of opposition leader Mohamed Brahmi. Faced with growing unrest over a faltering economy and rising violence by extremists, Tunisia’s moderate Islamist led government is facing its biggest test. But this is not Egypt. Nascent democracies in the region are not acting in a uniform fashion. Each has political and socio-economic issues that make them unique. But what unites the new democracies in the region is an urgent need to accommodate the religious and secular communities in their new democratic systems. Many thought the Arab uprisings would marginalise religion’s impact in those countries. But this simply isn’t the case. The

Sebastian Payne

The View from 22 — Twitter abuse wars, Theresa vs Boris and Egypt’s Arab winter

Will online abuse and trolling ever be stopped? On this week’s View from 22 podcast, Hugo Rifkind discusses his Spectator column on the subject with Helen Lewis of the New Statesman. They ask if trolling has got better or worse? What, if anything, can or should be done about ‘morons’ who mindlessly attack people? And should politicians — like Stella Creasy — be influencing the moderation policies of social networks like Twitter? James Forsyth and Toby Young discuss the next Tory leadership battle: Theresa May vs. Boris Johnson. James reports that these two top Tories are jostling to succeed David Cameron, even though the PM is expected to be in