Islam

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

A number of columnists have written recently about how we have all misunderstood ‘the Arab Spring’. Most prevalent among them has been the claim that when the current youth-bulge in these countries grows up they will in fact turn into capitalist entrepreneurs. I concede that it is possible. It would certainly be highly desirable. But as an idea it ignores the thing which secular Western commentators continuously ignore: that is the small matter of ideology. On this note, might I heartily recommend the following two videos?  The first is a recent Friday sermon from the Egyptian cleric Muhammad Zoghbi calling on Allah to annihilate the Jews and the Shiites. Viewers will

Last month I wrote a post arguing that an awful lot of opinion polling is worthless. The public mood matters – and measuring it is important – but when it comes to the detail of actual government policy the public is, generally speaking, clueless. Well, whaddyaknow, but here’s a new Ipsos-Mori survey which confirms my suspicions. The Great British Public may have many virtues and they may be able to tell you that poor Mr Clegg is a wrong ‘un but when you peak beneath the bonnet you begin to fear that newspaper comment threads may not be quite as unrepresentative of the general public as you’d like to think

The long lazy summer is upon us, and as I walk the Swiss hills below the mountain ranges my thoughts are always of the past, the long hot summers of long ago, girls in their pretty dresses, my father in his whites sailing around the Saronic Bay with a ball-and-chain standard flying from his main mast. It meant ‘Wife on board’, which really meant: when I drop anchor in some nearby port, local talent should stay away. Dad was famous, infamous rather, for flying that ensign, because he loved partying with loose women on his boat, and, during the rare occasions my mother would come on board, he didn’t want

There’s a joke doing the rounds in Tahrir Square which goes like this: ‘Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak all tried to destroy the Muslim Brotherhood, but only Mursi succeeded’. As protests against the world’s oldest Islamist party intensify, the Brotherhood is now learning the price of power after decades of being confined to the political wilderness. On the one hand there are very obvious reasons for the current discontent. Egypt’s fortunes have tanked since the revolution with its economy stagnating, rising inflation, increased corruption, and the near disappearance of its tourist industry. For all those invested in the revolution that swept away Hosni Mubarak it was never meant to be like

Ever since the Woolwich murder I’ve noticed an upsurge in the use of what is now my least favourite cant phrase – ‘community cohesion’. Political cant proliferates when theory fails to match reality, and today we have a diverse and vibrant array of words and phrases that mean two contradictory things at once, and also nothing. It’s important to talk about community cohesion because diversity is our strength, and also our weakness, and should be celebrated, and policed. Community cohesion also has a darker Singaporean edge. In Singapore, the world’s first truly multicultural modern state, speeches and broadcasts can be arbitrarily shut down if community leaders believe them to be