Islam

Next month the Islamist preacher Anjem Choudary will be released from prison, having served just half of his five-and-a-half-year sentence. He was jailed for his role in encouraging Muslims to join Islamic State. At the time of his sentencing in 2016, the judge described the hate preacher as ‘calculating’ and ‘dangerous’. The Justice Secretary, Rory Stewart, echoed that verdict earlier this month, calling Choudary ‘deeply pernicious’ and a ‘destabilising influence’. His views remain the same; his status as a martyr — at least in the eyes of his followers — is assured; and his hatred of Britain is more ferocious than before. He will emerge as a greater menace than

The story of Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan is an interesting one, I think, for what it tells us about the right, the left and human nature. These two youngish people — both 29, one of them a vegan, the other a vegetarian — jacked in their wonkish jobs in Washington DC in order to experience the world in all its glory. Their itinerary included dangerous areas — or at least areas deemed dangerous by western governments with an axe to grind. As Jay put it: ‘People, the narrative goes, are not to be trusted. People are bad. People are evil. I don’t buy it. Evil is a make-believe concept

The crowd were singing ‘Oh, Jeremy Corbyn’ again, at a festival in Cornwall, the words appended to a riff by the White Stripes which I once liked but now find a little nauseating. Vacuous, dimbo, middle-class millennials and — worse — their stupid, indulgent parents, all waving their hands in the air for Jezza. Meanwhile, the rest of us were trying to work out if Jeremy is a sort of even more retarded Forrest Gump and thus the most stupid man ever to lead a political party in the history of our nation, or something altogether more sinister. I had always cleaved to the former point of view — and

By now you’ve probably heard of Marie Laguerre. The 22-year-old student was punched in the face last week by a passer-by, a sickening attack that was caught on CCTV and has since gone viral. It’s caused uproar around the world, and is being seen as evidence of the physical and verbal abuse with which Frenchwomen have to contend all too often. Laguerre was struck because she gave short shrift to the obscene comments of a man who crossed her path on a busy Parisian street. Marlène Schiappa, France’s gender equality minister, described the incident as an assault on the “freedom of women”; Schiappa deserves much praise for her dominant role in

For the last four months, Oxford professor Tariq Ramadan has been rotting in a French jail, like Jean Valjean. He stands accused of rape by several women who came forward during the #MeToo scandal. One says that in a hotel room in Paris in the spring of 2012, the world-renowned Swiss scholar of Islam “choked me so hard that I thought I was going to die”. Another has reportedly described “blows to the face and body, forced sodomy, rape with an object and various humiliations, including being dragged by the hair to the bathtub and urinated on”. If Ramadan is guilty of these despicable acts, he must face the full

Is it all right for the Muslim parents of children at British state schools to prevent their sons and daughters from being friends with non-Muslim kids? And is it sensible? These questions have been knocking around my head like a pair of trapped moths, unable to find a way out. Quite by coincidence and on separate occasions, in the past month I’ve met two (non-Muslim) women whose children have had trouble at Muslim-dominated state schools. The kids made friends easily in their first term, said the mothers, but as the months went by it became harder to stay pals. Their schoolmates never invited them home, nor would they come round

In all the agonising about Islamism, and what to do about it, it would be a mistake to forget a very useful fact: that Britain has a special relationship with Islam and has done for centuries. The friendship with Islam is unique. Spain was home to Andalusia, a Muslim empire for 700 years. The Germans, Poles and Austrians saw off Turkish Muslim invaders in the Siege of Vienna in 1529 and then again at the Battle of Vienna in 1683. The French lived in the shadow of 732 and the Battle of Poitiers. Britain alone, cut off from Catholic Europe, forged a relationship with Muslims built on trade, the rule