Islam

Twenty minutes into what seemed a routine softball literary interview for Bloomberg TV in London last month, the conversation took a prickly turn. My interviewer had tripped across some remark in one of my podcast appearances that set her off. So much for talking about my new novel. For the following 20 minutes, leaning over the table and poking at the air between us, she proceeded to hector me about why I seemed to discuss Muslims in general terms rather than as individuals. I objected that she was being disingenuous. Journalists regularly address issues involving groups of people in general terms. (For an opinion piece, I’m to interview all two

Rough justice Sir: The Church Commissioners’ plan to establish a £100 million (rising to £1 billion) fund for ‘reparative justice’ is indeed ‘the most egregious example of lanyard Anglicanism’ as your leading article says (‘Laud’s prayer’, 11 October). It is deeply flawed in conception, substance and process – and is especially ill-judged when parish clergy are atrociously paid and many parishes face an existential crisis. The critique made by the Policy Exchange paper ‘The Case Against Reparations’, written by Professor Lord Biggar, Dr Alka Sehgal Cuthbert and me, is reasonably well known. What is less appreciated is that since at least May last year, the Commissioners have known they have

With a new history of slavery and the slave trade in the Islamic world just published, I am under strict instructions not to make any fatwa-related jokes. The Holy Trinity, if I can mix my faith metaphors for a moment, of publisher, agent and wife have advised me strongly against it. ‘No jokes about fatwas, please,’ were my wife’s exact words ahead of an appearance at Chalke History Festival. ‘No one finds them funny.’ I disagree. They can be extremely funny. But on balance it may be wisest to err on the side of caution. After three weeks in the curiously bland Nigerian capital of Abuja, much of it holed

Did you take part in any of the mysterious commemorations last weekend? The newspapers were full of it – something called 7/7, apparently. I read a long report on the BBC’s website about this tragedy but remained entirely unclear as to who killed the people on those trains and bus. The report said ‘bombs were detonated’ on the Tube, as if the bombs – anxious to fulfil their purpose in life – had blown themselves up, without the aid of any external agency. Nowhere in the report did it mention who brought the bombs down from Yorkshire and then set them off. Nowhere in the entire article were the words

Britain without blasphemy laws is a surprisingly recent development. Blasphemy was abolished as a common law offence in England and Wales only in 2008 and in Scotland in 2021. But that was the final burial of a law dead for much longer. The last execution for the crime was in 1697; the last imprisonment in 1921; and the last successful trial in 1977 – Mary Whitehouse’s prosecution of Gay News for publishing a poem about a centurion’s rape of Christ’s corpse. Even if 11 local councils banned Monty Python’s Life of Brian two years later, the trend since has been towards trusting that the Almighty is big enough to fend

In its infinite wisdom, the Labour government appears to be reconsidering the introduction of a blasphemy law in the UK. It has picked up this idea despite it being so idiotic that it was even rejected by the last Conservative government. That well-known theologian Angela Rayner has decided to set up a council to look into the question of ‘Islamophobia’. As mentioned, there was a push to do this during the Conservative era, when a committee including some of the worst people then in public life – Dominic Grieve, Naz Shah, Anna Soubry – looked into the same thing. Their scholarship foundered, as it always will, on how you protect

In Michel Houellebecq’s satirical novel Soumission, the French elite submits to Islamic rule rather than accept a National Front government. Nine years after its publication, submission seems more imminent on this side of the English Channel. My American friends are surprised to learn there’s no equivalent to the First Amendment in Britain. They have forgotten a free press was one of the things their ancestors rebelled to establish in the US. Free speech is a much more recent thing in the UK. If it was born in the 1960s, it seems to be dying in the 2020s. If free speech in the UK was born in the 1960s, it seems