Islam

Tuesday

Theo Hobson

Saint Joan is the perfect religious play for our ignorant era

From our UK edition

The chief appeal of Saint Joan, which I saw last night at the Donmar, is that it is a brilliant vehicle for a young actress. Gemma Arterton is great, if a little too mature and attractive to convey teenage innocence. Otherwise, I don’t quite see the point of George Bernard Shaw's play, and wonder why it is regularly revived in our time. Does it have anything intelligent to say about religion? It romanticises a medieval mystic who took up arms – which has rather little to do with contemporary Christianity. At one point it suggests that her stubborn individualism is the source of Protestantism, but this is muddled in various ways.

Saturday

Matt Ridley

A new puritanism explains why some feminists are making common cause with Islam

From our UK edition

The bicoastal elite might be more effective in opposing Mr Trump if it weren’t obsessed with the persecution of anybody who says the wrong thing. ‘While you self-involved fools were policing the language at the Kids’ Choice Awards,’ raged the broadcaster Bill Maher last week, ‘a madman talked his way into the White House.’ This new puritanism must explain why some feminists make common cause with Islam. One of the Women’s March organisers was Linda Sarsour, a defender of sharia law, which is misogynism incarnate.

Friday

Gavin Mortimer

The Louvre attack is a reminder that Islamic extremism hasn’t disappeared

From our UK edition

Friday morning's attack in Paris in which a machete-wielding man was shot and wounded in the stomach by a French soldier after he injured another soldier near the Louvre museum is the first terrorist incident in France since July. Then two teenagers murdered an elderly priest in his Normandy church, an attack that shocked and repulsed in equal measure. While the full details of Friday's incident are still to emerge, it hasn't the hallmarks of a determined and well-organised attack. There were no explosives in the two backpacks recovered at the scene and launching oneself at two armed soldiers holding just a machete is frightening but foolhardy. Nonetheless, interior minister Bruno Le Roux rightly lauded the 'sangfroid and professionalism' of the soldiers involved.

Damian Thompson

Is Trump turning Islam into America’s ‘Great Satan’?

From our UK edition

President Trump has a 'dark vision' of America under siege from radical Islam, says the New York Times – and that vision is now radically reshaping the policies of the United States. Hence the 'Muslim travel ban', as it's still being called, despite the protestations of the administration that it's nothing of the sort. Fear of Islam is now thoroughly entrenched in America: there's no doubt about that. It preoccupies Evangelical Christians and the much smaller constituency of white nationalists (some of whom used to admire jihadist Islam for its zero tolerance of Jews and gays before morphing into passionate if unconvincing Zionists).

Thursday

Matt Ridley

Diary – 2 February 2017

From our UK edition

 ‘A Bill to confer power on the prime minister to notify, under Article 50(2)…’. When it comes to the House of Lords, some of those trying to amend or delay the bill will be paid pensioners of the European Commission. Peers are obliged to declare any interest that ‘might be thought by a reasonable member of the public’ to influence the way they discharge their parliamentary duties — unless it is an EU pension. In 2007, a Lords subcommittee said that because their contracts oblige them to support the EU, an EC pensioner who made ‘intemperate criticism of the commission’ would have contravened their obligations under the Treaty of Rome ‘and therefore could in theory damage his pension’.

Molly Guinness

Agonised questions

From our UK edition

It’s terribly difficult to write a novel about soul-searching, and Elif Shafak has come up with a rather clever device to do so: Peri grows up in Istanbul listening to her parents fighting about religion. Solemn, naive and tortured, she gets a place at Oxford, where she makes friends with Mona, who wears a headscarf and feels persecuted, and Shirin, who enjoys drinking and sex and says things like ‘We Muslims are going through an identity crisis. Especially the women…Eat your heart out Jean-Paul Sartre! Get a load of this! We have an existential crisis like you’ve never seen!’ They all study under the handsome and wayward Professor Azur, who gives seminars about God. The scene is set for a romantic crisis.

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

My pick for the pious political hypocrite of the week award

From our UK edition

I would like to propose Labour MP Tulip Siddiq as the winner of the pious political hypocrite of the week badge for her response to President Trump’s temporary immigration halt. From today’s Guardian we learn that Ms Siddiq is one of a number of Labour MPs who have warned that the UK Prime Minister’s allegedly ‘feeble’ response to President Trump’s recent immigration order risks making UK Muslim communities feel ‘disenfranchised and disillusioned.’ Apparently the consequences of this failure could be ‘played out on our streets’ and ‘turning a blind eye to the reality of this ban we run the risk of losing the trust of an entire generation of young British Muslims.

Tuesday

Matt Purple

Trump’s ‘Muslim ban’ is nothing of the sort, but what the hell is going on?

From our UK edition

Among Donald Trump’s many neologisms is the 'What the hell is going on' evidentiary standard. It was introduced by Trump during his presidential campaign as his biggest dare yet: 'a complete and total shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on'. A high hurdle to clear, no doubt, and a controversial idea. Whether it would ever be implemented was unknown—after Trump’s election the Muslim ban was scrubbed from his website, then restored, with a spokesman blaming a technical glitch. Now we have our answers. Fleshed into public policy, figuring out 'what the hell is going on' means the government reviewing the security of America’s immigration system.

Thursday

Ian Buruma

Orange alert | 26 January 2017

From our UK edition

That the US should have elected as president someone like Donald Trump came as a shock. But the US is a strange country, given to periodic outbursts of political madness — though perhaps never quite as mad as this. That the Dutch, often caricatured as pragmatic, bourgeois, phlegmatic, business-minded, tolerant and perhaps a little boring, might in March pick a party led by a vulgar rabble-rouser with dyed blond hair to be the biggest in the land is more surprising. But the rise of Geert Wilders, leader (and only official member) of the Freedom party, shows how populism is sweeping across the Netherlands too. Wilders was one of the main attractions at the recent far-right jamboree in Koblenz, where he hailed Brexit, Donald Trump and what he called the Patriotic Spring in Europe.

Boyd Tonkin

Dangerous liaisons | 26 January 2017

From our UK edition

In a Kashmiri apple orchard, a young fugitive from the Indian army’s cruel oppressions spots a snake that has ‘mistaken its tail for a separate creature’ and started to devour itself. Imran, a.k.a. ‘Moscow’, will later break away from the equally barbaric Islamist insurgents who prey on his rage and grief, flee to Pakistan, and there meet the other protagonists of this fifth novel by Nadeem Aslam. Although The Golden Legend has plenty of passages of exposition and argument, Aslam shines above all as the fabricator of radiant images that tell a story in themselves.

Thursday

James Delingpole

Dual control | 19 January 2017

From our UK edition

Revolting (Tuesdays) is the BBC2 comedy series that spawned the now-infamous sketch ‘Real Housewives of Isis’. It has been watched on the BBC’s Facebook page nearly 30 million times and rightly so because it is fearless, funny and near the knuckle. A pastiche of reality TV shows set in places like Beverly Hills, the sketch depicts three young British jihadi brides brightly discussing their domestic lives in some Raqqa-like hellhole. ‘Ali bought me a new chain,’ boasts one, ‘which is eight feet long. So I can almost get outside, which is great.’ Cue shot of black-hijabed housewife lurching towards the doorway of her bombed-out home, dragging the cooker to which she has been leashed.

Wednesday

Gavin Mortimer

Unlike Merkel, Trump understands the Islamist threat to the West

From our UK edition

The reaction in Europe to Donald Trump's recent remarks critical of the continent was all too predictable. It was an echo of the response when, following the Islamic terror attacks in November 2015 that left 130 Parisians dead, Trump said: 'Paris is no longer the same city it was....they have sections in Paris that are radicalised, where the police refuse to go there. They're petrified.' On that occasion the liberal media and the French Establishment reacted with outrage, rejecting the idea that the Republic had lost control of parts of Paris. The mayor, Anne Hidalgo, even threatened legal action against Fox News when they repeated Trump's assertion. Now it's Angela Merkel who is up in arms.

Thursday

Gavin Mortimer

François Fillon could become the face of France’s Catholic revival

From our UK edition

It strikes me that it's not much fun being a Catholic in France these days. Strolling back to my apartment in Paris on Christmas Eve, for example, I passed my local church. Inside a midnight Mass was in progress; outside a policeman stood guard. It was the same across France, an army of gun-toting men and women protecting the nation's cathedrals and churches. They'll be back at Easter, and on the Ascension and the Assumption. For how long? Who knows how long the country that is known as 'the eldest daughter of the church' because of its Christian heritage will need to protect its flock. There's been just one fatal attack on a church in France since the Islamists began their terror campaign, the brutal slaying of an 84-year-old priest in his Normandy church last July.

Friday

Damian Thompson

How mass immigration is turning London back into a religious city

From our UK edition

The bewildering influx of immigrants into London has had one effect that no one could have predicted 20 years ago: it's making our capital city religious again. We've noticed – but only up to a point. Islam is visible: the women in niqabs, the new mosques, the Halal butchers. But the transformation of Christianity in London is harder to spot. If you asked the average Londoner how many Sunday churchgoers in the city were black, I suspect he or she would be startled by the answer: about half of them. My guest on this week's Holy Smoke podcast is Ben Judah, whose knowledge of the demography of London was picked up by living in and among immigrant communities while researching his eye-opening book This is London.

Saturday

Ed West

How the Catholic Church created democracy

From our UK edition

Going to spend Christmas with relatives you don't really like? Well, you can thank God you only have to see them once a year rather than living as an extended family. Or more precisely you can thank the Catholic Church, without whom you'd all still be in the same house as your uncles and aunties and marrying your cousin. It is reasonably well known that the medieval Church's ban on cousin marriage helped to make western Europe less clannish; but according to an interesting new paper from Nottingham University, by doing this the Catholic Church actually laid the foundations of democracy. The author, Jonathan F Schulz, argues: 'The role of the family as one of the most fundamental institution for human society is unquestionable.

Thursday

Gavin Mortimer

Islamofascism and appeasement are the biggest dangers facing the West

From our UK edition

The appeasers, apologists and 'useful idiots' have been out in force over the festive season, busily lighting candles, declaring 'Ich Bin Ein Berliner' and proclaiming that the murderous attack on the Christmas market had nothing to do either with Islam or mass immigration. Thinking of them prompted me to pluck from my shelf one of my favourite books, a slim tome entitled 'Ourselves and Germany', written in the winter of 1937 by the Marquess of Londonderry. Otherwise known as Charles Stewart Henry Vane-Tempest-Stewart, or 'Charley' to his pals, the Marquess could neither write well nor read men well, but his book is nonetheless riveting. It's a timeless reminder of where an educated man's moral cowardice and intellectual stupidity can lead.

Douglas Murray

The predictable Muslim ‘good news stories’ have arrived

From our UK edition

Since my Tuesday piece on the Berlin attack – when, as the BBC is still saying, a lorry ‘went on a rampage’ in the city – a number of readers have asked if I could give them this week’s lottery numbers. It is true that much of what I predicted has already come true. For instance, I anticipated that by Christmas Day at the very latest a group of Muslims from the incredibly small and very persecuted (by other Muslims) Ahmadiyya sect would pop up at a church in Germany and that the media would report it as ‘Muslims’ doing this. This particular ‘Muslim good news story’ actually happened faster than even I had guessed.

Sunday

Gavin Mortimer

Marine Le Pen promises to drive the Machos from the Mosques

From our UK edition

The National Front were out in force at my local Parisian market on Saturday. A coterie of volunteers handing out leaflets with suitably festive bonhomie. I took one from a smiling middle-aged woman. It was titled ‘Au Nom Du Peuple’ and there was a photograph of the party's leader, Marine Le Pen, looking pensive. She's dropped the surname for her election campaign. It's deemed too toxic, what with her reptilian father's reputation for playing down the holocaust and playing up the sins of homosexuality. There's a message from Marine at the top of the page, an extract from a speech she gave in September this year. ‘Nobody should ignore that this presidential election is about an inescapable choice,’ she said during an address at Frejus on the Côte d'Azur.

Saturday

Rob Crilly

Not all Muslims are despairing at a Donald Trump presidency

From our UK edition

The immediate aftermath of Donald Trump's surprise election victory brought a slew of comparisons with 9/11. In New York, my liberal friends waking up on 11/9 said they experienced the same range of emotions. You will have seen the stories of commuters weeping on the subway, colleges offering counselling to students and a general sentiment that life would never be the same again. Therapists reported an overwhelming sense of grief among their clients as they tried to process their world turned upside down. Robert de Niro chipped in, telling the Hollywood Reporter: 'I feel like I did after 9/11.

Thursday

Hanif Kureishi

A radical mistake

From our UK edition

In the early 1990s, after the shock of the 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie, I began to do some research among those who condemned him, and learned that a strange thing was happening among young British Muslim men and women. I first wrote about this strange thing in my novel The Black Album, which concerns a young man who comes to London from the provinces to study and finds himself caught between the sex-and-ecstasy-stimulated hedonism of the late 1980s and the nascent fundamentalist movement. At the end of the novel the Asian kids — as they were called then — burn The Satanic Verses and attack a bookshop. I followed this up with a story published in the New Yorker, ‘My Son The Fanatic’.