Islam

Thursday

Kim Sengupta

Monumental heroes

Leptis Magna was deserted when I last visited — no wonder. Tourists daren’t visit Libya these days and so I had the ruins to myself. I climbed the steps of the vast Roman theatre, looked out to where the Wadi Lebda meets the sea, then stopped. Men with AK-47s. My immediate fear was that they were Islamic State. Isis move closer to Leptis Magna every day and it would make sense for this most spectacular site to be next on their hit list. Their last great coup was on the other side of the Med, when they blew up the Temple of Baal Shamin in Palmyra, known as ‘the Pearl

Wednesday

Sughra Ahmed

Take it from a Muslim: British coronations should be Christian

In 2012 as the Jubilee celebrations began, I was honoured to meet the Queen twice. At Lambeth Palace, three Muslim colleagues and I presented Her Majesty with a decorative frame with Quranic text embroidered on a cloth that had once been used to cover the holiest of Muslim sites, the Kaaba. I met her again shortly afterwards, when she came with the newly-married Duchess of Cambridge to Leicester cathedral to begin her Jubilee tour. Our meeting came sixty years after the young princess became Queen Elizabeth II, following her coronation in Westminster Abbey with St Edward’s Crown. The service was three hours long and attended by 8,000 guests. It now feels like it belongs to a

Brendan O’Neill

Why does the left care more about Islamophobia than anti-Semitism?

Why do leftists care more about Muslims than they do about Jews? If that sounds confrontational, consider this: this week, the Met Police released the latest hate-crime figures for London. They show that offences against Jews have risen by 93% over the past year, while offences against Muslims have risen by 70%. And guess which story the BBC, Guardian and Independent, those voices of the British liberal conscience, have chosen to flag up? Yep, the 70% hike in Islamophobic attacks, not the nearly 100% hike in anti-Semitic offences. The BBC’s headline is ‘Islamophobic crime in London “up by 70%”‘. The Guardian‘s is ‘Hate crimes against Muslims soar in London’. The

Monday

Ed West

The short road from anti-Westernism to anti-Semitism

Corbynmania has unleashed a great feeling of hope and change in the British public, especially among people hoping to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. Whether or not Jezza can be blamed for his links to activists with fascinating, esoteric views of the second world war, the accusations have focused attention on one particular aspect of 21st century politics: anti-Semitism on the left. My colleague, Hugo Rifkind, raised the issue last week and has since enjoyed a lot of light-hearted, knock-about anti-Semitic banter. For example, here and here. Great stuff guys! I laughed, but anti-Semitism can be darkly funny as long as it’s spoken by the powerless and ineffective.

Tuesday

Ross Clark

Muhammad really is the single most popular boys’ name in England and Wales

Why doesn’t the Office of National Statistics want us to know that Mohammed is the most popular boys’ name in England and Wales?  Yesterday, it put out its annual survey of the top 10 baby’s names.  In 2014, it reported, the most popular boys’ names were Oliver, Jack and Harry. This contrasts somewhat with a similar survey by the website BabyCentre last December which claimed that the most popular boys’ name was now Mohammed. When that survey was reported in the Daily Mail it was jumped upon by various left-wing ‘fact-checker’ websites who denounced the survey as an abuse of statistics. Not only were the figures based only on respondents

Friday

Douglas Murray

Muslims in the UK are attacking mosques. Does that make them Islamophobic?

The Times today reports that leading Muslim clerics in the UK are warning that ‘religious sectarianism is on the rise in Britain’s Muslim community and threatens to spill over into violent crime and terrorism’.  An investigation by the paper ‘found a sharp but largely hidden rise in sectarian tensions between the minority Shia community and the dominant Sunni groups’. I must say that I am shocked – really shocked – by this.  Like everyone else, I had always assumed that if you allowed very large numbers of people with totally different beliefs into this country then in no time they would be down the local pub and fully integrated loyal

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

Taleban

Toxic virus or Taleban: it’s funny how the mild-mannered Liz Kendall has attracted for her Blairite associations the most violently pejorative terms. Hardly had the Labour leadership contest begun before her allies were being called ‘Taleban New Labour’. No one thought New Labour was really much like the Taleban. That’s why the metaphor was effective: it suggested generalised maleficence. Many people presume that the Taleban is some immemorial movement within Islam, like the Hanbali school or the Wahhabi sect. But it dates back no more than 20 years, to the exiles who returned to Afghanistan having developed strict practices while students of Islamic law in Pakistan. Talib, more fully talib

Kim Sengupta

Who’s running Libya?

When I covered Libya’s revolution in 2011, I had a driver named Mashallah. Mashallah was a decent and stoical man with an interesting propensity for malapropisms. He was regarded with fondness by us journalists — so when I decided to return to Libya recently, I sent him an email: did he want to work for me again? Unfortunately, replied Mashallah, he was in Paris. This seemed strange. How would he have got a French visa? I emailed again suggesting another week and received another profound apology. That week he was going on to Ankara and Istanbul. A quick look online solved the mystery. My former driver Mashallah Zwai is now

Thursday

Owen Matthews

Putin and the polygamists

Homosexuality may not be tolerated in today’s Russia, nor political dissent. Polygamy, though, is a different matter. Ever since news broke this summer of a 57-year-old police chief in Chechnya bullying a 17-year-old local girl into becoming his second wife, Russian nationalists and Islamic leaders alike have been lining up to call for a man’s right to take more than one wife. Most vocal has been Ramzan Kadyrov, the flamboyant 38-year-old president of Chechnya (part of the Russian Federation), who advocates polygamy as part of ‘traditional Muslim culture’. Veteran ultranationalist politician Vladimir Zhironovsky has long held that polygamy is the solution for ‘Russia’s 10 million unmarried women’. And even Senator

Tuesday

Douglas Murray

Here’s more evidence that the left might be screwed

Friends of mine who still call themselves ‘liberals’ or ‘leftists’ occasionally confide in me that they think the left might be screwed.  Depending on how I feel on that particular day I tend to reply either that (a) they must stay and fight their political corner and make the left decent again or (b) one day they will realise that this is because the left is wrong. Anyhow – evidence for the (b) answer seems to grow by the day. The Labour leadership race aside, consider the Guardian newspaper, which is a pretty good weathervane for what has gone wrong with the left.  In the last fortnight the paper has

Monday

Ed West

The Islamic historian who can explain why some states fail and others succeed

I have a new Kindle Single out, an essay on the 14th century Islamic historian Ibn Khaldun, who can rightly claim to be called the ‘father of social science’. Ibn Khaldun is underrated in the west, compared to the other great philosophers and historians of the ages, but he enjoys a cult following because his central theory of human society seems ever more relevant today – that is, asabiyyah, or ‘group feeling’. Group feeling explains why the individual-centred western worldview has proved so inadequate in explaining things since the fall of Communism, especially in the Middle East. Born in Tunis on May 27, 1332, Ibn Khaldun pioneered the fields of

Thursday

James Delingpole

A twinge of fear, and a glimpse of a harsher world

I celebrated Eid in a sandy bay in Sri Lanka, watching from the warm, shallow sea as gaggles of local Muslims in holiday mood sauntered past to congregate at the public end of the beach about half a mile away. Since they looked so much more colourful, picturesque and exotic than the tourists in the security-guarded enclave where I was, I thought I’d wander down to take a few snaps. Having just finished Ramadan, they were all very excited — the young men especially. Suddenly, as if from nowhere, a group of dark-skinned boys with wispy beards, bare-chested but in long trousers, had surrounded me. ‘Selfie!’ one of them said —

Tom Miller

The crackdown that backfired

In October 2013, a jeep ploughed through a crowd of pedestrians on the edge of Tiananmen Square, crashed and burst into flames, killing five people. The authorities identified the driver as Uighur, a member of an Islamic ethnic minority hailing from China’s northwest region of Xinjiang. Six months later, eight knife-wielding Uighurs rampaged through a packed railway station in Kunming in southwest China, killing 29 people and wounding more than 140 others — an attack described by the national media as ‘China’s 9/11’. Beijing blamed both attacks on radical Islamist organisations pursuing what it calls the ‘three evils’: terrorism, separatism and religious extremism. It claims terrorists are attempting to create

Thursday

Douglas Murray

Je Suis Charlie? Even Charlie Hebdo has now surrendered to Islamic extremism

Bad news from the continent.  In an interview with the German weekly Stern, Laurent ‘Riss’ Sourisseau, the editor-in-chief of Charlie Hebdo, announced that he would no longer draw cartoons of any historical figure called Mohammed. This follows his former colleague Renald ‘Luz’ Luzier saying a couple of months back that he would no longer draw Mohammed either. ‘Luz’ announced that he was leaving the magazine shortly afterwards. I don’t judge either of them for this decision. ‘Luz’ happened to be running late for work on the morning that the Kouachi brothers forced their way into the Charlie Hebdo offices and started shooting his colleagues.  ‘Riss’ was in the office and

Damian Thompson

Swedish nationalists plan a gay pride march through a Muslim area, hoping for trouble

I haven’t seen this reported in the press anywhere, but in Sweden the right-wing nationalist Sweden Democrats are staging a gay pride march featuring men kissing each other. Why? Simple: the July 29 march will pass through areas of northern Stockholm where Muslims make up a majority of the population – 75 per cent, according to some accounts. So there will be trouble. Which is the whole point of the exercise. The Sweden Democrats won 13 per cent of the vote in the 2014 general election and have 49 per seats in parliament on an anti-Muslim manifesto. The Guardian calls them ‘far-Right’, though the party claims to have moved away from its fascist roots.

Jane Kelly

Teenage terrors

One of the great moments of my student life was opening the door and seeing visitors step back, shocked. I’d shaved my hair off to an eighth of an inch. It felt like velvet but looked spiky and hard. It was all down to Ulrike Meinhof, co-founder with Andreas Baader of the Red Army Faction, who’d just hanged herself in Stammheim prison, in Germany. My friends liked my haircut as we conflated Ulrike the martyr with images of a mullet-haired Jane Fonda raising her fist against the US army on behalf of the tortured Viet Cong. I was reminded of that haircut — and my shocked visitors — by the

Wednesday

Con Coughlin

Could the Taliban become a useful ally against Islamic State?

For the better part of a decade, Nato forces fought a bitter war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, which claimed the lives of thousands of troops – including 453 members of Britain’s Armed Forces – and left thousands more seriously maimed by roadside bombs and other devilish devices. So it is perfectly understandable that anyone who has had the least dealings with this ugly conflict, from politicians to the families and friends of those who participated, should recoil in horror at reports that senior members of the Taliban are now actively participating in negotiations that could ultimately see them become members of the Afghan government. The Nato mission to Afghanistan,

Tuesday

Rod Liddle

We’ve always messed up the Middle East. Let’s stay out, for once

I suppose I should cease carping. We got a Blue Labour budget (except for the ludicrous stuff on inheritance tax), and far better than anything we would have got under my party, Labour. And at least the Prime Minister is addressing the issue of Islamic ‘extremism’. Yes, I suppose, I would concur that taking away the passports from juvenile wannabe jihadis is a good idea. Just about. A horrible part of me thinks they should be taken away once they have left the country, though. Certainly that should apply to the adults. Encourage them to go, then nullify their passports. However, to disavow our own role in facilitating the Islamic

Theo Hobson

Why we need to talk about theocracy

David Cameron is right to speak against religious extremism, even if it claims not to support violence. But what exactly is religious extremism? He defined it in opposition to British values, meaning democracy and the rule of law and so on. Maybe this is clear enough. But I think the matter can be clarified further. I think it should be defined in this way. Religious extremism idealises religious unity as the basis of good politics, and denigrates pluralism, liberal values, ‘secularism’ (in the political sense). In other words, it is theocratic religion. ‘Theocracy’ is an old-fashioned word, but I think we need to use it a lot more. It gets

Monday

Jonathan Russell

David Cameron must ally himself with moderate Muslims

Those who have been involved in counter-extremism in recent years would be forgiven for thinking that there is little new in the Prime Minister’s speech today. However, we need to remember two key things. First, that this government aims to increase the counter-extremism duties of frontline workers like teachers, so the target audience is wider UK civil society. Secondly, and this is evidenced by the Prime Minister speaking at a school in Birmingham, not at a security conference on the continent, we need to engage with the people who may be vulnerable to radicalisation in the first place. The strategy set out today, ahead of its implementation in the autumn, identified the need