Islam

Monday

Ed West

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

From our UK edition

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.

Thursday

James Delingpole

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

From our UK edition

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 — the new universal word. So we put our arms round one another’s shoulders and smiled for the phone cameras.

Tom Miller

The crackdown that backfired

From our UK edition

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.

Thursday

Douglas Murray

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

From our UK edition

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.

Damian Thompson

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

From our UK edition

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

From our UK edition

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.

Wednesday

Con Coughlin

Could the Taliban become a useful ally against Islamic State?

From our UK edition

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.

Tuesday

Rod Liddle

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

From our UK edition

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 State is evidence, to my mind, of a delusion.

Theo Hobson

Why we need to talk about theocracy

From our UK edition

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 to the heart of the matter.

Monday

Jonathan Russell

David Cameron must ally himself with moderate Muslims

From our UK edition

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.

Sebastian Payne

Theresa May on tackling extremism: ‘we’re not talking about curbing free speech’

From our UK edition

David Cameron will outline the ‘struggle of our generation’ today: tackling Islamist extremism. The Prime Minister is set to deliver a significant speech in Birmingham, where he will say ‘the root cause of the threat we face is the extremist ideology itself,' attacking those who blame the West's foreign policy for the rise of extremism. Cameron will outline the beginnings of a five-year plan to take on the 'discrimination, sectarianism and segregation' ideas of groups such as ISIL — but what action will the government's proposals entail?

Thursday

Taki

High life | 16 July 2015

From our UK edition

I have signed an affidavit for a hearing in the High Court stating that Janan Harb was, to my knowledge, married to Fahd of Saudi Arabia, who later became king of that ghastly country until he ate himself to death. His son Abdul Aziz, a fat playboy who drifts around the world with an entourage of 150 bootlickers, is challenging Janan’s claims, which, in the immortal words of Mandy Rice-Davies, ‘he would, wouldn’t he?’ Saudi camel-drivers-turned-self-proclaimed royals do not like to pay for the mess they leave behind their ample posteriors, and they definitely do not like to pay for their women. (I’ve often wondered if they really think women stay with them for their looks.

Rod Liddle

I’m emigrating to Islamic State – see ya, kafirs!

From our UK edition

I am getting heartily sick of being subjected to low-level racist and Islamophobic abuse whenever I go out wearing my black Islamic State flag. It is a very beautiful flag, symbolic of freedom and love and bears the legend: ‘There is no God but Allah and Muhammed is His Messenger’, which I hand-painted in Arabic script. (On the other side it says: ‘Nothing to do with Islam’, just so as I can hedge my bets a bit.) Anyway, walking around London with it I can report that several people looked at me funny. That’s Islamophobia for you. Also, one fairly obese man shouted, ‘Fuck off to Syria, you wanker.’ That’s racist abuse, end of.

Graham Robb

One événement after another

From our UK edition

The great conundrum of French history is the French Revolution, or rather, the sequence of revolutions, coups and insurrections during which the nation was repeatedly destroyed and recreated. How is it that a heap of cobblestones, furniture and overturned vehicles — handcarts in 1848, 2CVs in 1968 — erected at particular points on the Left Bank of Paris can bring down a régime whose domain extends from the North Sea to the Mediterranean? As Baudelaire observed when Napoleon’s nephew conducted a coup d’état in 1851 and installed himself as supreme leader, it seemed that ‘absolutely anybody, simply by seizing control of the telegraph and the national printing works, can govern a great nation’.

Wednesday

Nick Cohen

Keep the cops away from the radical clerics, be they Christian or Muslim

From our UK edition

If you want to see our grievance-ridden, huckster-driven future, looks to Northern Ireland, which has always been a world leader in the fevered politics of religious victimhood and aggression. Just as the Tories and much of the politically-correct liberal centre think they can force us to be nice by allowing the cops to arrest those who 'spread hate but do not break laws' (in George Osborne’s sinister words) so Northern Ireland has all kinds of restrictions of 'hate speech' to police its rich and diverse tradition of religious bigotry. I suppose it was inevitable that they would catch 78-year-old Pastor James McConnell of the Whitewell Metropolitan Tabernacle in North Belfast. The pastor is a protestant of the fundamentalist kind.

Thursday

Christina Lamb

Diary – 9 July 2015

From our UK edition

One strange consequence of my job as a foreign correspondent is discovering beautiful places when terrible things happen in them. So it was that I have been spending the past couple of weeks in Tunisia, a land of azure skies, whitewashed houses and apricot light which has inspired artists such as Paul Klee. That beauty — along with soft sandy beaches, local rosé and low prices — also attracted hundreds of thousands of British tourists. Not any more, after a young Tunisian took a gun from inside a beach umbrella at the resort of Sousse and slaughtered 38 holidaymakers, 30 of them British. Almost every Tunisian I met apologised on learning I was British: ‘Please don’t think Tunisians are like that — we are people of peace.

James Delingpole

Behind the Black Flag curtain

From our UK edition

So you’ve just popped out of town for the day on an errand. And when you get back, everyone has gone. Your wife, your kids, your nephews and nieces, your friends, your customers: they’ve all been kidnapped and dragged off to a place so barbarically horrible that really they’d be better off dead. Your daughter, for example. If she’s nine or over then she’s considered fair game. She’ll be sold as a slave in the market to the highest bidder — as ever, there’s a premium for blonde hair or blue eyes— after which her new owner can use her as she wishes. The very least she can expect is to have to spend her every day in the most restrictive clothing anywhere in the Muslim world.

Saturday

Brendan O’Neill

Isis aren’t the only ones guilty of censoring the past

From our UK edition

Aside from reports about terrorism, war and the Vatican cosying up to Naomi Klein, few news stories this year have upset me as much as the ones about TV Land cancelling re-runs of The Dukes of Hazzard. TV Land, an American cable channel, announced this week that it will stop showing the oh-so-1980s TV show about the Duke boys and their sheriff-dodging antics in the state of Georgia, because the car they drove — a 1969 Dodge Charger — had the Confederate flag painted on its roof. And following Confederate fan Dylann Roof’s massacre of nine black worshippers at a church in South Carolina, the Confederate flag has become object non grata, verboten, a symbol of evil whose existence we mustn’t tolerate.

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s notes | 2 July 2015

From our UK edition

‘The Greek people,’ the Financial Times leading article said on Monday, ‘would be well advised to listen closely to the words of Ms Merkel. The plebiscite will be a vote for the euro or the drachma, no less.’ It is interesting how menacing powerful ‘moderate’ institutions can become when popular feeling challenges them. In the eurozone theology to which the FT subscribes, its statement above cannot be true. It is not possible (see last week’s Notes) for a member state to leave the euro, any more than it is for Wales to renounce sterling. Eurozone membership, once achieved, is a condition of EU membership. So the Greeks cannot vote to leave the euro, unless they vote to leave the EU — which even the FT is not claiming is happening.

Ed West

Polygamy could be the next sexual liberation campaign

From our UK edition

Back in the early 1990s when the kind old 17th Duke of Norfolk was special guest at prize-giving night at our school he remarked that in Islam one was allowed up to four wives. ‘What a nightmare,’ he quipped, ‘imagine having four mothers-in-law’ (or something to that effect). I think back at the joke as indicative of a more innocent age; if he had said that now, some little Pavlik Morozov in the assembly would have tweeted his outrage and by the time the Duke left the building he would have been trending on Twitter, forced to step down as governor and the ‘offensive comments’ would be the subject of an investigation by the police.