Ed Husain is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University. He is the author of Among the Mosques and The House of Islam.
As the Islamist regime in Iran attacks Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Riyadh, Bahrain and Kuwait with drones and missiles, some in Britain are quietly happy to see the Gulf’s skyscrapers lose their shine. ‘Dubai has no culture or history,’ say the armchair critics. Is this British bitterness caused by contempt of a former colonial power? When
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I am writing this article from abroad because I do not currently feel safe in Britain, the country of my birth and where I grew up. Why? Because I have written books and articles exposing and warning about the danger of Islamism in the UK. I am not alone in feeling threatened. Many of our
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For more than a decade, I have been a public critic of Saudi Arabia. I should, therefore, be applauding recent global efforts to cast the Kingdom into pariah status and punish the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS). But I fear that such calculations are flawed, short sighted and will weaken the West. Instead,
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‘One of the things that’s coming up over and over again is Islamophobia,’ says Keir Starmer in a campaign video, talking to Sadiq Khan. ‘We need to say over and over again that Islamophobia is intolerable… and I think there’s more we can do in government. There’s certainly stuff online that needs tackling much more
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‘You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing,’ said Winston Churchill, ‘after they have tried everything else.’ After much American talk of a ‘pivot to Asia’ and hence ‘withdrawal from the Middle East’, president Biden and his top team are visiting Israel today. From there, they will head to the heart of
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The protests against the film The Lady of Heaven reminded me of a demonstration I attended as a child. My father had taken me to Hyde Park to stand with thousands of other British Muslims to oppose Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. Ban the book, the cries went up. Some began to burn copies. Others
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First, France has been shaken by a series of gruesome terror attack – yet western leaders seem remarkably reluctant to support President Emannuel Macron. (01:04) Lara speaks to The Spectator’s associate editor Douglas Murray and writer Ed Husain. Next, this year’s US election was truly remarkable – but what was it like to report on
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It’s easy to see why so few western leaders have come to Emmanuel Macron’s defence: when they scrutinise extremists, they are accused of being ‘Islamophobes’. Since the French President’s speech last month about Islam in the West, he has been accused — by populist Muslim politicians such as Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Imran Khan, as
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Britain’s terror threat level has been upgraded to ‘severe’ this week, following jihadist attacks in both France and Austria. Raising a terror alert is not enough though to stop more attacks. The government’s security and bureaucratic response to terror is always playing catch-up and constantly on the defensive. And unless we take the time to
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When al-Qaeda destroyed the Twin Towers almost exactly 19 years ago, the aims of the terrorists were not fully understood by many in the western media. Osama bin Laden intended not just to wage war against the non-Muslim world but to present himself — and his jihadi narrative — as the new voice of Islam.
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Britain cannot afford for its place in the world to be limited by those stuck in the thinking and guilt of the last century. Beyond Covid-19 and Brexit, a new world is taking shape. Three of our closest allies – the United States of America, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates – negotiated a brave and historic
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When Benjamin Netanyahu visited Oman in 2018 in a gesture of goodwill to Israel’s neighbours, the welcome was not universal. For an Israeli Prime Minister to be warmly greeted in a proud Arab state was, for some, far too much. The Omani foreign minister, Yusuf bin Alawi bin Abdullah, was asked on Al Jazeera why
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As a Muslim, I find the term ‘Islamophobia’ an etymological fallacy. Islam, by the definition of its founder the Prophet Mohammed and its greatest philosophers (al-Farabi, Ibn Tufayl, Averroes), is considered to be a ‘natural way’. Humans cannot have a phobia against nature. It is the height of moral insanity for an intelligent Muslim to place the
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I am not a right-winger. I am ashamed to say that I discovered Sir Roger Scruton only four years ago when an argument in a Washington DC think-tank led to a search for contemporary philosophers who took a long view of civilisation, history, ideas, and implications of philosophy. It happened when I was an advisor
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‘Kill Angela Merkel. Kill Erdogan. Kill Sadiq Khan’ were the demands of the white supremacist terrorist who killed 49 innocent worshippers at a mosque in New Zealand. France’s President Macron, he wrote, was ‘an ex-banker’ who was a ‘globalist’ and ‘anti-white people’. Make no mistake: the Australian man who gunned down innocent worshippers had political
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In Britain today, Islam in its original essence is not to be found in mosques or Muslim schools, but on the first floor of the British Museum. There, the Albukhary Islamic gallery, newly opened to the public, dazzles visitors and defies every certainty promoted by today’s hardline Muslim activists. This spectacular exhibition of objects from
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My earliest memory of a mosque is being with my father in London’s Brick Lane Mosque. He was a member of its management committee and that gave me, an infant, the right to roam freely the four floors — including its vast basement — as I waited for him to finish meetings. I remember seeing
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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,
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‘We are avenging the Prophet Muhammad’ shouts the jihadi murderer as he escapes, having killed 12 at Charlie Hebdo. In Syria, an American fighting for al-Qaeda says: ‘I want to rest in the afterlife, in heaven. There is nothing here’. There are thousands of young men and women in our midst who share these sentiments.
