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My name is Timothy Bowes, an English Muslim working for my local NHS Primary Care Trust. It is the last week of our month of fasting, known as Ramadan. I arose at five o’clock this morning for breakfast before the start of fasting. Today it was Heinz Baked Beans on Toast. We have not had [...]

“It’s now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury. Councillors’ expenses?” — Jo Moore, advisor to Transport, Local Government and Regions Secretary Stephen Byers, 11 September 2001. I am not a conspiracy theorist. I’m a realist. What’s the correlation between domestic political turmoil and populist scaremongering? I don’t know about [...]

To me, Ajax is that fresh smelling powder my grandmother used to sprinkle on the carpet before vacuuming her house in Swanland. Clearly times change. Apparently Ajax is short for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, and is used to create Internet applications that are wholly interactive. What joy. Wherever I turn these days, it’s there: ajax [...]

January 1998: this was my first Ramadan, half a year before I came to believe in Islam. It was an experiment, an experiment that went badly wrong. Around November I had stopped eating pork, telling everyone who knew me that I didn’t like the taste. The first phase of my experiment. In the popular vocabulary [...]

There is a section on the BBC News website called “The Editors”. Last Thursday Matt Morris published an interesting commentary entitled, “Too many Muslim stories?” Well, as you know I have an opinion on this, and so I submitted a polite, quite reasonable comment, questioning why the veil story occupied the headlines on BBC Online [...]

…which means it’s Muslim Anger Day on BBC Online. Today it’s an apparent storm over Jack Straw’s comments about the face veil worn by some Muslim women. Right now it’s the main article on the website, with two sub-articles immediately underneath, plus a video clip and photo, then a link to “Have your say” in [...]

As I was starting my four-day Project Management course today, I had to drive up to Winslow in north Buckinghamshire and thus caught more of BBC Radio 4′s Today Programme than I usually do. At 8.10am John Humpries interviewed an individual who was made famous by his intervention during Home Secretary, John Reid’s speech to [...]

Um, genuine question. In its article Pope apology fails to end anger, BBC Online reports today: “Influential Qatari Muslim scholar, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, called for a day of anger on Friday, saying the Pope had not apologised.” * I have a question. What on earth is a “day of anger”? The Messenger of Allah (peace and [...]

I have just glanced at BBC News Online as I often do when the digital clock in the corner of my screen reaches midday, the rustle of packets of crisps awaking me from my spreadsheet slumber. Wonderful, it’s another Muslim Anger day. The main item, spanning two columns and in prominent text, tells the whole [...]

At work I am involved in the local implementation of a complex government-driven national computer programme. In my particular region, every surgery and health centre has been kitted out with the latest technology, delivering over 300 new PCs, 50 printers and 20 servers. The aim of the national programme is to connect thirty-thousand doctors to [...]

Four and a half years ago we disposed of our television because we found it eating up our evenings after work. Indeed, in the wake of the collapse of the Twin Towers in New York, we felt we had to sit glued to every news broadcast… the end of the Six O’Clock News, all of [...]

This is the view from the hill above my village, looking northwards towards the town of Hopa and the Black Sea beyond at sunset. On a clearer day you would just be able to see the sea.