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Two articles to remind us who the victims really are: ordinary folk like you and I, just trying to live ordinary lives. Just people. People, like you and I.

Behold, your Lord said to the angels: “I will create a vicegerent on earth.” They said: “Will You place therein one who will make mischief therein and shed blood? Whilst we celebrate Your praise and glorify Your Holy Name?” He said: “I know what you know not.”

The Gaza Strip, home to more than 1.5 million Palestinians, will soon be without its most basic commodity: bread.

A quick note to say thank you to those who read this website and decided to vote for it in the category of Best European Blog in the recent Brass Crescent thingymabob.

My current colleagues at work do not know that I am a Muslim, but they have concluded that I am an eccentric. There is something not quite right about me, they think, pondering on all the strange things I have let slip over the past year working with them.

My mother-in-law now has her own website for her beautiful handmade woolen slippers, which I am duty-bound to share with you. Please visit her website if you’d like to find out more.

The latest in a long line of Muslim junk-mail hitting my inbox is Cordoba Gold, “The Sharia compliant MasterCard”. Very nice, but I am getting rather tired of “ethical” Muslim companies that think they can help themselves to my email address in order to notify me about their latest product.

“O you who believe! Stand out firmly for justice, as witnesses to God, even as against yourselves, or your parents, or your kin, and whether it be against rich or poor: for God can best protect both. Follow not your lusts lest you swerve, and if you distort or decline to do justice, verily God is well-acquainted with all that you do.”

This weekend I intended to tidy my study, which is indisputably the messiest room in our house. Unfortunately, as often happens, I soon found myself side-tracked from the task and absorbed in reading a document that had no obvious place amongst my piles of bills and letters. It turns out it may not have been the most appropriate reading material for a Sunday afternoon, because now imagined images keep flashing before my eyes, causing me to weep.

What follows is aimed specifically at webmasters and bloggers running self-hosted websites using the open-source CMS, WordPress, but I am sure there are general principles here that can benefit others. If you have a self-hosted weblog or website, there are two things that really should be your priority: beefing up your security and having some sort of backup process in place. All in all, this is a modest plea to my respected writers: before disaster strikes, take a few steps to protect your website so I can carry on reading what you have to say to my heart’s content.