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The old Pakistani uncle at the mosque is due his seventy excuses too.1 People like me are often found muttering taciturn complaints about the unfriendliness we perceive in our fellow travellers when we come together for prayer. In weeks and weeks it could be as if we are not even there, as if ghosts standing [...]

Why all the killing? I really cannot comprehend it at all. A bomb planted in a Peshawar marketplace extinguishes the lives of 91 in an instant as it rips through everything in its path; 200 more are left injured. Just a matter of hours earlier 150 are slaughtered in Baghdad. Islam holds that indiscriminate violence [...]

I feel the need to follow up on my last post regarding adoption, as the interpretation of my words by some was not what I intended. I did not mean to suggest that we are having a particularly trying time and I am sorry if that is how it came across. It is a huge [...]

I have been reluctant over the past two years to write anything of our application to adopt, for it has felt too private and too intense. It has felt like an age since the process began: the initial disappointments when our own local authority decided not to even consider us because we had a weird [...]

Some of my friends are angry with me, dispatching lengthy emails voicing their dissatisfaction. I know I should be hurt and offended, but instead I find myself thinking that this is just the voice of the Divine, revealing itself through His creation. I could compose great tracts in my defence, but I fear it would [...]

‘You may have convinced everyone else Sara,’ sneered Sajeda, ‘but I’m not persuaded by this sudden transformation of yours.’1 Blocking the entrance to the prayer room, preventing Sara from entering, she raised her right hand and jabbed it towards her heart. Forlornly, Sara looked back at the one person she had always respected and trusted; [...]

On his arrival in the UK last week, Geert Wilders hailed it as a victory for freedom of speech. Funny that—as comedian Jeremy Hardy pointed out on The News Quiz last year—given that he wants to ban the Qur’an. And with that thought, his presence escaped me. It was left to our Qur’an teacher to [...]

There is a disease that I have harboured for the best part of my life. It accompanied me as a child, an adolescent and an adult; as a Christian, an atheist, an agnostic and a Muslim; and in times of both health and sickness. I would define it as a disease of the soul — [...]

Recent months have seen a sudden upsurge in devotion to the Christian faith amongst followers of the British National Party (BNP) and the English Defence League (EDL). In June the BNP chimed against the Islamic colonisation of Britain, seen in the widespread conversion of churches throughout the land: the Central Mosque of Brent; the former [...]

I have long been one of those admirers of the Muslim woman, who says, ‘How I wish I had faith the strength of theirs.’ For to take upon a visual marker of identity outside the norms of society and to wear it whenever one wanders into the public eye takes great courage. Observing English women [...]