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During the last football World Cup, my wife and I were invited to attend a small gathering hosted by some friends in their home. Although we knew them to be Shia Muslims (Shi’atu Ali), we quite gladly accepted their invitation so as not to break their hearts. So it was that we found ourselves in [...]

The Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline is a proposed natural gas pipeline being developed by the Asian Development Bank. If the project is successful, the pipeline will transport Caspian Sea natural gas from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan into Pakistan and then to India. The 1,040 mile pipeline will run from Turkmenistan’s Dauletabad gas field to Afghanistan. From there it [...]

As sections of the media and governments worldwide congratulate themselves for telling Israel off for shooting civilians on the Mavi Maramara earlier this week, I am struck by the absolute lack of outrage at that hideous by-product of America’s robotic assassinations: the incidental deaths of women and children. In the course of the war on [...]

Sometimes the best way forward is to cut the excess baggage.

While I laughed last week at the amusing enquiries into my ethnicity, I have been reminded of the more serious side of the assumptions people make. A dear Puerto Rican friend who has lived in the UK for the past twenty years with her English husband has recently decided to move back to the States [...]

It is sometimes supposed that converts to Islam get special treatment in the mosque, but I’m not so sure. Moving in the circles I do, it has become quite apparent over the past few months that the notion of the convert is still alien to many people’s minds. A Palestinian friend I often walk back [...]

I used to be exacerbated by what I perceived as the aloofness of the folk at the local mosque wherever I happened to find myself. But times have changed. Over the past year or so attending the mosque in town in my lunch break, I have become part of the furniture. I am no longer [...]

My mind is suddenly wandering back in time. ‘Do you by any chance still have the copy of my novel,’ began my email to a friend this morning, ‘which I gave you to read around Autumn 2000?’ I realised that almost a decade had passed since then, but my mind was somehow back on those [...]

We are all used to receiving spam messages, but its use in promoting online Qur’an tuition must be quite an innovation. When I recived this comment overnight, I must say I was momentarily touched… I have seen many blogs and have don research on many but most of them lack of good substance but I [...]

In 1996 I wrote a novel entitled The Beauty of the Lion. From a literary point of view, it was a disaster, but for me as the writer it was remarkably influential. There was nothing remarkable about the book itself, except for its particularly sloppy style and poor punctuation. Indeed, I suppose the same story [...]