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Sometimes I cannot help being suspicious of Damascene Conversions. Of course God can change all hearts, I remind myself, from the most wicked to the most gentle. And indeed in the story of the Muslim faith there is ample evidence of this. Amongst the greatest personalities of Islam are those who were once its greatest [...]

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 [...]

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.

As most people who have been reading this web log for a while will have come to appreciate, I am not one to view the Muslim world through rose-tinted spectacles. Indeed I have never shied away from condemning the violence and depravity emerging from Muslim nations. I dislike the refrain that “The West” is to [...]

I have never been a good Believer, neither as a Christian before those five years of agnosticism nor as a Muslim ever since. My faith has never been zealous; when I said I didn’t believe in God for a year or so around the age of fifteen even my atheism was agnostic. Nevertheless, however simple [...]