I have had crises of faith since adolescence. In truth, they never really leave you.
We say: “So you are telling us that hundreds of Muslim scholars participated in a vast and successful conspiracy to divert people from the truth?”
Today I set out on a new venture: to approach the Qur’an in as near the order of revelation as is possible, with the limited information at my disposal. Every mushaf and translation of my shelves is arranged not in chronological order, but roughly by length, from the longest surah to the shortest. Over the years …
I find it fascinating that in 1977, the late Dr John Burton better defended the Prophet and the Qur’an, than all the Muslims through the ages. At the very end of his thesis on the collection of the Qur’an, after a tour of the development of fiqh and naskh, and traditional accounts of the collection …
The other night, my heart sank, heavy blues descending, thoughts keeping me awake into the early hours. I only had myself to blame, I told myself, having exposed myself to an ugly clamour: far right nationalists and far right Muslims, spewing horrendous sentiments online.
Do those apparently doing dawah on YouTube and those claiming to defend the deen on Twitter take any responsibility for the misinformation they insist on spreading in the Muslim community daily? Mosques across Britain have been burying week on week the sort of numbers they would normally expect to bury in a year. But still …
My brethren competing in a festival of moral degeneracy. It repulses me. In truth, they are not my brethren; I am not of them, and they are not with me. I disassociate myself from them completely. My conscience prevents me from embracing their way. Onwards along the road, I will leave them behind. Onwards along …
Dear Twitter demagogue, Congratulations, you used the last ten days of Ramadan to ferociously insult a people in such a way that they replied with insults against God, the prophet and his message. And do not insult those they invoke other than Allah, lest they insult Allah in enmity without knowledge. Thus We have made …
An innocent young Muslim woman has tragically been killed on her way to buy groceries, in the last ten days of Ramadan. Our activists, when they thought she was the victim of a hate crime: “A hijabi sister has been murdered by a white terrorist.” When police arrests seemed to suggest that she was killed …
Ease and difficulty
An innocent young Muslim woman has tragically been killed on her way to buy groceries, seemingly caught in the crossfire of a turf-war. Muslim social media erupts: another white terrorist strikes again! Far Right agitators: probably an honour killing! Anti-discrimination activists: Where is the media coverage? If the attacker had been Muslim, this would be …
It is just flu, they say. What, seasonal flu, which in the freezing winter of 2017/18 is likely to have significantly contributed to the 50,100 excess winter deaths in England and Wales? The same flu that in the winter of 2014/15 contributed to 43,850 excess deaths? Or pandemic flu, which is consistently the top risk …
Most of us humans are unreliable. We create our own versions of history. We choose what we want to believe and will hold to those beliefs, irregardless of the evidence. We will canonise men or women we believe support our cause, turning them into perfect saints.
In his own Aramaic tongue, his name was Yeshu, Eesho or Eshoo; two thousand years later, it is impossible to say how it was pronounced back then. In Hebrew, we think it was Yeshua, from Yehoshua, derived from the verbs to rescue or deliver. His name was transliterated phonetically into Greek as Iēsous, roughly pronounced …
