I’m never sure which is worse… attending the Urdu khutbah which I don’t understand… or the English khutbah which I do.
Here we go again. Another generation redeploying the same old tales as the last one, speaking of amazing prophecies being fulfilled before our very eyes. They don’t remember the exact same claims in the 1990s and 1980s, and back through the centuries.
We managed to book a four-day holiday by the sea. It cost us an absolute fortune. The hotel was as basic as it gets. The beds in our family room were comfortable, but the bathroom was a disgrace. Our four night stay cost us the equivalent of a month’s rent for a furnished house. We …
How grand. In our local interactions with our immediate neighbours, we are called upon to anathematise the sectarian other of Deoband, due to their alleged beliefs and mildly different positions on the minutae of Hanafi fiqh. But on the international geopolitical scene, the local mosque is right behind the militant Deobandis of the east. Nothing …
After complaining about and vilifying for years Afghan families making perilous journeys from the east, all across Europe and the English channel, British news anchors now say in all seriousness: “Why do all these people suddenly want to leave Afghanistan? We didn’t see an exodus like this before!”
You can oppose war and military occupation without being a supporter of the bogeymen of the enemy. The occupying forces wiped out most of the old guard with BLU-82 Daisy Cutter bombs, air strikes and armed combat years ago, though their founding father reportedly died of tuberculosis. In the two decades since their invasion, the …
Are we really defenders of human rights? Are we — now hysterical — the true ethical opponents of the bedraggled turbaned ones?
The transition of global technology from dependence on oil to a dependence on lithium means the world needs Afghanistan more than ever. China, Russia, Turkey and all of Europe need a share of the $1trillion mineral deposits buried beneath its soils. China will soon dominate the extraction of gold and copper there. Two decades of …
He was never the sharpest knife in the drawer. On Facebook, YouTube and Twitter — his every thought stamped with a date, time, GPS location, wifi location, IP address and his every interaction, stored in a giant database accessed by no one but big data mining analysts and the intelligence community — he posts about …
Proofs take years, if not millennia, to discern. Why did the redeeming saviour of mankind came so late in the history of our species? The last 2000 years in which he has supposedly reigned king is a mere 1% of human history. I was an atheist too, then an agnostic, then a theist, following a …
Welcome to the house of horrors, where we blame mitigations for disruption, not the exponential growth of factors the mitigations are designed to alleviate.
Malaysia looks like a complete basket case. That is until you recall that we were seeing over 1,000 covid deaths a day in the UK in both April 2020 and January 2021. They have just hit 100 a day for the first time. We had a thousand more deaths in one week in January alone than Malaysia …
Chris Whitty’s latest statements give me a dreadful feeling of déjà vu. Can’t help recalling that in March 2020, he was saying the imposition of Covid restrictions would only delay the anticipated first wave too. So here we are again. Let’s hope the vaccines have broken the link between infection and hospitalisation. Otherwise, brace yourselves …
Everything seemed to be going swimmingly. We thought we were a rich nation on top of the world, so unlike all those dreadful nations over there. But all of a sudden, we discovered 25 local authorities on the brink of bankruptcy, the national health service on the verge of collapse and a mental health crisis …
