I have been reflecting quite a lot recently on what Christians refer to as ‘the addictive power of sin’, for I am one of those unfortunate souls that makes mistakes and repents only to repeat them again over and over. Faced with this phenomenon, I believe it is easy to appreciate how many Christians come …
You may have forgotten that the day God created our souls He took a solemn oath from us. Have a billion years passed since then? Perhaps; perhaps more. But do we abandon our promises just because time has passed us by? Or because we have forgotten them? I wish I could say I was perfect, …
If ever we needed evidence that we have no control over our own lives, it is in my garden. Last year my wife and I spent a lot of effort working on our vegetable patch, digging it over and working in the manure, all to little avail. It did not get enough light, we concluded, …
21 December 2006: It is our forth day in Medina in the warming heat of Arabia according to our own grand master plan. Shortly we will depart for Mecca and the wondrous House. Planned months in advance and carefully financed—ihram sourced a month before departure, suitcases packed two weeks before—but though we plot and plan, …
In days of old the tribulations faced by the pilgrim on his journey to Mecca included the assault of ravaging bandits determined to make quick profits by pillaging the winding desert caravans. In our own age, say some, the road to Mecca is easy, a comfortable voyage by jetliner to comfortable five-star accommodation. That may …
When I embraced Islam in 1998, one of the first pieces of advice I received from Muslim friends was to learn the names of three people, and then stay far away from them. They were Abu Hamza, Omar Bakri and Abdullah Faisal. A few months after that, I received an angry email from my father, …
In British politics today, there is so much talk of identity, of what it means to belong, of shared values. Sometimes it is assumed that we must all trace our values back to Hellenic roots, as if this were the foundation of civilisation. Yet my heart has always felt comfort in the Semitic pathway. As …
January 1998: this was my first Ramadan, half a year before I came to believe in Islam. It was an experiment, an experiment that went badly wrong. Around November I had stopped eating pork, telling everyone who knew me that I didn’t like the taste. The first phase of my experiment. In the popular vocabulary …
The Friday prayer is meant to be a joyous event in the Muslim week, something which we are all obliged to attend as one of our religious duties. So why do I leave feeling so irritated, so unrefreshed? It is alienation. More precisely it is the use of language. Ours is a diverse community: while …
In the community in which I live I could not say that there is a problem of extremism amongst the Muslim youth. Not ‘Islamic Extremism’ in any case – jahil extremism maybe. In this community, our concerns are with drug use, excessive alcohol consumption and anti-social behaviour. A friend tells me that some young Muslims …
Defending The Transgressed By Censuring The Reckless Against The Killing Of Civilians “To put it plainly, there is simply no legal precedent in the history of Sunni Islam for the tactic of attacking civilians and overtly non-military targets.” http://www.livingislam.org/maa/dcmm_e.html
Today’s Guardian carries a story about the tendency amongst the ordinary man to believe in conspiracy theories, in this case focusing on the mass murders on the London transport system last July. Muslims are not alone in harbouring this tendency, of course. The book Londonistan by a famous British commentator describes a vast conspiracy in …
This comes from a friend of mine… // Start quote I read recently in the Quran where God describes the muttaqeen: And vie one with another for forgiveness from your Lord, and for a paradise as wide as are the heavens and the earth, prepared for those who ward off (evil); Those who spend (of …
I am really quite tired of being bombarded with propaganda set on defining for me the realms of civilisation. We want “civil” in that word to refer to courtesy and politeness, but we know that it doesn’t. Instead, our dictionaries describe civilisation as an advanced stage or system of human social development. Of course, for …
At the end of the summer last year, we spent our days between visits to a clinic in Jihangir, Istanbul. While its views over the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn beyond were stunning, I was not too keen on those streets. In this secular quarter and haunt of expats, wine shops outnumbered grocery stores. In …
