In Defence of Civilisation
I have before me a copy of The Telegraph—it isn’t mine; my grandmother left it with us after her visit today—and there is a photograph and a headline on the front that occupy me. I keep on returning to the dining table to sit hunched over it, studying the photograph and the words that accompany it.
I have before me a copy of The Telegraph—it isn’t mine; my grandmother left it with us after her visit today—and there is a photograph and a headline on the front that occupy me. I keep on returning to the dining table to sit hunched over it, studying the photograph and the words that accompany it.
I cannot promise
This weekend I intended to tidy my study, which is indisputably the messiest room in our house. Unfortunately, as often happens, I soon found myself side-tracked from the task and absorbed in reading a document that had no obvious place amongst my piles of bills and letters. It turns out it may not have been the most appropriate reading material for a Sunday afternoon, because now imagined images keep flashing before my eyes, causing me to weep.
This weekend I intended to tidy my study, which is indisputably the messiest room in our house. Unfortunately, as often happens, I soon found myself side-tracked from the task and absorbed in reading a document that had no obvious place amongst my piles of bills and letters. It turns out it may not have been the most appropriate reading material for a Sunday afternoon, because now imagined images keep flashing before my eyes, causing me to weep.
Two Muslim authors have told us today that we must not condemn the terrorist atrocities carried out in India yesterday: Umar Lee argues that American Muslims should not condemn them and Yusuf Smith that Western Muslims should not. They both argue their case effectively and I can see where they are coming from, but I …
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 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 …
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 …
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 …
A visitor to this site has asked me to comment on an article by one Mona Charen entitled, Stand up: Wafa Sultan is passing on a website called Townhall.com. This is a US website which prides itself on being an exchange for conservative thoughts and ideas. Charen worked in the White House Office of Public …
It isn’t actually difficult to appreciate how radicalisation occurs. Last night I had the misfortune of deciding to watch the previous evening’s edition of Newsnight on the web and was thus bombarded with the disgusting images emerging from Abu Ghraib I had so far managed to avoid. In my case I found that the sense …
I have just read news on the BBC that three Indonesian Christian girls were beheaded as they walked to school – news buried under the frenzy surrounding David Blunket’s business dealings. What an utterly sick age we live in. Even as we anticipate it in our Prophet’s words, the depravity never fails to appall. The …
Last night, at the age of 92, Rosa Parks died peacefully in her sleep. Refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a bus in 1955, she unwittingly initiated the US civil rights movement. Following her arrest for this ‘crime’, Baptist minister Martin Luther King organised a mass black boycott of buses …
Apparently the loss of British life is only a tragedy if it is a means of scoring points against Islam. If ever we are unfortunate enough to mention our faith or to walk to the mosque for prayer, our socialist companions remind us that Muslims blew up three tube trains and a bus in London …
If only we dwelled on this. Would there then be any of this chaos? In the Name of God, not in my name or your’s. If we reflected, would men of religion cut down innocents with explosives, thinking their deeds are good?
