Author Archives: Guest

Reading, Writing and Ramadan

By Guest | Published: July 20, 2010

This is a guest post by Uncle Daud

According  to advice given to Stoke-on-Trent City Council, Muslim pupils should not attend swimming lessons in the month of Ramadan, because:

Schools with a significant number of Muslim pupils should try to avoid scheduling swimming lessons during Ramadan to remove unnecessary barriers to full participation.”

Nor does it end with restrictions to swimming lessons:

It also suggests re-scheduling sex education classes during the holy lunar month, as Muslim followers who have reached puberty are required to avoid sexual thoughts during this period.

But who is behind this ‘advice’ imposed on schools, delivered in the manner of a religious edict or a ‘fatwa’? Who else but the excitable people at the Muslim Council of Britain:

“The council said the document, produced by its Standing Advisory Council on Religious Education, was based on information from the Muslim Council of Great Britain”

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Posted in Education, Islamism | 12 Comments

Holding dear the universalist agenda of Human Rights

By Guest | Published: July 18, 2010

This is a cross-post by Joseph Mathai from Himal Southasian

Gita Sahgal was suspended from her post as head of the gender unit of Amnesty International consequent to a Sunday Times article published in 7 February 2010. In this article Sahgal expressed her discomfort with the Amnesty International’s collaboration with Moazzam Beg, a former inmate at Guantanomo Bay, in Amnesty’s “Counter Terror With Justice” campaign. She is quoted to have said that for Amnesty “to be appearing on platforms with Britain’s most famous supporter of the Taliban, whom we treat as a human rights defender, is a gross error of judgment.”

On the same day Sahgal issued a statement where she spelt out the essential basis of her discomfort: “The issue is a fundamental one about the importance of the human rights movement maintaining an objective distance from groups and ideas that are committed to systematic discrimination and fundamentally undermine the universality of human rights.”

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Posted in Human Rights, Islamism | Leave a comment

The Other Muslims

By Guest | Published: July 15, 2010

Zeyno Baran

This is a cross-post of an interview by Barry Rubin with Zeyno Baran, senior fellow of the Hudson Institute and editor of The Other Muslims: Moderate and Secular, recently published by Palgrave-Macmillan.

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Posted in Islamism, Secularism | 142 Comments

David Miller only raises more questions

By Guest | Published: July 14, 2010

This is a guest post by Shiraz Maher

Professor David Miller, who operates the SpinWatch, SpinProfiles and Neocon Europe websites, has responded to a piece by my colleague Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens. At best, Miller’s answers are evasive and inadequate.

In the comments section of Alexander’s article, Miller writes:

Meleagrou-Hitchens argues that his profile should not appear on our website Powerbase, because he did not want to feature on a site which in the past ‘published’ the work of racist academic Kevin MacDonald.

Meleagrou-Hitchens well knows that – to our regret – one of our researchers did quote MacDonald on one of our sister sites – as opposed to ‘publishing’ anything by MacDonald.

This could be seen as misdirection by Miller. The difference between ‘quoting’ and ‘reproducing’ would be the terms in which the selected material of MacDonald was represented on the website. As it was, MacDonald’s views were reproduced, at length, and without challenge, on Neocon Europe. The passages appeared in terms which not only seemed to approve of – but also approbated – MacDonald’s views. The Spittoon points out:

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Posted in Your View | 20 Comments

Questions David Miller must answer

By Guest | Published: July 13, 2010

This is a crosspost by Shiraz Maher

My colleague and comrade Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens has today explained why he wanted his profile removed from the SpinProfileswebsite operated by Professor David Miller of Strathclyde University.

Hitch the younger was characteristically generous in his response, omitting the wider questions relating to David Miller’s websites and views. I am honour-bound to raise these in defence of a trusty friend.

Miller operates SpinProfiles along with a number of other websites which include SpinWatch and Neocon Europe. The first of these websites came to attention after Alexander requested that his profile be removed from it.

SpinProfiles describes itself as an:

encyclopedia of people, issues, and groups shaping the public agenda that is being written collaboratively on this website. It catalogues descriptions and details of PR firms, activist groups and government agencies as well as the criticisms that are made of these groups from different perspectives.

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Posted in Your View | 6 Comments

The History of Alcohol in Islam

By Guest | Published: July 8, 2010

This is a cross-post by Lord Curzon from Coming Anarchy

Muslims are prohibited from drinking alcohol. But why? In objectively reviewing for the ban in the Koran, one can only leave bewildered. Occasional passages that do not refer to alcohol as it is known today is interpreted as being a complete prohibition on alcohol consumption, without exception.

The Koran has a few sections that cryptically refer to alcohol. In 4:43, Muslims are forbidden to attend to prayers while intoxicated; in 2:219, intoxicants are said to contain good and evil, but the evil is greater than the good. In these two sections, the word for “intoxicated” is sukara which is derived from the word “sugar” and means drunk or intoxicated. In 5:90, “intoxicants” are called “abominations of Satan’s handiwork” intended to turn people away from God and prayer, and Muslims are therefore ordered to abstain. Here, the word is al-khamr, which is related to the verb “to ferment,” and probably refers to fermented sugar drinks. This word could be used to describe other intoxicants such as the Roman era wine.

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Posted in Esoterica | 20 Comments

Islamism and the misunderstandings of the Left

By Guest | Published: July 7, 2010

This is a cross-post from Harry’s Place by Igor

An article on Comment Is Free lauding the recently deceased Lebanese Grand Ayatollah, Muhammed Hussein Fadlallah, provides a vignette of how leftists tend to interpret the statements and actions of Islamists according to their own frame of reference, and more often than not get it hopelessly wrong.

Ian Williams writes:

In fact, the Ayatollah, who had his own website (http://english.bayynat.org.lb/) epitomised what Western critics, with varying degrees of sincerity have been suggesting Islam should be. He took the West at its face value, decried the idea of theocratic rule in affairs of state and indirectly paved the way for Hezbollah, formerly the party of economically, socially and politically excluded Lebanese Shi’a to become part of a, relatively, democratic polity.

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Posted in Islamism, The Regressive Left | 2 Comments

Hizb ut Tahrir – we hate it here but let us stay

By Guest | Published: July 7, 2010

This is a guest post by Abu Wannabe Arab

The global Islamist group Hizb ut Tahrir recently held an annual conference in Sydney Australia. The speakers at the conference, many of whom were British, spouted all the usual nonsense about western conspiracies and an Islamic state taking over the world. However, in the run up to the conference they produced a propaganda video that has to be seen for entertainment value alone. The video is followed by an interview with a truly clueless member of HT who does so badly that you end up feeling sorry for him. But putting the pathetic interview to one side, I want to look at some of the points raised in the propaganda video.

The HT members doing the talking mention how there is a new brand of ‘secular Islam’ being promoted by western governments, that encourages Muslims to adopt a ‘western reading of history’. I’m not sure what a ‘western reading of history’ is, it’s perhaps history without all the mad and baseless conspiracy theories that characterise Nabhani’s (HT’s founder) reading of history in which no reference or footnotes are supplied. I’m not sure a secular understanding of Islam is new either. I am quite certain that Ibn Rushd, Muhammad Abduh and Ali Abd al-Raziq were not western stooges nor were they recent. In fact, modern secularism owes much to the works of great Muslim scholars such as Ibn Rushd, Al-Farabi and others.

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Posted in Islamism | Leave a comment

Partisans of Allah

By Guest | Published: June 28, 2010

Philip Delves Broughton’s review of Partisans of Allah, a book by Ayesha Jalal

In 1953, a group of Muslim leaders in the Punjab agitated to have a rival group de- classified as Muslims by the still young state of Pakistan. The government’s response came in the Munir Report, an eloquent expression of the state’s position on religion. Its author had asked a number of Pakistan’s Muslim scholars — known as ulama — to define what it meant to be a Muslim and found none of them agreed.

“If we attempt our own definition as each learned divine has done and that definition differs from that given by all others,” the report declared, “we unanimously go out of the fold of Islam. And if we adopt the definition given by any one of the ulama, we remain Muslims according to the view of that alim [scholar] but kafirs [infidels] according to the definition of everyone else.” With no agreement on what it meant to be a Muslim, how on earth could Pakistan legislate as if it were an Islamic state?

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Posted in Review | 1 Comment

Fear and silence

By Guest | Published: June 27, 2010

This is a cross-post by Mohsin Hamid, author of the novels Moth Smoke and The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

WHY are Ahmadis persecuted so ferociously in Pakistan?

The reason can’t be that their large numbers pose some sort of ‘threat from within’. After all, Ahmadis are a relatively small minority in Pakistan. They make up somewhere between 0.25 per cent (according to the last census) and 2.5 per cent (according to the Economist) of our population.

Nor can the reason be that Ahmadis are non-Muslims. Pakistani Christians and Pakistani Hindus are non-Muslims, and similar in numbers to Pakistani Ahmadis. Yet Christians and Hindus, while undeniably discriminated against, face nothing like the vitriol directed towards Ahmadis in our country.

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Posted in Anti Muslim bigotry, Freedom of Religion | 9 Comments

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