Islam

The news that Ayaan Hirsi Ali has cancelled her speaking tour of Australia due to ‘security concerns’ should concern anyone who believes in freedom. It is a dark day when a woman who fled to the West to escape the Islamist suffocations of Somalia, and precisely so that she might think and speak freely, feels she cannot say certain things in certain places. That even a Western, liberal, democratic nation like Australia cannot guarantee Hirsi Ali the freedom to speak her mind without suffering censorship or harm is deeply worrying. It points to the mainstreaming of intolerance, to the adoption by certain people in the West of the illiberalism that makes

‘On Friday noon, July the 20th, 1714,’ begins the small, perfect 20th-century novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey, ‘the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travellers into the gulf below.’ In the coincidence of crossing the bridge at the same time, explains the writer, Thornton Wilder, these five seemed to have been assembled by pure chance. Or had they? He entitles this first chapter ‘Perhaps An Accident’. He spends the rest of his book tracing the lives of each until the moment when, in a twang of rope, fate hurled all together into the abyss. Thus is the reader’s interest engaged for the human histories that

In yesterday’s Guardian, David Shariatmadari confronts the claim that Islam is an especially violent religion. The claim, he says, is undermined by the fact that jihadi terrorism is a very recent phenomenon. Yes, there is also the violence of empire-building in its history, but you could say this of Christianity too. ‘Aspects of Islamic teaching do indeed justify some kinds of violence. Islam isn’t a pacifist religion. But again, it has this in common with Christianity, Judaism and other world faiths.’ As I have said quite a few times before, it is simply wrong to say that Islam and Christianity have much the same view of war and peace. Judging from

Stay safe, London. Stay safe, everyone. It’s nice, isn’t it, as a sentiment, which is just as well because it is the motto du jour of every celebrity who has added his or her mite to what passes as debate on the terrorist attack last Wednesday. And, my goodness, they all piled in: JK Rowling, Katy Perry, James Corden, Neil Gaiman; every man and woman of them, you’ll be pleased to hear, against this sort of thing, and urging us all – especially those not actually resident in London – to ‘stay safe’. The other trope is that ‘nothing will divide us’, that this is what terrorists want – Stella

Allahu Akbar! Greetings from Samsun, where Turkish protestors — their eyeballs spinning in orgasmic Islamic rage — tried to set fire to the Dutch flag while chanting the usual ‘Allah’s dead good’ stuff. They used cigarette lighters and some lighter fuel and up it went — and was then jubilantly trampled on by the inflamed, howling masses. Except that it wasn’t the Dutch flag — they had got hold of the French flag by mistake. I wonder if any of the similarly inflamed Turkish protestors in the Netherlands would have noticed? My guess is most of those demonstrating in Rotterdam had spent their entire lives in the Netherlands, but possibly

Omar Saif Ghobash, who is the United Arab Emirates ambassador to Russia, has written a good Muslim-reformist tract called Letters to a Young Muslim. There is plenty of passionate rhetoric denouncing rigidity, praising open-mindedness. There are plenty of insights that give the outsider a glimpse of his difficult inheritance (as a half-Arab, half-Russian boy educated in Britain). But is the bullet bit? A bit. While his liberal sympathies are not in doubt, Ghobash does not quite focus on the core issue with adequate determination. For me, the essence of the Muslim-reformist task is the repudiation of theocracy. This entails more than denunciations of terrorism, religious police, blasphemy laws and so

There was a good programme last week on Channel 4 about Muslims looking for love, or at least marriage. It was called ‘Extremely British Muslims’, and it did indeed show us some young Muslims who were very much like anyone else. But it was also a reminder that many Muslims have a deep-seated assumption about religion and secularism that the rest of don’t. Lots of these young Muslims, though not very religious, saw it as their duty to become more religious as they grew up and settled down. Religion, for them, was an essential part of becoming responsible, civic-minded, family-minded, and about putting away youthful selfishness. And – the other side of the