Islam

‘What’s in the news this week?’ I asked my wife as she browsed the first newspaper we had seen for a whole week, having hitherto been blissfully disconnected from the rest of the country, without phones or the internet. ‘Muslims, largely,’ she replied, flicking from page to page, ‘a bit on in-and-out, but mainly it’s the Muslims.’ Oh, good. A perpetual optimist, I had rather hoped that during our week away the frequently promised Islamic Reformation might have taken place and peace and enlightenment spread all those many miles from the jungles of Banda Aceh to the dilapidated terraces of Kirklees. But nope, apparently not. They were still up to

Last night Channel 4 broadcast a programme by Trevor Phillips, in which he worried about the integration of British Muslims. He suggested that we should switch to a policy of ‘active integration’. The night before, at the same time of 10pm, Channel 4 broadcast a programme in which the merits of having sex with a complete stranger were discussed. Some people find it very liberating, a sexpert explained, as a thrilled audience of thickos tittered. Yes I know – I wrote about Sex Box last week – one more strike and I’m officially volunteering to be the new Mary Whitehouse. My point is that sensationalist TV is guilty of falsifying who

Hardly anything is less likely to keep people reading than to mention an exciting evening in Toronto.  But stick with me. Because last Friday night in Toronto there was a debate (organised by the Munk debates, which can be watched in full here) on the great migration crisis which pitted Louise Arbour and Simon Schama against Nigel Farage and Mark Steyn.  Regular readers will know my views of Simon Schama on this matter, so I was looking forward to watching this exchange in the hope of seeing him get what in technical debate-speak is known as his ‘arse handed to him on a plate’. And sure enough it came, courtesy of

Terrorism is a distraction. It’s a distraction from the big question of our day, about Islam and violence. Only a tiny minority of Muslims affirm that sort of violence. A far larger proportion of Muslims condone another, vaguer sort of violence. It is this that we must confront. I mean the violence of theocracy. Theocracy is the belief that one religion should be absolutely culturally dominant. Of course it thinks that the state should enforce this; if the state fails to do so it loses legitimacy. This theocratic worldview is the underlying cause of Muslim terrorism. To judge from its founding texts, and its history, Islam is a religion that

On Maundy Thursday a Muslim shopkeeper in Glasgow was brutally murdered.  Forty-year-old Asad Shah was allegedly stabbed in the head with a kitchen knife and then stamped upon.  Most of the UK press began by going big on this story and referring to it as an act of ‘religious hatred’, comfortably leaving readers with the distinct feeling that – post-Brussels – the Muslim shopkeeper must have been killed by an ‘Islamophobe’.  Had that been the case, by now the press would be crawling over every view the killer had ever held and every Facebook connection he had ever made.  They would be asking why he had done it and investigating every one

After terrorist outrages like the one in Brussels, our leaders always say the same thing: ‘We must defend European values against these evil killers.’ It seems the Metropolitan Police didn’t get the memo. For they have just arrested someone — actually arrested someone — for tweeting something unpleasant about the Brussels attack, in the process trampling their coppers’ boots all over what is surely, or at least ought to be, the most important European value of all: freedom of speech. The arrested man is one Matthew Doyle. He went viral after tweeting about a run-in he had on the day of the Brussels attacks: ‘I confronted a Muslim woman yesterday

Well at least we all know the form by now.  This morning Islamist suicide-bombers struck one of the few European capitals they haven’t previously hit in a mass-casualty terrorist attack. The standard response now goes as follows.  First the body parts of innocent people are flung across airport check-ins or underground trains.  Briefly there is some shock.  On social media the sentimentalists await the arrival of this atrocity’s cutesy hashtag or motif and hope it will tide them over until the piano man arrives at the scene of the attack to sing ‘Imagine there’s no countries’.  Meantime someone will hopefully have said something which a lot of people can condemn

I’ve always admired the liberal Muslims in the Quilliam Foundation. It is hard to take accusations of betrayal from your own community. Harder still to keep fighting when the thought feeling keeps nagging away that out there, somewhere, there are Islamists who might do you real harm. But Quilliam keeps fighting. To mark the launch by students of the Right2Debate campaign, which seeks to make universities live up to their principles and respect the right to speak and dispute, they have collected accounts from atheists and secularists of the wretched state of higher education. I should pause to explain that last sentence to the confused. You might have assumed that