Painting Fakes

If you want a sympathetic, insiders introduction to Islam you could do a lot worse than Ed Husain's The House of Islam: A Global History. Husain is British-born of Bangladeshi parents, and grew up in East London.  After a youthful flirtation with Hizb ut-Tahrir and radical Islam, he returned to his parents' Sufi teachings and studied Islam in earnest, travelling to Turkey, Syria and Saudi Arabia to study under various Sufi divines and explore the origins of Islam.  In 2007 he co-founded the Quilliam Foundation , which describes itself as a counter-extremism foundation, and he also consults for the US-based Council of Foreign Relations.  In sum, he is a devout Muslim who is implacably opposed to extremism. In The House of Islam  he provides an inside look into the Islamic faith.  He aims to both enlighten Western readers as to what Islam should be about, and is about for the majority of Muslims, and to challenge the growing influence of Salafism in the Islami...

The hounding of Yassmin Abdel-Magied is one of the more shameful incidents in the catalogue of Australian media misbehaviour.  Abdel-Magied is a young Sudanese/Australian woman who is proudly Islamic, wearing flamboyant bright-coloured headgear and speaking her mind. Her crimes, if such they be, are twofold.  During an episode of the ABC's Q&A program Senator Jacqui Lambie expressed her well-aired fears about sharia law, and Abdel Magied interrupted to explain forcefully that Lambie knew nothing about sharia and that Islam is 'the most feminist religion'.  A few months later she drew further ire by briefly posting a critical comment on Anzac Day.  Now it's probably fair to say that she was a little rude in interrupting Senator Lambie, although I doubt the senator would be much phased given that we see worse behaviour every day in parliament. Indeed, later in the same episode the pair joined forces to critique the Coalition Government's changes to early childh...

It can take me a long time to get around to reading a book.  There are so many of them in the world.  Sometimes it takes something extra to prompt me to pick up something.  Hence, the current moral panic about Islam, and my various bits of reading on the subject, finally got me to reading Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses . Salman Rushdie was born in Mumbai into a culturally Muslim but not particularly devout  Kashmiri family, and describes himself as an atheist.  He was educated in the UK and has spent most of his adult life there, working as an advertising copywriter before his second novel, Midnight's Children,  won the Booker Prize and allowed him to become a full-time novelist.   The Satanic Verses  is his fourth novel, published in 1988. Its publication set off a storm of protest from Islamic fundamentalists around the world.  Copies of the book were burned in the streets in various countries including the UK and US, bookstores th...

One of the mistakes we make as Westerners is that if we want to know what Muslims think, we go and read the Q'uran.  Not that I think we shouldn't read it - we really should - but we shouldn't assume that once we have read it we know how Muslims think.  What's to say they interpret it the same way we do?  What's to say they emphasise the bits that stand out to us? Of course the question "what do Muslims think?" is highly simplistic.  There are over 1.5 billion Muslims in the world, of all ages, a wide variety of nationalities, languages and cultures and widely differing levels of education.  Naturally they don't all think the same thing.  Still the obvious way to find out what Muslims think is to ask them. That's why I am surprised that in all the media I have been seeing on Islamic issues in the past few years, and the various bits of reading I've done, no-one has yet referred to Riaz Hassan's Inside Muslim Minds. Hassan is a South A...

When I was a young man the World Government Conspiracy was quite popular (or should I say unpopular?) in the conservative church circles in which I moved for a while.  The basic idea was that various powerful forces were working in secret to create a single world government, perhaps with the United Nations as its initial vehicle.  This government would appear benign and desirable initially, but once firmly established would show its true Satanic character in fulfillment of various prophecies in the Book of Revelation. There were a number of usual suspects in this conspiracy - Freemasons, the Illuminati, the Club of Rome, Jewish bankers (or Jews in general) and Communists.  Many elements were imported from earlier conspiracy theories.  For instance, the Jewish aspect of the conspiracy was imported directly from Nazi propaganda.   The Protocols of the Elders of Zion -  a clumsy forgery created by the Russian secret service which purported to describe a Je...

If you were to watch the world news and listen to the pronouncements of our leaders, you would think we were at war with Islam.  Almost every night we see images of fanatical people brandishing flags with Arabic slogans and proclaiming Allahu Akbar (God is Great) alongside images of bombed out building, beheadings and abductions.  We hear stories of Christians and other religious minorities fleeing for their lives to avoid the choice of execution or forced conversion.  Is this an inevitable result of Islamic dominance in society, or is something else going on? I have been convinced for long time that Islam is not the problem.  Not that Islamic extremism isn't a  problem, but that this is an historical anomaly not an inevitable result of Islam. I want to try to explain briefly why I think this. When these persecutions and religious cleansing efforts first became headline news and various commentators and friends started suggesting they were a logical ...

Like most people, I guess, I've been following the news from the Middle East over the past two years - the non-violent rebellions in Tunisia and Egypt, the civil wars in Libya and Syria, the protests and bloody repression in Bahrain, Yemen and many other countries, the decades-long conflict in Palestine.  I understand what's happening on the surface, but my knowledge is skin deep, because I know so little about the societies in which they are taking place. Not so Tariq Ramadan .  His maternal grandfather was the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and his father a prominent Brotherhood figure who was exiled under President Nasser.  He grew up in Switzerland, becoming one of the Western world's leading Islamic scholars.  If anyone is qualified to interpret what's going on for Western readers, it's Tariq Ramadan. Not that he's unbiased.  He has at times been persona non grata in the US for his outspoken criticism of American and Isr...