Three related items:
Christopher Howse in the Telegraph asks Who are the ummah?
Oliver McTernan in the Guardian discusses The textual analysis of terrorism
And from Fulcrum Graham Kings writes London Bombings:Warnings and Support
In The Times Geoffrey Rowell writes that The truth of Christian faith prevails in even our most faltering words
Also in The Times, an article by Nick Wyke on the Cammino di San Francesco (the URL within the article is wrongly spelled)
Graham Kings does a decent overview of the issues but some of his references are from an earlier generation (Cragg, Warren) when issues were far less polarized, and he needs to say a lot more about the problematic character of being a Muslim in the UK today – think of the crazy jilbab affair involving that schoolgirl or the way in which the city centers of much of the UK have become Muslim ghettoes. Some of these cities will be Muslim majority places by 2025, by current birth rates. There is an excellent piece on this in The Spectator by… Read more »
Here’s the link to the Patrick Sookhdeo article, ‘The Myth of Moderate Islam’;
http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php?id=6421
Any article in the Spectator has to be immediately suspect, and this one is no different to any other. An Anglican priest as author is no automatic recommendation. Now, which cities are we talking about? Birmingham has a high Muslim population , certainly, as does London, but then, London is a cosmopolitan city all round. Bradford also has a high Muslim population. Newcastle, Norwich, Liverpool, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Leicester, Leeds, Nottingham – all have Muslim people living there, but none overwhelmingly Muslim, or even likely to be. As for the jilbab issue, we have a choice – to take the French… Read more »
Don’t know what the problem with The Spectator is or why it’s suspect – isn’t it one of England’s oldest and most respected political journals? Here’s the money quote from the piece: “The Muslim community now inhabits principally the urban centres of England as well as some parts of Scotland and Wales. It forms a spine running down the centre of England from Bradford to London, with ribs extending east and west. It is said that within 10 to 15 years most British cities in these areas will have Muslim-majority populations, and will be under local Islamic political control, with… Read more »
‘Oldest’ – yes.
‘Respected’ – if you agree with its right-wing politics, perhaps.
But I don’t. Neither do I have any time for the likes of Sookhdeo. As for Christians being persecuted in Britain – hilarious!
Mersymike, here’s an article from the Times Online, Feb 5 2005 on what’s happening to Muslim apostates in England, including converts to Christianity – sounds like a religious hate crime to me. Do you think the UK government will act to stop this?
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1470584,00.html
Have you met Dr Sookhdeo? I don’t understand your comment about this scholar.
So the considerable number of non-observant Muslims in the UK are all being killed by fundamentalists now, are they??
Sometimes, people believe what they want to believe. I don’t happen to agree with any sort of religious fundamentalist – the Christian and Muslim kind have a lot in common!