One would never think that in the midst of the hustle and bustle of downtown London, there were passionate people debating the future of British Islam. Instead of going out socialising or heading straight home to put one’s feet up, these folks made the mini-pilgrimage to this little nook in Holborn to thrash out the best way forward ...

I’m staying in the NCA hostels, the college halls of residence. The NCA staff had been lovely enough to offer me my own mini-apartment, though it felt better to be in amongst the students in order to recruit and also to get to know prospective members of The Lahore Agitprop Theatre Company. It also sounded like a lot more ...

Our first glimpses of the boiling summer ahead came at a perfect time one recent evening in a crowded classroom at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). We were attending a public debate entitled ‘Islam and Reformation – Which is The Way Forward’ organised by the Muslim Debate Initiative. Instead of the plush ...

A conversation held at London’s Dialogue Society recently between David Goodhart (Director of the London based think tank Demos and Editor-at-large of Prospect, a British current affairs magazine) and Tariq Modood (Professor of Sociology, Politics and Public Policy at the University of Bristol and founding Director of the Centre for ...

In my last blog I paid tribute to the clarity and value of Ziauddin Sardar’s book Reading the Quran I think it is a book that has the potential to change lives both inside and outside the Islamic community. So it is with a little trepidation that I take issue, though very mildly, with one particular perspective. A chapter in the ...

I’ve not been here that long and so much has happened it’s difficult to decide what I should focus on. There’s just being in Lahore, which is crazy enough. Central Lahore, where I’m staying, is an imposition of centuries old and still fully functional buildings, streets and alleyways that spill straight out ...

An evening last month hosted by the City Circle at the Abrar Islamic Foundation saw an audience gathered for a panel discussion on the unhappy relations between Pakistan and the US. The panel was comprised of Jonathan Paris, a political analyst affiliated to various organisations (notably the South Asia Centre for the Atlantic Council), ...

Taking queue from Wadah Khanfar’s introductory address to an audience gathered at the LSE this week for a talk on the ‘reality’ of the Middle East, there is still much to be understood in the wake of the revolutionary uprisings that spread across the Arab regions last year. Khanfar, former director general of the Al Jazeera ...

I don’t think the importance of what the Moudawana has achieved has either been acknowledged or recognised. It is a revolutionary transformation of Islamic personal law. I have been arguing for decades that the Sharia needs to be rethought and reformulated – the Moudawana shows what a reformulated Sharia, at least one aspect of ...

For anyone who wanted to participate in a bit of Islamic culture, they didn’t need to go further than Russel Square! On the 5th and 6th of December 2011, the Islamic Society of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) held two days of Ashura Day celebrations. They were modest ceremonies to break the supererogatory fast but ...