Yahya Birt

How big a threat is “Islamic” terrorism (note the scare quotes) to Europe? It’s a valid question, and not one that we should assume we already know the answer to.
Since 9/11, politicians have had a ready answer and portray terrorism as the primary, existential threat, even in an age of global warming. For Tony Blair [...]

Today we live in an age when the boundary between two allegedly monolithic entities, “Islam” and the “West” appears to be rigid, politicized, ring-fenced. So the question arises as to the motives of converts to Islam. Are they converting to faith or to an anti-West political cause? Such questions get asked after terrorist incident involving [...]

Boyd Tonkin says it much better than I could, but the case of the Lyrical Terrorist shows that people can now be locked up for what they think, what they write and what they read, download and print out from the Internet. How can we have come to the position whereby the first response of [...]

Peter Kosminsky, well-known for his topical political dramas, has taken on post-7/7 Britain in his latest offering, the two-parter, Britz. This is the story of a brother, Sohail (Riz Ahmed, the single “Post-9/11 Blues”, Michael Winterbottom’s The Road to Guantanamo), and his sister, Nasima (Manjinder Virk, Neil Biswas’s Bradford Riots), both born and bred in [...]

on American campuses this week (22-26th October). According to Think Progress, one of America’s top political blogs, the claim that 200 campuses are taking part is hype. The American-Arab Anti Discrimination Committee did a survey of (the allegedly) participating campuses and found that
after we contacted those institutions, most of those institutions indicated that no such [...]

Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (London: Penguin, 2007) is a little gem of a novel. It is the story of Changez, a Pakistani from an old Lahori family fallen on genteel poverty, who goes to America to get a good education and make money. It is a tale of enchantment followed by disenchantment. Changez wins [...]

Last week the question of Muslim unity came up, as it often does, on the English-medium Muslim blogosphere. One of the prominent young American scholars, Imam Suhaib Webb, who is currently studying at the al-Azhar in Cairo, Sunni Islam’s most august centre of Islamic learning, commented that:
Over the last 15 yrs the West has become [...]

It’s a truism that how journalists report “extremism” is a central issue of the day. The controversies over two Dispatches programmes, one broadcast in January and other in August on the topic of British Muslim “extremism”, usefully highlight difficult issues around standards of accuracy in journalism and the forms of censorship that emerge from the [...]

We have sadly been here before. The question on everyone’s lips after the failed attacks in London and Glasgow is: shouldn’t British Muslims be doing more? After all, if one considers some of the key figures, the battle for the “hearts and minds” (a horrid cliché admittedly) of an extremist subculture doesn’t seem to be [...]

Shiv Malik reads too much into one case study.
Shiv Malik’s essay, “My brother the bomber” (Prospect, June 2007), sets out a detailed account of the life and motivations of Mohammad Sidique Khan, the ringleader of the 7/7 bombings. But Malik reads too much into this one case study.
Much of the detail in Malik’s piece has [...]