Yahya Birt

Yahya Birt
It is obvious enough that the debate about the place of Islam in Europe has probably never been so important or sharply contested. The numbers of those who think there can be no genuine or settled place for Europe’s second largest religion seem to be growing; and this sentiment now mobilises politics in many [...]

What was the status of the Sheikh-ul-Islam of the British Isles? Evidentially there is no definitive answer to this and my tentative conclusions are provisional as I do not have the immediate means to get to the bottom of what most would probably regard as an “historical footnote”.
The office has only had one incumbent: Sheikh [...]

The choice of Abdullah Quilliam (1856-1932), ennobled as the Sheikh of Islam of the British Isles in 1894 by the Ottoman caliph and by the Emir of Afghanistan, as a symbolic flag-bearer for British Islam is less straightforward than it might appear. One recent appropriation of his legacy presents him as a kind of proto-Brownite [...]

Gillian Gibbons has been given a “lenient” fifteen-day sentence for allegedly insulting the Prophet by allowing her pupils to name a teddy bear Muhammad after asking them to vote for a name that they liked. The judge ignored any question of (lack of) intent or cultural misunderstanding despite strong support from her pupils, their parents [...]

The Transatlantic Task Force on Immigration and Integration composed of senior or retired European and American politics has issued a report this month, “Integrating Islam: A New Chapter in ‘Church-State’ Relations”. Reports come and go and often get ignored but what caught my eye about this particular briefing was an unusual clarity of expression and [...]

The impressions of a British Muslim about the Islamic Society of North America’s 2007 annual convention. Posted here, courtesy of Emel Magazine.

Hold fast to the Rope of Allah, all together, and be not divided. (Qur’an, 3:103)

Surely, those who have made divisions in their religion and turned into factions, you have nothing to do with them. Their case rests with Allah; then He will inform them of what they used to do. (Qur’an, 6:159)

In light of the Divine Word, we recognize that the historical nature of Sunni Islam is a broad one that proceeds from a shared respect for the Qur’an and Sunnah, a shared dependence on the interpretations and derivations of the Companions (may Allah be pleased with them), and a shared respect for the writings of a vast array of scholars who have been identified by their support for and affiliation with the Sunni Muslims and have been accepted as the luminaries of Sunni Islam – as broadly defined.

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 [...]

The Muslim world, however else it is interconnected by history, culture and religion, largely doesn’t trade with itself today. In 2004, about a sixth of all imports and exports were traded within the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (with nearly all of its 57 member states being Muslim-majority countries); by contrast, after nearly a decade-and-a-half [...]