Yahya Birt

The digital age is crucial to reshaping religious authority among Muslims today. The mass media and the internet have changed the way in which religious teachings are disseminated and indeed how religious disputes are projected and replicated to a vast audience. This is not new but arose two hundred years ago when the ulema began [...]

It’s usually a hopeful sign if an Indian restaurant has a small menu. It’s less likely that a standard masala base has been used to cook all the (fast food) dishes and instead a fresh and distinctive masala has been cooked for each dish — as it should be. But I save my real test [...]

Yahya Birt interviews Tony “Bilal” Ishola, the founding editor of The Platform Magazine, “Your Original Muslim Hip-Hop Source”, which has just put out its big launch issue with a CD sampler showcasing some of the best Muslim talent here in the UK and Stateside. Frustrated with the direction that mainstream hip hop was taking, Bilal [...]

It’s that time of year again. The fourth annual Brass Crescent Awards, sponsored by City of Brass and alt.muslim, are seeking nominations for the best of the Muslim blogosphere up until Friday, 9th November. Voting, in ten categories, runs for two weeks from Friday, 15th November.
So let me do a bit of shameless plugging for [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

It was sad to hear of the passing away of Robert Jordan on 16th September, whose Wheel of Time series was a modern, if flawed, fantasy masterpiece. The series had captured the imagination of a generation, selling some thirty million copies and was translated into twenty languages.
Of course literary critics are usually sniffy about popular [...]

Herman Melville (1819-1891), the American novelist, essayist and poet, from his vantage point of the nineteenth century, speculated about America’s future role in the world. He defined two faces that America could show to the world:
Intrepid, unprincipled, reckless, predatory, with boundless ambition, civilized in externals but a savage at heart, America is, or may yet [...]

For those who want a bit of a chuckle, two of America’s top Muslim comedians, Azhar Usman and Preacher Moss, are doing their first UK tour, “Allah made me funny — the official Muslim tour”. Apparently it’s only “official” because they’ve said it’s official, but don’t let that bother you. They’re doing six dates around [...]

Orhan Pamuk is not only the most recent recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature (2006), but his difficult novels are widely read in his home country of Turkey for perhaps two reasons: they take the pulse of the country’s concerns and they attempt to do this by rescuing literary narrative from the grip of [...]