Yahya Birt

Back in 2004, King Abdullah II of Jordan sent three deceptively simple questions to 24 religious scholars representing major trends of thought within Islam: (i) Who is a Muslim?; (ii) Is it permissible to declare another Muslim an apostate?; and (iii) Who has the right to issue non-binding legal verdicts (fatawa)? The immediate context was [...]

It has become commonplace to suspect the loyalties of British Muslims, and all the more so after the London bombs in 2005.* British Muslims are constantly asked to deny their alleged sympathies for terrorism. Their feelings of Islamic solidarity are thought to equal at best indifference or at worst hostility to patriotism. Although there has [...]

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 [...]

An eighteenth-century French nursery rhyme “Ah! Vous dirai-je, Maman”, set to music similar to “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” (the lyrics of which were written later on), has some timeless wisdom to impart to fathers the world over, above and beyond the immediate context of a child’s sweet tooth:
Ah! Vous dirai-je, Maman,
Ce qui cause mon tourment?
Papa [...]

Would it be feasible to imagine a convincing universal library, one that contained not only every book in existence, but every possible book? Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), the Argentinian writer famous for exploring philosophical conundrums through short stories and fictive essays, once did so in his parable “The Library of Babel” (1941). Well before the [...]