Yahya Birt

Nominations for the Fourth Annual Brass Crescent Awards are now up (now that the good folk at the Awards have finished wading through 300 nominations). Voting closes on the 14th December.
It’s the strongest ever British performance this year, although far be for me to suggest that patriotism is the only valid voting criterion! The Brits [...]

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 [...]

Sometimes the best way to deal with a loudmouth (Martin Amis), nothwithstanding Terry Eagleton’s or Ronan Bennett’s valiant efforts, is to send him up. Chris Morris provides a masterclass here, noting striking similarities between Martin Amis and Abu Hamza. It really cheered me up: it will cheer you up too.
It’s sobering to note that the [...]

In October the Racial and Religious Hatred Act came into force in Britain that outlaws anyone from stirring up religious hatred against people on religious grounds. From the late Eighties onwards, it was argued that while certain religious groups such as Sikhs and Jews were seen as ethnic groups under incitement to racial hatred legislation, [...]

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 [...]

Paul Vallely, one of the more thoughtful commentators on British Muslim life, has written a background piece called “Wahhabism: A deadly scripture” in response to all the botheration over King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia’s recent state visit to Britain and the release of a recent report on hate literature found in mosques (which I haven’t [...]

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 [...]