Five global challenges: how might Hizmet respond?
Hizmet, the social movement inspired by the neo-Sufi thinker Fetullah Gülen, is currently being dismembered by the autocratic president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He accuses Gülen of ordering a coup attempt on 15th July 2016, saying it was was led by Hizmet members in the army. This is strenuously denied by Gülen and Hizmet, […]
Opposing terrorism
I wrote this article with Dr Rumana Hashem, prompted both by the death threats issued against Rumana, a Bangladeshi-born Muslim academic at a British University, and the disagreement I had earlier (supported by Rumana and other feminists) with British academics who support the organisation called Cage. It forms part of my ongoing investigations into Islamism, […]
Reflections on the Srebrenica genocide in July 1995
Qari Asim MBE, the Chief Imam of Makkah Mosque in Leeds, asked me to contribute to the community Iftar on 12th July 2015 which was dedicated to remembering the murder of 8,000 or so Muslim men and boys in Bosnia twenty years ago. I was given five minutes so I didn’t read the text I’d written […]
Critical Multiculturalism’s response to diverse Islamic thought and practice
My friend Dr Ali-Reza Bhojani invited me to talk to his students at the Al-Mahdi Institute in Birmingham last October, so I wrote this paper and then forgot to post it. It develops the position I’ve advanced elsewhere, that I call ‘critical multiculturalism’ as a way of thinking about, and responding to, the various types […]