By Max Farrar on December 9, 2015
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, and it sits alongside my life-long opposition to racism, xenophobia and its variants (e.g. discrimination against, and hostility to Muslims and Jews).
On the day the article was published in opendemocracy (3.12.15) I gave a talk at the monthly event organised by Leeds Taking Soundings based on the arguments developed in the article. The slides I used can be accessed here Islamist terror-dilemmas PDF
Posted in blog, journalism and media, writing | Tagged Islam, Islamic State, Islamism, Islamophobia, terrorism |
By Max Farrar on October 4, 2015
This is so important that I’m uploading a PDF of the article in the Independent on Sunday last week explaining the abominable actions of the Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT). The ABT have already murdered several people simply for their rationalist, secularist views. These violent Islamists have now issued a list of people they intend to kill, including Dr Rumana Hashem, a Bangladeshi Muslim feminist working at the University of East London in the UK.
For some reason the IoS has not uploaded this article, so I’m placing it here for wider circulation. Karen Attwood Bangla Hit List 27.9.15
Posted in blog | Tagged Islamism, jihadis, terrorism, violence |
By Max Farrar on July 13, 2015
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 (it would have taken 20 minutes). I concentrated on the last section of the document. You can access the full text here Understanding genocide 12.7.15 — if you want to.
This was an enlightening event for me, bringing together a survivor of Srebrenica and of the Holocaust with significant figures in the civic life of the city of Leeds. Makkah Mosque is notable for its open-ness and its progressive role in the city. Eating together with local Muslims as they broke their fast was another highlight of the evening.
[Since posting this article, one of my friends has reminded me of the first genocide of the 20th Century, perpetrated against the rebellious Herero-Nama peoples by the Germans who had colonised present-day Namibia. Read about it here.]
Posted in blog, public sociology, writing | Tagged equality, genocide, Holocaust, Islam, love, massacre, Muslims, peace, Rwanda, social justice, Srebrenica |
By Max Farrar on June 6, 2015
These are the slides I used at my talk for the excellent Big BookEnd festival in Leeds, UK, during June 2015. I’m very grateful to Fiona Gell and her team for the invitation to speak. The talk is based on this chapter in my co-edited collection of essays Islam in the West: Key Issues in multiculturalism (Palgrave 2012). The material in the chapter is updated with new material on Islamic State, and the talk applies my new discourse of ‘critical multiculturalism‘ as a means of suggesting a better response to violent Islamism than we have at present.
Here are the slides Islamism Terror West PDF
Here are Richard Benn’s photos of the event. (Not only does the Big BookEnd have a great publicity machine, they also have an excellent photographer.) And check the photos carefully to spot some of the students from the University of Texas at Austin attending Prof Ben Carrington’s #LeedsMaymester2015, taking his course ‘Sport and English Society’.
Dialogue will be welcomed.
Posted in blog, Public talks | Tagged Al Qaeda, Critical multiculturalism, Islamic State, Islamism, Muslim Brotherhood, terrorism |