This week Baroness Caroline Cox launched a bill in the House of Lords to impose principles of gender equality upon the sharia courts of Britain. This proposal reflects a growing groundswell of concern about the impact of these courts upon the lives of Muslim women....
I first became intrigued by the situation of non-Muslims under Islam while doing linguistic field work in Aceh, Indonesia in the late 1970's and early 1980's. This interest was piqued in the 1990's by reading Bat Ye'or's The Decline of Christianity under Islam. This led to...
Two important modern reference works on jihad in Islam are Muhammad Haykal's Jihad and Fighting according the the Shar‘i Policy (Al-Jihad wa-l-qital fi al-siyasa al-sharia’iyya) and Yusuf Al-Qaradawi's Jurisprudence of Jihad (Fiqh al-jihad). Both these works give the lie to apologies offered by many western...
In April 2009, the Islamic Fiqh Academy made a ruling entitled ‘Domestic Violence’. (See here, pp.15-18 of the PDF). This is a highly significant document which reflects a high-level consensus of leading Muslim scholars in the world today. It was clearly issued in the context...
The Australian Government is holding a national inquiry into multiculturalism. The Australian newspaper yesterday reported that the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils has requested the introduction of Sharia law under the umbrella of multiculuralism (the AFIC submission can be downloaded here: other submissions are available...
This opinion piece appeared in The Age newspaper of March 25, 2011 THOSE who denounce critics of Islam should allow that, like all global faiths, Islam has its detractors and a religion will be judged on what its followers say and do. There is a debate going...
My previous post discussed the difficulty of reading the Qur'an. This post addresses a very specific challenging issue in Quranic translation, namely the meaning of certain 'fighting' verses. There are many verses in the Quran which refer to fighting and killing. I would like to consider...
I am grateful to the linguist Alton L. Becker for drawing my attention to a principle that language is both exuberant and deficient. His words sank deep into my consciousness at the time of first reading them over twenty five years ago: In the fifties, the...