Q-Notes
The New Statesman suffers from historical amnesia.
Fun times for Oxbridge Muslim Alumni.
Deenport Mania.
The Height of Opulence in Abu Dhabi.
Youssou N'Dour wins world music award.
Where the wine flows like lassi.
Q in the News.
Iran's mystery DJ.

Women slipping thru’ the gaps
The Fawcett Society reports evidence of triple prejudice working against Bangladeshi and Pakistani women.
Samira Ahmed looks at the path ahead.

The Rock Star and the Mullah
Salman Ahmad is no stranger to controversy. His band Junoon’s unique brand of spiritual rock draws on Sufi traditions. He is an outspoken critic of Pakistan’s mullahs, yet supports the presidency of General Musharraf. In a frank conversation, Salman speaks about his music, cultural revival and the future of the ummah.

"A modern day hippie in search of love"
The Rock Star and the Mullah has had a remarkably long shelf life, but as
Abdul-Rehman Malik argues, it ignores the complexity of Pakistani society in favour of simplistic polemics.

Handing Victory to the Terrorists
The December 2004 decision by the Law Lords criticising the government’s anti-terror legislation should have resulted in a major change to the law. But as Shami Chakrabarti and Megan Addis explain, the Home Secretary’s new proposals fall short of real reform.

Who is Sania Mirza?
In India, she’s everywhere. there isn’t a publication or television program that hasn’t caught Sania Mania. "This lass has got class,” they gush. “She’s the belle of the ball,” they coo. Siraj Wahab reports on the teenage tennis sensation that’s got everybody talking.

Democracy Inside Out: The Case of Egypt
The US has made education reform in Muslim nations a key feature of its foreign policy and earmarked considerable sums to fund democratic education. Well meaning? Perhaps. But real change, in countries like Egypt, will come when internal reform is taken seriously.
Louay Safi reports.

Diary
Affan Chowdhry on Desert Island Discs, his lost voice, the dangers of yoga and the tragedy of London transport.

Book views
With winter dragging its feet into March, there’s no better time to stay warm with a cup of chai and one of these recently released titles that will satisfy your appetite for history, culture and the arts.

Turks: A Journey of a Thousand Years
The latest exhibition at the royal academy of arts is an ambitious look at a millennium of Turkish civilisation.
Isla Rosser-Owen finds the exhibition spectacular, but designed to impress rather than educate.

Raising Aspirations
Raihan Alfaradhi reports on the 2005 Muslim student awards and finds British Muslim university students making their mark despite the odds.

FROM THE PULPIT
March 2005, Issue 361
Buy a copy of this issue online

I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen so many young women dressed in black in one place - black hijabs, black jilbabs and matching shoes. Was this a university Islamic Society event or a funeral? The mood, which should have been positive and welcoming, was anything but. My fellow sisters were miserable and believe it or not, they looked proud to be so. The event was heavily segregated, with thick black cloth dividing men from women. I felt incredibly sad. Here I was in a male-free zone, which technically is supposed to be a space for the young women around me to relax. But their faces were like a sour prunes, as if it was their religious duty to remain unsmiling and serious. Why do people think misery is any indication of piety?

A week later, I was invited to speak at an event sponsored by the Royal Holloway University Islamic Society. My affable host, Ameena Gamiet from the executive committee told me the topic for the evening was “Behind the Veil”, but that I was free to digress.

And digress I did.

I began the session by asking how many women (and men) in the audience had read a certain popular article from the mid-90s. The article was a robust and feisty defence of a Muslim woman’s right to wear the veil and was so popular that for years, we called it the Hijab Manifesto. As a young woman who took on the hijab in my third year of university, I felt the author eloquently represented my views so I must have e-mailed it to hundreds of people at the time! Unsurprisingly, at least half my audience at Royal Holloway were familiar with the article.

Imagine their shock when I told them the author had recently removed her hijab. Sources close to her say she remains a devout Muslim who simply feels that the “hijab no longer serves the purpose we like to believe it does”. Whatever her motivations, my reason for challenging my audience was not because I support the removal of the hijab. I wanted to discuss whether Muslims all too often seek validation outside our own selves, just as I did in the author of the Hijab Manifesto. Now that the “hijab guru’s” views have changed, where does it leave us?

The modern Muslim mantra involves far too much lip-service to clichés like “the hijab liberates women” and “Islam means peace”. As the world continues to change around us, we are unable to keep up because our discourse proves to be shallow.

There are a great number of serious and difficult issues affecting our communities: a rise in the number of teenage pregnancies, growing levels of drug abuse, and a quantifiable rise in the cases of depression and mental illness to name a few. To insist we all be stuck on the topic of whether the hijab frees women or not in the face of these new social realities is at best a diversion and at worst, a grave oversight.

I feel I can say this - I wear the hijab. University students ought to know better. They should be pushing the boundaries of conventional wisdom and exploring these difficult issues in new and interesting ways.

My presentation was followed by a lively discussion, lasting well beyond its scheduled time. I could see a few Muslims squirming in their seats, no doubt uncomfortable that the discussion had led to the public airing of the community’s “dirty laundry”. (Nevermind that our dirty laundry is already out there, flapping wildly in the wind...)

One young woman tried to prompt me with, “Sister, could you tell the audience about how Muslim women who wear the hijab are seen for their minds, not their bodies?” A young man later added, “Why not tell the audience how Islam elevates the woman in every stage of her life, particularly as a mother and as a wife?”

What? Are you and I not good enough living examples of those beliefs, that we have to go out of our way to spell them out? These were well-meaning, sincere people but I realised that evening that over the years, I have forgotten the idealistic language they were speaking in. Make no mistake, I told them, I believe in all of the above. I chose the hijab for myself. I come from a Muslim family and chose to marry into another and am very contented, alhamdulillah. However, I just couldn’t bring myself to speak the way these young people wanted me to speak.

Islam “liberates” women, but for how long will we hide the very real inequalities in our communities, behind this cliché? I love my hijab, but how can I go along with the wishful-thinking that hijabis are automatically de-sexualised just because they cover their hair? How can I feign ignorance of the fact that the hijab has, sadly, not proven to be a barrier to teenage pregnancy or drug and alcohol abuse, so rife in Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities in Britain?

I was once like these earnest activists but my vision has since shifted - laterally. I later had a fruitful private word with two Muslim women who strongly felt that this was not the forum for raising embarrassing issues. They felt that too many audience members were non-Muslims who “came to hear about the beauty of Islam” and that such internal discussions belong elsewhere. Really? And where is this elsewhere?

A strong and credible community is a one that can constructively discuss difficult issues. We do no one any favours when we insist on harping on topics that make us feel good or like self-righteous victims. This head-in-the-sand attitude is making Islam irrelevant to our own young people, let alone non-Muslims.

Muslim communities have so much going for them but we also have our problems, like any other community. The only way forward is to have unashamedly vigorous and yet, well-meaning debates. Many of these debates are internal ones - something we hope wider society will respect, but we must not be afraid to begin somewhere.

I think I convinced the two sisters sufficiently at the end of it. I genuinely believe their approach is just as right as mine. We are all sincere people, walking on parallel paths with the hope that Inshallah, we will one day arrive at a common destination, which is the betterment of humanity as a whole, and the attainment of God’s mercy on the Last Day.

As for my dour sisters in black, let’s remember that the Prophet, peace be upon him, always smiled. There was never a person who entered his presence and did not feel joyful, welcomed and loved. If we cannot learn this important lesson, no number of special “dawah events” will do us any good.

And Allah knows best.

Fareena Alam

Bleedin' Islamophobia
“Why would anyone follow a dead prophet instead of the living Christ?” Yakoub Islam froze. This is not what he expected when he responded to a call for more donors to the National Blood Service.

Upfront
Multimedia installation Disappeared in America humanises the plight of the 3,000 American Muslim men detained in the post 9/11 security dragnet.

The Muslim Blogosphere
For the last three years, it has been “All Islam, all the time.” Enter the muslim blogs. As Shahed Amanullah reports, bloggers are challenging popular
perceptions of Islam from cyberspace and creating an online community that is turning conventional wisdom on its head.

Haroon Moghul rambles, but he’s read. The thousands who visit his site weekly are in turns inspired and infuriated. What makes him tick?

The politics of
common purpose
British muslims are more diverse and have a broader range of interests and concerns than some like to give them credit for. Labour party chairman Ian McCartney argues that, more than just a historic bond, Labour and the Muslim community have shared values and a common political purpose.

Waking up to Progressive Muslims
Islam has a progressive tradition that is as old as the religion itself, but as Nazim Baksh argues, you are not likely to find it reflected at MuslimWakeup.com

The Shariah Firestorm in Canada
The law in Canada’s largest province, Ontario, allows for faith-based independent dispute resolution. Orthodox Jews and Christian churches have been doing it for almost 15 years. So why are critics so upset by attempts by the members of the Muslim community to do the same. Faisal Kutty explores the thorny issue.

Book review: Renewing Our Faith in Common Ground
The search for common ground is difficult in the face of the fatuous but deadly assumption that the world is easily divided: East and West, Muslim and Christian, Arab and European, good and bad. James Abdulaziz brown reviews two recent works that bravely challenge the intellectual status quo.

Obituary
Hafiz Gulammohammed Bora touched the lives of all who met him. Fuad Nahdi remembers an unsung hero in the struggle to establish Islam in the West.

Write Mind:
Chicken Soup for the Muslim Soul
Chicken Soup for the Soul anthologies offer warm fuzzies to its readers. So when series fan Sana Khatib saw books aimed at Christians and Jews, she wondered why there was no book for Muslims. Don’t we have souls too?

Classic Q
Mourning the unknown. Rock demigods and the girl next door, death touches us all eventually. Abu Anon contemplates.

Fiqh questions, with Faraz Rabbani