One dark winter’s night, I was in bed, sitting perfectly erect, completely oblivious to my surroundings, my eyes fixated on the pages of the book I was reading – a book that was to change my life. Continue reading
One Year Since My Father’s Death – Reflections on: TV, Music, Food, Religion & Sufism
On January 13 2012, my late father, may he rest in peace and light, died of cancer. We know that one in three of us will get cancer some time in our life – it’s a scary prospect but one we must acknowledge. My dad, unfortunately, first got cancer when he was about 41 or 42, which is pretty young. Age, however, is irrelevant: kids get cancer these days. Continue reading
NEWS: Muslim leaders urge Islamic community to rethink evolution theory
My news story published in the Times
Muslim leaders from around the world have urged the Islamic community to rethink their stance on the theory of evolution. Continue reading
The female Muslim role model: Yasmin Mogahed
Prominent Muslim women’s voices are generally lacking in mainstream discourse. However, things are changing: Yasmin Mogahed, 32, an Egyptian born American – popular for her public speaking and writing – is defying all the odds. Continue reading
Islam in revolt: evolution and homosexuality
Islam, being the youngest of the three Abrahamic religions, has had the least amount of time to evolve, or “regenerate” as Martin Lings, the English writer and biographer of the Prophet Mohammed, once put it. And it’s strikingly evident: while Christianity has accepted, and welcomed debate around, homosexuality and Darwin’s evolution theory, it pales besides the resistance of change within Islam. However, for the first time in Islam’s 1400-year history, these issues are finally being openly discussed, and rightly so. Continue reading
Is Buddhism the answer to Britain’s problems?
The 2011 Census results, which came out last week, showed that the amount of people who identify themselves as Christians has declined by four million since 2001. What’s more, 14 million people, about a quarter of the population, say they had no religion at all, a rise of 6.4 million over the decade. With the Church of England receiving such negative press lately, largely because of the decision not to allow women to become bishops and its opposition to gay marriage, the future of Christianity in this country is uncertain. Continue reading
Twitter, Facebook, Food, Life and God
Today is probably the first time in about a year where I have had hardly anything to do. It’s easy to fall into the trap of sitting around doing nothing, Tweeting, Facebooking and grazing like a cattle, you know, searching the fridge every 25minutes. Instead I’ve occupied my mind with fairly useful activities: reading and thinking. Here are some random thoughts from today, some arbitrary but others perhaps intuited from something deeper. Continue reading
