On 16 October, French teacher Samuel Paty was decapitated outside his secondary school in a Paris suburb while on his way home. The attacker, 18-year old Abdullakh Anzorov, a Russian-born refugee of Chechen descent, was allegedly enraged by the teacher’s sharing of Charlie Hebdo’s controversial cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad with his class a week and a half before the attack. The…
The terrorist attack that was committed by a religious extremist against a French schoolteacher who showed his students cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammad as part of a free speech lesson raises questions about the issue of self-censorship in Western societies, with the two points of contention being whether the victim shouldn’t have done what he…
France is in crisis. Official and unofficial Christian French radical extremism, legitimising itself under the umbrella of what the French ostentatiously call laicité, continues to increase its attacks on French and non-French Muslims. The Collectif contre l’islamophobie en France (CCIF) listed 1,043 Islamophobic incidents that occurred in 2019 (a 77 percent increase since 2017) – 68 physical attacks…
The United Arab Emirates has unexpectedly found itself the focus of global attention after signing an agreement with Israel on 13 August that covers a full normalisation of relations. The talks were mediated by the US. The UAE has therefore become the third Arab state to recognise Israel (after Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in…
Islamic influence on European cultural heritage is a thorny topic. Christian bigotry, the preference by academics for Western sources, and most recently Islamophobia, have all played a part in obscuring its role. And so, it comes as something of a surprise, perhaps, to learn that Turks in Elizabethan London worked as tailors, cobblers, button-makers and…
An agreement to establish diplomatic relations between the United Arab Emirates and Israel and a Saudi-Pakistani spat over Kashmir coupled with feuds among Gulf states and between Turkey, the kingdom, and the Emirates drive nails into the notion that the Arab and Islamic world by definition share common geopolitical interests on the basis of ethnicity…
