Tag Archives: Islam

The podcast Caliphate explored the war on terror and ISIS on the ground in Syria and Iraq. In this March 12, 2020 photo, a man rides a motorcycle in northwestern Syria the current focus of the 10-year civil war. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana) Peter Klein, University of British Columbia The latest scandal to hit United States news media involves Rukmini Callimachi, …

Chris Wilson and Sanjal Shastri What is the relationship between hate crimes and terrorism? Could we have predicted the terror attacks at Masjid Al Noor and the Linwood Islamic Centre on March 15 last year if we had been able to identify a rising number of verbal and physical attacks against Muslims in the preceding months and years? In New …

Pooyan Tamimi Arab, Utrecht University and Ammar Maleki, Tilburg University Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution was a defining event that changed how we think about the relationship between religion and modernity. Ayatollah Khomeini’s mass mobilisation of Islam showed that modernisation by no means implies a linear process of religious decline. Reliable large-scale data on Iranians’ post-revolutionary religious beliefs, however, has always …

Shutterstock Fouzia Azzouz, University of Bristol Sharia councils across the UK could be facing a potentially significant rise in their workload as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, and many don’t have the resources to cope. The predicted rise in divorce rates and reported increase in cases of domestic violence associated with lockdown measures will touch Muslim relationships just like …

Group photo outside the Memorial Hall at the Shah Jahan Mosque complex in Woking. Woking Mission Photos Index, Author provided Sariya Cheruvallil-Contractor, Coventry University The two first British mosques were established in 1889 in Liverpool and Woking, and women played a major contribution to the communities that helped to set up these mosques. But you wouldn’t necessarily know it. Indeed, …

Hagia Sofia. Baucys/Shutterstock.com Ilay Romain Ors, University of Oxford and Tugba Tanyeri Erdemir, University of Pittsburgh Two former Byzantine churches of Istanbul, the famed Hagia Sophia and the Church of the Holy Saviour in Chora, which served as museums for decades, have been converted to mosques in the space of a month. This has raised concerns. Istanbul’s Greek Orthodox community …

Hazal Atay, Sciences Po – USPC Many women took to the streets worldwide on September 28, the global day of action for safe abortion successes and put forth new demands for women’s right to access safe, free and legal abortion. Right to access safe abortion is under threat in many countries, from the United States to Poland, from Argentina to Ireland …

Jon Hoover, University of Nottingham The killing of Jordanian pilot Moaz al-Kasasbeh by Islamic State has been explained as an act of retaliation for the air campaign against it. But there have been many questions about whether immolation is a valid form of punishment in Islamic law – and many Muslim scholars have argued that it is not. This is …

Muslims start the hajj by circling the Kaaba, the black, cube-shaped house of God. UmmSqueaky, CC BY-NC Ken Chitwood, University of Florida Around 1.7 million Muslims have gathered this year in the holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia for the annual pilgrimage – the hajj. The five-day pilgrimage is a once-in-a-lifetime obligation for all Muslims who have the physical …