Recommendation: Trojan Horse Affair Podcast

I listened to it on Spotify. Here's the information page at the New York Times, which includes other platforms to listen to the show.

Hind Makki Reviews Nida Manzoor's "We Are Lady Parts" on PeacockTV

I enjoyed Nida Manzoor's We Are Lady Parts on Peacock TV, but I didn't have the words to explain to readers of this blog why I did. Thankfully, Hind Makki did find the words!

If you mute the electric guitar, most of us will recognize these women from our own lives. But why would you want to lower the volume?

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The songs by @weareladyparts are available in #USA on @Spotify https://t.co/B6TtonUezp

— Ayman Hossam Fadel (@aymanfadel) June 19, 2021

We Are Lady Parts season TWO out on May 30! pic.twitter.com/bR6uItbxFS

— We Are Lady Parts (@weareladyparts) May 25, 2024

The British Mosque: An Architectural and Social History by Shahed Saleem

Rowan Moore reviewed The British Mosque: An Architectural and Social History by Shahed Saleem in The Guardian on March 13, 2018. 

A mosque is more about process, argues Saleem, than it is about the finished product. It is about the often slow, “iterative” business by which a community defines its needs, finds a site, raises money and commissions a building. 

Mosques, he says, are “vehicles for the dynamic reconstruction of tradition” and their conservatism can be explained as a reaction to both racism and homesickness for countries of origin. 

His own preferences do, however, become clear, in a non-traditional mosque that he has himself designed in Bethnal Green, London. He also likes the abstractly Islamic Cambridge mosque, now being built to the designs of Marks Barfield, architects of the London Eye. And, surely, the future of mosque design should indeed be about finding a British Islamic way of building to stand alongside – rather than copy – those of the Mahgreb, or Turkey, or the subcontinent. Just don’t expect this transformation to happen quickly.

I have not read the book. Find it in a library near you.

Review: The Muslims Are Coming!: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror by Arun Kundnani

The Muslims Are Coming!: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror by Arun Kundnani

Arun Kundnani (Twitter) has written a thorough critique of the Age of Obama War on Terror. And you are right, Obama supporters, that your Nobel Peace Prize-receiving hero does not call it a War on Terror like that once-reviled but now surprisingly familiar cousin George W Bush did. Obama and his people are fighting extremism. Isn't that a good thing?