Sunday 6th May 2018 saw two to three thousand people march through London flying national flags and holding signs decrying limits to freedom of speech. Yet commentators see their rhetoric regarding civil and religious rights as a contradiction.
Britain’s most senior diplomat has apologised for calling one of the holiest sites in Sikhism a mosque, demonstrating the prominence of religious illiteracy which leads to Sikhs often being confused with Muslims.
The National Union of Students (NUS) has published its report ‘The experience of Muslim students in 2017-18’. The report highlights the obstacles Muslim students experience in higher and further education, including raising concerns about the effect of the Prevent initiative.
The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has launched a hashtag campaign to encourage action against hate speech. He launched the #endthehate campaign through a video on his personal and mayoral Twitter feed in conjunction with his keynote address to SXSW 2018, and also called on social media companies to do more to combat it.
Seyran Ateş, controversial founder of an avowedly ‘liberal’, gender-equal mosque in Berlin at which she serves as female Imam, has been faced with disbelief at her most recent comments on the Muslim headscarf. Women’s rights lawyer turned to the religious field Ateş made a name for herself in the 1990s as a lawyer defending women’s…
