It’s the ninth month of the Islamic calendar and that means the start of Ramadan – this year in July for the first time since 1980 – and most of the UK’s three million Muslims, including older children, will be fasting from dawn to sundown and focusing on being better Muslims and people. Ramadan is…
It’s the ninth month of the Islamic calendar, and Muslims have been fasting throughout it for more than 14 centuries. And yet non-Muslims are always full of questions. Here are the answers to some of the most common: So you don’t eat at all? No, we only fast during daylight hours – from dawn…
Ramadan in Britain during the early Eighties was very different from the way it is now. There was no awareness of the rotating month of fasting in the Islamic calendar, no flexibility to working hours, no facility for prayer in offices and no calls for prayer on television. For one month every year, my family…
Have the Brits got a problem with “Muslims”? The author notices that on British television news coverage the lengths to which some reporters went to in order to avoid using the word “Muslim”. Now if we categorise court defendants by their religion, we are saying – in effect – that their religion must have…
July 9, 2013 Faith and integration. Starting today, in private homes and mosques in via Corsica and in via Volta. One month of great celebrations but also of “abstentions” says Bar Abdoulaye Diouf, a 28 year resident of Italy: “I would like the mayor to give us best wishes, as in Senegal” “I wish a…
