Mayor turns on display made up of 30,000 sustainable lights on eve of Muslim month of fasting
Sadiq Khan has switched on the London’s first ever celebratory Ramadan lights, in Piccadilly Circus.
It is the first time a European city has seen such a grand display for the festival, with the installation featuring 30,000 sustainable lights.
Continue reading...Move met with indignation by many across country, where liquor sales have boomed in recent years
Over the past two decades of problems in Iraq, where to find a drink has never been one of them. But one of the country’s most popular vices – alcohol – is again at the centre of a tussle between hardliners, who are demanding an import ban, and drinkers intent on defying them.
The latest row about whether alcohol can be served has followed a decree from a conservative cabinet minister at the weekend that ordered customs officials to impose an import ban.
Continue reading...The verdict, the first of its kind in almost a decade, has shocked many who fear country is sliding back into state extremism
Three Sudanese men have been sentenced to hand amputation for stealing, the first time in almost a decade that such a punishment has been handed down in the country’s courts.
The three men in their 20s were convicted of stealing gas cylinders in Omdurman, Sudan’s most populous city, which sits across the Nile River from the capital, Khartoum.
Continue reading...Killing is latest in string of mob attacks against people accused of blasphemy in Muslim-majority south Asian country
A mob in eastern Pakistan stormed a police station on Saturday and snatched a Muslim man accused of blasphemy from police custody and lynched him, in the latest religion-linked killing in the conservative Islamic country.
Muhammad Waris, in his mid-30s, was in police custody in Nankana Sahib in Punjab province, 80km (50 miles) from Lahore, for desecrating pages of the Qur’an.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Erkin Tuniyaz ‘played central role’ in persecution of Uyghurs, says inter-parliamentary alliance on China
The Foreign Office has shocked cross-party opponents of the Chinese treatment of Uyghur groups by revealing that it has asked the Xinjiang governor for talks.
MPs belonging to the inter-parliamentary alliance on China (Ipac) called it “incomprehensible” that “anybody within government would think it appropriate to meet with someone who has played a central role in the persecution of Uyghurs – crimes our own parliament has declared to be genocide”.
Continue reading...Politicians accused of stigmatising Muslims and migrants after man with machete entered two churches in Algeciras
Conservative and far-right Spanish political leaders have been accused of seeking to smear and stigmatise Muslims and migrants after a suspected Islamist terrorist attack on two churches in the southern city of Algeciras in which one man was killed and four other people were injured.
On Wednesday evening, a man with a machete entered the Andalucían city’s San Isidro church and seriously wounded a priest there before going to the nearby Nuestra Señora de La Palma church and killing its sacristan, Diego Valencia. Three other people were injured in the violence.
Continue reading...Event in front of Turkish embassy will further inflame tensions between two countries
Turkey has condemned a demonstration involving the burning of Qur’ans in Sweden on Saturday, further inflaming tensions between the two countries amid Stockholm’s Nato bid.
The protest in Stockholm, which took place under heavy police protection in front of Turkey’s embassy, gathered about 100 people and a crowd of reporters, Agence France-Presse reported.
Continue reading...Campaigners urge policymakers to act on ‘cycle of poverty’ entrapping generations of British muslims
Campaigners have urged policymakers to act on the “cycle of poverty” entrapping generations of British Muslims, as the latest census shows that 39% of Muslims are now living in the most deprived areas of England and Wales.
The proportion of people who identify as Muslim has risen by 1.2 million in 10 years, bringing the Muslim population to 3.9 million in 2021, the census shows. Overall, Muslims now make up 6.5% of the population in England and Wales, up from 4.9% in 2011.
Continue reading...Head of World Cup organising committee says he sees rainbow armband as protest against Islamic values
The head of Qatar’s World Cup organising committee has accused teams who wanted to wear the OneLove armband at the World Cup of sending a “very divisive message” to the Islamic and Arab world.
Hassan al-Thawadi’s comments came as the UK sports minister Stuart Andrew said he would wear the rainbow-coloured armband at the England v Wales match on Tuesday.
Continue reading...Report finds stock indexes provided by MSCI include companies using forced labour or constructing surveillance state in Xinjiang
Many of the world’s largest asset managers and state pension funds are passively investing in companies that have allegedly engaged in the repression of Uyghur Muslims in China, according to a new report.
The report, by UK-based group Hong Kong Watch and the Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice at Sheffield Hallam University, found that three major stock indexes provided by MSCI include at least 13 companies that have allegedly used forced labour or been involved in the construction of the surveillance state in China’s Xinjiang region.
Continue reading...Makers of Bollywood film say it is based on real information and events but have not provided any evidence
Police in Kerala are investigating a controversial Bollywood film that portrays the southern Indian state as a hub of Islamic terrorism and forced conversion.
The Kerala Story, directed by Sudipto Sen, has come under criticism for its fictional depiction of tens of thousands of women from Kerala who it claims were converted to Islam and became terrorists for Islamic State in Afghanistan, Yemen and Syria.
Continue reading...Teargas also used against protesters gathered in home town of 22-year-old Kurdish woman, says rights group
Iranian security forces have clashed with protesters who had gathered in their thousands in Mahsa Amini’s home town to mark 40 days since her death, with reports that shots were fired.
“Security forces have shot teargas and opened fire on people in Zindan Square, Saqqez city,” Hengaw, a Norway-based group that monitors rights violations in Iran’s Kurdish regions, tweeted without specifying whether there were any dead or wounded. It said more than 50 civilians were injured by direct fire in cities across the region.
Continue reading...The bravery of the women’s rights fight in Tehran and beyond is a cause for hope – and a call to action
It was in the strange days between the Queen’s death and her funeral that the bad news from Iran broke through the blanket coverage of the state mourning rituals. The news that pierced this was the report that a young woman had died in the custody of Iran’s morality police.
Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian Kurd, had been taken into custody because of “bad hijab”. She was visiting relatives in Tehran with her brother when the morality police challenged her about a few strands of hair that were showing from her standard hijab. According to her brother, she was in custody for just two hours before collapsing and being taken to hospital, where she lay in a coma before dying on 16 September. The authorities claimed that she had a heart attack from a pre-existing condition. Her family deny this, and state that her head and body were covered in bruises and signs of being beaten.
Continue reading...The uprising over the death of Masha Amini is like no other, but whether it leads to revolution remains to be seen
The Iranian president, Ebrahim Raisi, was holding court to a small group of journalists at the Millennium Hilton in New York on his first visit to the United States since his election in June 2021. At home, protests over the death in police custody of Masha Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, were entering their sixth day.
At the start of the meeting, a 10-minute film was shown, part patriotic travel brochure and part paen to how the Iranian people “live peacefully together in a new model of democracy”. Given the events in Iran, it seemed like the kind of absurd propaganda only a severely self-deluded regime would screen.
Continue reading...Rights groups ‘extremely concerned’ about violent repression of demonstrations in Tehran and Isfahan
Iranian students have stepped up their protests in defiance of a crackdown by security forces, who allegedly cornered and shot 12 students at a prestigious university in Tehran on Sunday night.
Anti-government protests ignited by the death of a young woman in police custody in mid-September have spread around the country at various levels of intensity, revealing a cultural chasm between the country’s educated youth and an elderly male religious establishment.
Continue reading...Popular Front of India, which says it fights for rights of minorities, victim of ‘political vendetta’ by Hindu nationalist government
An Islamic organisation that says it fights discrimination against minorities in India has disbanded after the government declared it and its affiliates unlawful, accusing them of involvement in terrorism.
The government of Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) accused the Popular Front of India (PFI) group of having been involved in “terrorism” and “anti-national activities”.
Continue reading...The country faces a litany of problems, from inflation to a democratic deficit, and the women’s movement is seen as an agent of change
On the day that news of Mahsa Amini’s death spread throughout Iran, a young woman with a shaved head joined protesters who had gathered outside Kasra hospital, where Amini had lain in a coma since her violent arrest by Iran’s morality police days earlier.
In her hand she carried a plastic bag full of her long hair, shorn off in a gesture of solidarity with Amini and in defiance of the increasing crackdown on women by the regime.
Continue reading...Ebrahim Raisi says he has contacted Kurdish woman’s family but laments western double standards on human rights
The death in custody in Iran of a Kurdish woman that led to widespread protests must be “steadfastly” investigated, Iran’s president has said, as he lamented what he claimed were western “double standards” on human rights.
Ebrahim Raisi told a news conference on the sidelines of the UN general assembly in New York that the death of Mahsa Amini while in the custody of Iran’s morality police “must certainly be investigated”.
Continue reading...Leicester East MP says ministers must clamp down on ‘extremist rightwing ideology’
Violent clashes between groups of mainly Hindu and Muslim young men will spread beyond Leicester to other towns and cities without central government and police intervention, a local MP has warned.
Claudia Webbe, whose Leicester East constituency has been at the centre of several incidents over the past month, said ministers needed to clamp down on “extremist rightwing ideology” and misinformation being spread through social media.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Concerns outsiders have stirred up trouble between Hindu and Muslim groups heightened after discovery people travelled into the city
Almost half of the 18 people arrested after violence between Hindu and Muslim communities in Leicester over the weekend came from outside the county, the Guardian has learned.
Concerns that outsiders have stirred up trouble in the city have heightened as it was discovered eight of those arrested were not from Leicestershire. Of these, five came from Birmingham, while one came from Solihull, one from Luton and one gave an address in Hounslow.
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