This book shakes things up!
It also opens a space for dialogue, welcoming Muslims, anarchists and anyone engaged with creating a just, peaceful world.
It attempts to offer a vision for building a community of mutual partnership, as an alternative to nation-state structures, capitalist or otherwise. Such a community is inclusive of diverse faiths and spiritualities and grounded in shared, lived, ethico-political values. It also engages with justice in relation to indigenous land…
In a statement, before the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, Rachid, a 31-year-old Algerian rebel (The Guardian, 9 March 2003), made an important point: ‘Algerians admire Osama for shaking the notion that the superpowers are invincible.... It takes more than the speeches of bin Laden to turn an Islamist into a terrorist. It takes years of feeling abused. To make me kill, my torture needs to be personal. To send me into a fury, I need flashbacks of suffering, not empty ideological concepts.…
Having seen so many negative views in the media regarding Islam, for me, as a Muslim woman, your article ‘This is not about Islam’ [PN 2592–2593] was indeed very refreshing to read. It has been well researched and presented.
Thank you and keep up the good work.
Thank you for your front page article ‘This is not about Islam’ in the last issue of Peace News.
As an Asian living in the UK, I experience racism every day in one form or another. It’s something that gives you a thick skin but also has made me wary of trusting people.
Most young Asian people are subjected to a similar experience, but those that are the ‘black sheep’ of their communities find it more difficult as they are unable to approach peers to talk and…
A very small minority of the fundamentalists from all the violent religions that talk literally about endless torture in hellfire (I notice that major sects of Christianity over the last few decades have stopped mentioning hell) will continue to commit atrocities similar to those we witnessed in Western Europe.
These tormented minds are so mentally brutalised, I presume by growing up in authoritarian households of marginalised communities, that they want a quick way out of their…
As a Muslim, I am grateful for the informative, well-researched, cover article written by Milan Rai titled 'This is not about Islam' [PN 2592–2593]. I particularly valued the attention given to actually explore and understand the backgrounds and histories of individuals who have committed violent acts under the banner of the religion. This effort curiously revealed, as Milan pointed out, that this group, rather than being expert practitioners of Islam (as one may be led to assume),…
There is a widespread, deeply-held, belief that there is something different about Islam as a religion, something fundamentally wrong. Islam is seen by many as distinctively oppressive towards women, somehow much more violent than Christianity or Judaism, to name just the two other monotheistic religions.
In the wake of the Islamic State suicide terrorist attacks in Brussels, which killed 35 people on 22 March, there is clearly going to be much more Islamophobia, much more fear and…
On 7 July 2005 four young British men detonated bombs on London's public transport system, killing 52 people as well as themselves. Why they did it and how we can prevent future such attacks are the two central themes of Milan Rai's latest book, which combines a deeply moving tribute to the bombers' victims with the gripping, page-turning qualities of a good detective novel.
In the immediate aftermath of the attacks - and before the Government shrewdly re-focused the public debate…
