Earlier this year, walking the south side of Whitechapel High Street in London’s East End I passed an advertisement for the cinematic release of the film The Infidel. Staring at me from a poster on the side of a bus stop was the film’s hero Omid Djalili. A curious figure he’s presented as cultural confusion embodied.
William Allan, The Slave Market, Constantinople, 1838, National Gallery of Scotland
Around about the time when digital torture porn from Abu Ghraib established racialised sadism and hardcore sexual violence as the aesthetic co-ordinates of contemporary western imperialism, someone…
In September 2007, the liberal German daily newspaper Süddeutsche published an article entitled ‘Migrant kids against Gays’.[1] The article referred to the results of a study initiated by the German Lesbian and Gay Federation (LSVD), investigating attitudes among German students…
Judith Butler is in town. The foyer of the London School of Economics is packed with a young giddy crowd. We arrive half an hour before the talk, too late to secure a seat, and are herded into a televised…
Introduction
Current discussions of immigration in France are saturated with sensational narratives about gender and sexuality. The wearing of Islamic scarves, polygamy, forced marriages, female genital cutting, and the sexual victimization of young Muslim women, for instance, receive intense and…
Of the many strange permutations that the so-called ‘war on terror’ has thrown up perhaps none is stranger than that by which the distinctions between Left and Right which orientated Western metropolitan politics since the time of the French Revolution…
An exclusive interview conducted by Sara Wajid with the author and activist Nawal El Saadawi
Less than a minute in, Nawal El Saadawi, the ideological godmother of Muslim feminists, flouts author interview protocol rather fabulously, by pretending she’s not really…
On the 30th of October 2007 Judith Butler gave the annual British Journal of Sociology lecture at the London School of Economics. It was called, ‘Sexual Politics: the limits of secularism, the time of coalition’.
Judith claims that the War…
Review of: Infidel: My Life (2007), Free Press.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali has hurled herself violently into the eye of the storm with her polemical pronouncements on the threat of political Islam, the dangers of multi-culturalism and the need for…
Memory, history and location all come together in a series of photographs, abstract watercolours and a video installation collectively titled Lost Pavilion by the British artist Said Adrus
At the centre of this exhibition is a forgotten…
Professor Mahmood Mamdani makes a well argued critique of ‘humanitarian intervention’ and the continuation of the ‘civilising mission’ in Dafur in the LRB
In a recent talk at the the LSE it was interesting to see how many in the…
‘Living Apart Together: British Muslims and the Paradox of
Multiculturalism’ [PDF file] – published by Policy Exchange
Has anyone read this recent report? It was quite high profile in the media. It might be useful to discuss further given…
If you missed the BBC series Power of Nightmares (broadcast Jan 2005) about the relationship between USA Neo-Conservatives and ‘Radical Islam’, all three episodes are available for online viewing at the archive.org
