I am pleased to inform you that my publisher Berg has decided to join the Social Science Open Access Repository and to make my first book, Jihad Beyond Islam(2006) available legally for download with no costs but strictly under the Creative Common License. In this first work I discussed through an anthropological approach how we... Continue Reading →
Yesterday the tenth anniversary of 9/11 was commemorated in New York. Yet the commemorations started more than one week in advance with newspapers, TVs and magazine building up the momentum. There is little need to summarize the incredible amount of special dossiers, reports, commentaries and documentaries which have been written during these days for a... Continue Reading →
A tiger cannot change its stripes, nor a leopard its spots, so too have the US, UK, France and Italy appeared to have not learnt very much from previous disastrous interventions within Muslim societies and nations. The revolution in Libya is more complex than a majority of mass media reports, both in the US and... Continue Reading →
bin-Laden is dead. A decadent symbol has been assassinated. For some time before his demise, his influence on contemporary terrorism had been on the wane. Most likely Osama had little choice but to agree to retire to his Pakistani prison under the ‘supervision’ of the Pakistani secret services and Taliban tribes. I did not write... Continue Reading →
All religions have their scholars since no religious text or even tradition can escape the slavery of human exegesis; no exegesis, no religion. Since Ayatollah Khomeini's famous 1989 Fatwa, which made Salman Rushdie famous for books that few succeed in reading from cover to cover and others find unpalatable, fatwas have become a symbol of... Continue Reading →
Today another 200 Rohingya refugees have been rescued while drifting away in a wooden boat near the coast of Indonesia. It is pretty clear that the Rohingya are becoming the 'Roma gypsy' of Southeast Asia, and similar to the case of Roma in Europe, the discussion is not about them, as human beings or to address their... Continue Reading →
I am pleased to inform my friends and readers that my latest book Understanding Muslim Identity Rethinking Fundamentalism, is finally on the bookshelf of (more or less virtual) book shops. Another book on Islamic fundamentalism?’ I can hear the question echoing among friends, colleagues and readers. Since 2001, more than 100 books and 5,600 articles have been published on Islamic fundamentalism.... Continue Reading →
Indonesia today is celebrating the election of Barack Hussein Obama as President of the United States because of his youthful links with the country. Some other people, in Australia, are waiting to celebrate the execution of the infamous Bali bombers, responsible for the carnage in Bali while others, as the Majority of British relatives of the victims, are still trying to stop the execution... Continue Reading →
Few British newspapers, and even less European, have reported the Orwellian plans of Brown’s increasingly illegitimate (and barely democratic) government for a 2008 version of Big Brother’s 1984. The main idea is to collect the largest database in the world though logging all the communications (from old phone to the Internet) of Her Majesty’s Subjects.... Continue Reading →
