Harry's Place

For sale on Ebay:

Sadly, the Masonic Badges (of course!) shop didn’t have a Scotland-Islamic Republic of Iran lapel pin. Although you can have a Wales-Latvia pin. 

Readers seeking a distraction may wish to indulge themselves with a brief foray into video gaming. Faith Fighter can be played online or downloaded to your PC or Mac. Keep your eyes peeled for the noodly one, and if you get your chosen prophet or God to the final stage a special opponent awaits.
Of course, [...]

If there was a prize for the highest number of self-inflicted non-fatal political wounds sustained by one politician Brown would surely win it. Here he goes again. Not enough to kill him, but enough to make the next election a total embarassment for Labour.
For ten years Brown plotted against Blair in government. Perhaps the time [...]

While the UN has its critics, the WHO does show that international organisations can have a purpose when they focus on living up to their primary purpose. They are currently co-ordinating a response to a contender for a possible pandemic. The disease is no longer considered containable, although this does not mean we have a [...]

This is a guest post by Ben Cohen of Z Word
When I was a kid, one of my favorite books was “Tintin in Tibet”, a rollicking tale of how the tufted one treks through the Himalayas in order to rescue his pal Chang, the sole survivor of a plane crash. Published in 1959, the same [...]

What do you do, if you are an anti-Muslim bigot, and certain Muslims don’t conform to your prejudices, leaving you with no convincing explanation for your opposition to them?
One answer is to resort to Catch-22: “taqiyya” (dissimulation). He’s a Muslim! He’s lying for Allah!
That’s more or less the Caryl Churchill tactic:
“We should be [...]

An article in today’s Guardian is most instructive. With regard to the situation in Pakistan getting rather more desperate, it notes:
“Under the deal the Taliban were supposed to renounce violence in exchange for the implementation of Sharia law in Malakand division, a vast area that covers one-third of the frontier province. Instead the militants used [...]

This is a guest post by George Readings
Jamie Bartlett, leader of Demos’s violent radicalism project “From Threat To Opportunity”, has a piece in Prospect Magazine this month. In it he makes some interesting observations:
[M]embers of terrorist cells tend to be young men with little religious knowledge other than a few cut-and-paste lines from [...]

Here’s a once in a lifetime opportunity:

Understanding and communicating Islam in official discourse and policy in Scotland and the UK: *ESRC Collaborative (CASE) +3 year PhD Studentship** **Globalisation, Communication and Democracy Cluster, Department of Geography and Sociology**, University of Strathclyde*
The Department of Geography and Sociology at the University of Strathclyde has been awarded an ESRC [...]

I’ve long been a believer in the powerful influence of social and economic class on people’s lives, even in a country like the US where class is not generally a polite topic of conversation. (In my experience, people are more comfortable talking about sex than about class differences, even as the gap between the richest [...]