Stockholm court gives Salwan Najem, whose co-defendant was shot dead last week, suspended sentence and fine

A man who participated in several Qur’an burnings in Stockholm that contributed to a diplomatic crisis between Sweden and the Muslim world has been convicted of incitement against an ethnic group.

Stockholm district court gave Salwan Najem a suspended sentence and a fine on Monday morning, saying his actions and behaviour in summer 2023 exceeded what could be described as engaging in objective debate and criticism of religion.

Exclusive: Language during debates reinforces view of migration as inherently unlawful, says Runnymede Trust

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The word “illegal” has been one of the terms most strongly associated with migrants in UK parliamentary debates over the past 25 years, research has found.

Findings from the Runnymede Trust, published on Friday, examine how politicians and the media have portrayed migrants, refugees and Muslims in their discourse.

The Oscar-nominated star of Netflix’s musical made racist and Islamophobic remarks in several tweets from 2020

Emilia Pérez star Karla Sofía Gascón is under fire after old tweets uncovered a range of troubling opinions on subjects including Islam and George Floyd.

The Spanish actor, who recently became the first ever openly transgender person to receive an acting nomination at the Oscars, has since deleted a number of tweets after users, including writer Sarah Hagi, uncovered them. Variety and the Hollywood Reporter have since reported the news and translated older posts.

Five arrested after Salwan Momika reportedly killed during TikTok live stream, hours before trial verdict due

Sweden’s prime minister has said a foreign power may have been involved in the fatal shooting of an anti-Islam campaigner just hours before a trial verdict over his burning of the Qur’an was due.

Police arrested five people over the killing of Salwan Momika, 38, who was shot late on Wednesday in a house in the town of Södertälje, near Stockholm. Authorities did not say whether the shooter was among those detained.

Assad’s fall welcomed in southern province of Suwayda but community continues to press Damascus caretaker government

Suwayda is well-equipped for protests. The central square of the city, home to one of Syria’s larger minority communities, hosts the crowds of weekly – or sometimes even daily – demonstrators calling for the representation and public services they have demanded for years.

Long before the fall last month of the regime of Bashar al-Assad, the southern province of the same name had become a byword for resistance to rule by Damascus, unafraid to protest despite Assad’s crackdown on dissent and his hollow pledges to protect communities like theirs.

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Q: Are doctors able to recognise depression? And can they decide if that affects someone’s capacity to make a decision about their health?

Whitty says doctors can identify depression. But he says it is harder for them to assess if that is affecting capacity.

That’s where help from colleagues from psychiatry, mental health more widely, is going to be useful. But that should be good medical practice, in my view, under all circumstances.

Certainly what I wouldn’t want is to be in a situation where the existence of the fact that someone who has a terminal diagnosis has some degree of low mood in itself just rules them out from any kind of medical intervention, this or any other. That shouldn’t be the case.

As a former Libyan foreign minister, I urge the world not to let Syria become another cautionary tale of a nation left to crumble under the weight of global apathy and splintered leadership

In December, the world watched in awe as Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria imploded. But as Syria rejoices, I bear a warning: we cannot let Syria’s power vacuum fester into another civil war, as the international community did in Libya.

As Libya’s first female foreign minister, I am painfully aware of what is at stake. When images of our own dictator’s dead body were broadcast to the world in 2011, we believed Libya had been liberated. But the euphoria of revolutions often gives way to darker realities.

Proponents of the amendments – described by activists as ‘disastrous’ – say they align with Islamic principles

Iraq’s parliament has passed amendments to the country’s personal status law that opponents say would in effect legalise child marriage.

The amendments give Islamic courts increased authority over family matters, including marriage, divorce and inheritance. Activists argue that this undermines Iraq’s 1959 Personal Status Law, which unified family law and established safeguards for women.

Prime minister told Commons any new inquiry into child abuse would delay progress however spokesperson says he has not ruled one out

Reform UK has also tabled a reasoned amendment to the children’s wellbeing and schools bill motion tonight. It says:

That this house declines to give a second reading to the children’s wellbeing and schools bill because the secretary of state for the Home Department has not launched a UK-wide public inquiry into grooming gangs and has not committed to updating Members of this House every quarter on the progress of the inquiry.

The Conservatives are using the victims of this scandal as a political football.

The Conservatives alongside Reform, goaded along by Elon Musk will be voting for a motion which will not secure a national inquiry for victims of child sexual abuse, but instead it would kill these crucial child protection measures completely.

Amid claims and counterclaims about the definition and prevalence of antisemitism and Islamophobia, experts say discussing them in the same frame can ‘generate allyship’

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Rates of antisemitism and Islamophobia in Australia have risen sharply since 7 October 2023, according to almost every source that has tracked incidents or surveyed attitudes.

But the extent of the rise has been questioned.

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A beautifully-illustrated account of the Middle Eastern influence on Europe’s great buildings

From Cairo to Istanbul, the ancient cities of the eastern Mediterranean tell a story of conquest, trade and coexistence written in stone. Jerusalem’s seventh-century Dome of the Rock and its surroundings are dotted with recycled Persian, Greek, Hasmonean and Roman stonework, along with choice fragments from churches. In Damascus, the eighth-century Umayyad Mosque features intricately carved capitals from a Roman temple and relics of St John the Baptist transferred from the church it replaced. The cross-pollination extended from design and materials to people – the shimmering gold mosaics that cover the interiors of both buildings are attributed to the Byzantine master craftsmen whose forerunners decorated the churches of Constantinople and Ravenna.

This sun-drenched historical patchwork could seem a long way from the gloom of early medieval Europe. But in Islamesque, cultural historian Diana Darke sets out to show Islamic art’s influence on Europe’s Romanesque monasteries, churches and castles, via a very similar story of surprising borrowings and occasional thefts. It is a companion to Darke’s previous book, Stealing from the Saracens, which argued that European masterpieces from Notre-Dame to St Paul’s took inspiration from the Muslim world, and whose eye-catching examples included Big Ben’s resemblance to the 11th-century minaret of the Great Mosque of Aleppo.

ASA acts on poster campaign by Wahed, urging people to join a ‘money revolution’, after receiving 75 complaints

The UK’s advertising watchdog has banned a campaign by an online investment company predominantly targeting Muslims that featured images of euros and US dollars and the words “The United States of America” in flames alongside a call to “join the money revolution”.

Wahed Invest Ltd, an online investment platform, ran six posters on various Transport for London (TfL) services, including the London Underground and on buses, last September and October.

Gunmen stormed satirical paper’s Paris offices, killing 11 people, over cartoons of the prophet Muhammad

Ten years on from the Islamist terrorist attack on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, France will ask: “Are we all still Charlie?”

The #JeSuisCharlie hashtag spread around the world in January 2015 after brothers Chérif and Saïd Kouachi stormed the paper’s offices killing 11 people in retaliation for it printing cartoons of the prophet Muhammad.

The new allegation in Islamophobic discourse is that even Muslims who appear ‘well-integrated’ hate the west

Reporting on the rise of anti-Muslim hostility across Europe means repeatedly hearing generalisations about Europe’s 25 million Muslims. We are – all of us – too religious, easily drawn to extremism and terrorism, we live in parallel societies and Muslim women, especially those who wear the hijab, are victims of fanatical patriarchal oppression or foot soldiers in a drive to replace indigenous white Europeans.

Again and again, European governments instruct us to integrate: come in, step out of the shadows and join the sunny European mainstream. We should be less “foreign”, more European, adopt “European values” (just which ones is left unclear, but drinking beer and eating pork seem to be among them), get an education and then – and only then – actively participate in the political, economic and social life of our “host societies” which, according to Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, are purely Christian.

Shada Islam is a Brussels-based commentator on EU affairs. She runs New Horizons project, a strategy, analysis and advisory company

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With firms such as Makani and Boycat, founders answer a growing demand: help their users support Palestinians

Amany Killawi made a breakup playlist every time she was dumped, three in all. The playlists, which feature songs such as Gotye’s Somebody That I Used to Know and Apologize by OneRepublic, would make good soundtracks to romantic splits, but that’s not what they were. The playlists came together after Killawi was told by three different banks and payment processors they would no longer work with LaunchGood, the crowdfunding platform for the Muslim community she co-founded.

Stripe said it was restricting its work in the crowdfunding space after five years of working with LaunchGood. Stripe also told the company it didn’t want to do any more international humanitarian work – a prerequisite for a crowdfunding platform that caters to the Muslim community. Another bank told the company there were too many Muslim and Arabic names and figuring out if those names belonged to sanctioned individuals was difficult.

Lack of faith in political leaders is leading the socially disaffected to be seduced by violence

Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, the alleged perpetrator of the horror attack on the Christmas market in Magdeburg, does not, Germany’s interior minister, Nancy Faeser, observed, “fit any existing mould”. He had acted in “an unbelievably cruel and brutal manner, like an Islamist terrorist, though he was clearly ideologically hostile to Islam”.

Faeser is not alone in her confusion about how to understand Abdulmohsen.

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Despite some theological differences, both denominations look to her as an inspiration for cultivating compassion and hope

I had just finished teaching a class on “the Muslim Mary”. Many non-Muslims who attended were puzzled to find out that Muslims had a connection with Mary at all, and had no knowledge of how important she is to our belief and practice. This came as no surprise. Half of Americans report they know “not much” or “nothing at all” about Islam.

As a Muslim girl growing up in the overwhelmingly Catholic state of Rhineland-Palatinate in Germany, Mary was a constant presence in my life. Her images and statues, dotted across my city, smiled at me as I walked to school. At Christmas time, I joined with my classmates to sing songs such as Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht.

Zeyneb Sayılgan is the Muslim Scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies in Baltimore

Conservative leader says ‘seeing Labour government reminds everyone who the real opponent is’ and rejects claim she should announce more policy now

During the Conservative leadership contest Kemi Badenoch wrote an article for the Sunday Telegraph about immigration in which she suggested the UK should not be admitting migrants who do not accept British values. She said:

We cannot be naïve and assume immigrants will automatically abandon ancestral ethnichostilities at the border, or that all cultures are equally valid. They are not. I am struck for example, by the number of recent immigrants to the UK who hate Israel. That sentiment has no place here …

Our country is not a dormitory for people to come here and make money. It is our home. Those we chose to welcome, we expect to share our values and contribute to our society.

People assume that I’m always talking about Islam, but I’m not really. It’s one of many variations of culture which we have in the country because of immigration, especially the more recent immigration which has been too high.

To understand what I’m saying, you have to look at where I grew up [Nigeria], where there are 300 different languages and cultures, everybody looks the same, and people don’t get on unless there is a unifying thing.

One of the things that profoundly affected my view on the world was what happened 10 years ago when those 300 schoolgirls were abducted from their school by Boko Haram, a terrorist group in northern Nigeria. It has a lot of parallels with what happened on October 7.

And this group had been indulged – you know, ‘It’s just Islam, they’re just people who are poor and they’re fighting for their rights’, and then it moved into something really hideous and terrible, and it’s now just a depraved group of people who assault Christians, women, destroy families.

Remember, that steel plant was one I was helping to manage [when she was business secretary]. I didn’t nationalise it then, did I?

It depends. With many of these things, it depends.

Aren’t you tired of people who just tell you what you want to hear? I will not do that.

And that’s why I don’t answer those questions, because the answer is always, and should always be, it depends.

Minority Islamic sect associated with overthrown Assad regime waits to see how threats of revenge will play out

To prepare khubeiza, the leaves of the kale-like plant must be roughly chopped and sauteed with onions, garlic and a dash of salt. Folklore says that the recipe originated among the Alawite communities who lived in Syria’s mountainous coastline where the fibrous, wild-growing plant can be found in abundance. So poor were the Alawites during Ottoman times, the story goes, that the only food they could find to eat was khubeiza, which sprouts like a stubborn weed every spring.

When Hafez al-Assad, a member of the minority Islamic Alawite sect, seized the reins of power in 1971, he promised to lift the neglected community out of its poverty and end its hunger.

NSW premier says vandalism aimed at particular religions is designed to incite hatred and ‘completely abhorrent’

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New South Wales police are investigating a potential hate crime after Islamophobic graffiti was painted on a busy underpass in Sydney’s west, with the premier labelling it “disgusting”.

The graffiti was spotted on Hector Street in Chester Hill overnight. Police cordoned off the road and launched an investigation on Sunday morning.

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