Almost universal support suggests interest in Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s mix of national and religious ideologies

Islamist organisations and militants around the world have congratulated Syrian rebels on their victory over the regime of Bashar al-Assad, ignoring historic ideological differences, sectarian divides and continuing uncertainty around how rigorously the new rulers in Damascus will impose religious strictures and norms.

The almost universal support for the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the dominant faction among Syrian rebels, suggests the group’s fusion of national and religious ideologies will act as a further example for other Islamists. Some senior Islamist activists are already discussing in private the “model” pioneered by the Sunni rebel group.

Our new report documents how conspiracy theories about a Muslim takeover of Britain have become primetime TV fare

• Miqdaad Versi is the founder of the Centre for Media Monitoring

“Sharia law is operational in large swathes of the United Kingdom.” The BBC is “erasing Christianity”, to be replaced with Islam or a “secular dystopia”. Meanwhile the archbishop of Canterbury is apparently doing “more to promote Islam than Christianity”.

Oh dear. Welcome to the unhinged alternative reality configured on GB News, where conspiracy theories about the Muslim takeover of British institutions and society are not simply fringe comments whispered in deep, dark corners of the internet (the archbishop prioritising Islam over Christianity is, after all, quite a feat), but primetime television fare. This week’s report by the Muslim Council of Britain’s Centre for Media Monitoring paints a picture of dangerous narratives being systematically mainstreamed by what is supposedly a regulated broadcaster.

Miqdaad Versi is the founder of the Centre for Media Monitoring

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Execution, long jail terms and big fines for ‘promoting’ nudity, unveiling or improper dressing come into force

Women in Iran could face the death sentence or up to 15 years in prison if they defy new compulsory morality laws due to come into effect this week.

New laws promoting the “culture of chastity and hijab” passed by the Iranian authorities earlier this month impose severe penalties for those caught “promoting nudity, indecency, unveiling or improper dressing”, including fines of up to £12,500, flogging and prison sentences ranging from five to 15 years for repeat offenders.

Exclusive: CfMM report over two-year period says channel’s ‘negative’ focus on Islam borders on an ‘obsession’

GB News accounted for half of all news broadcast coverage of Muslims over a two-year period, much of it negative, according to new analysis.

The findings demonstrate an “excessive” focus on Muslims bordering on an “obsession”, according to a new report by the Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM).

V&A, London
The seventh edition of the award for new art inspired by Islamic tradition is devoted to moving image and digital media work. It’s a dense and nuanced show – if you have the stamina

Somewhere along the Euphrates river, in the marshlands of southern Iraq, a young boy calls out to water buffalo. He imitates their mournful bellows and grunts – calls that sound prehistoric. A young girl prepares khirret, a candy made from the pollen of bardi, a kind of reed ubiquitous in the Ahwar marshlands. She sifts the xanthous powder and turns it into mustard-coloured hunks. Her modest home, too, is made of reeds.

The children who appear in Alia Farid’s Chibayish are sustained by the river and the buffalo – in one especially luscious scene, an adolescent boy rides bare-backed on the giant crescent-horned creatures, moving gracefully through the murky brown, intensely polluted water. This chapter of the two-part film is shot at a close range: you see little more than the river edged with its dense reeds and the inside of the small huts on its banks, giving a sense of how intertwined this tight-knit community is to each other, and to nature. The effect is also stifling and claustrophobic, evoking their shrinking habitable space – once part of the largest wetlands in Asia. In an interview, the children trace out a map of their community, naming the few families that still live along the waterways, and those that have been displaced – the impact of environmental destruction, ongoing since depleted uranium bombs were dropped on the region .

For Muslims, Jummah has always been a time to dress your best, and a new exhibition documents just what that means for the older and younger generations

Every Friday, for eight months, people attending Jummah at one of four mosques in Tower Hamlets became familiar with the same sight: a man with a camera and a woman with a clipboard, chatting to men as they entered and left the mosque, as part of a special project.

Jummah, or Friday prayer, is a spiritual highlight of the week that brings the spectrum of Muslim communities together. And ever since it was established by the prophet Muhammad – who described Friday prayers as an “Eid” or celebration – there has been an idea of wearing your “Friday best”. What comprises this uniform is wide-ranging, from monochrome ankle-length Arab thobes to colourful south Asian kurtas, easy tracksuits to stylish blazers. The project set out to document the whole range, and forms the basis of a new exhibition in London’s Bethnal Green called Jummah Aesthetics: British Muslim Men and Their Sartorial Choices.

The 13th-century poet’s resolution to articulate his grief is a reminder to us of the power of literature, particularly in our most trying times

• Making sense of it is a column about spirituality and how it can be used to navigate everyday life

My wandering heart went around the world —

It travelled far seeking the remedy.

Hegseth’s conspiracy theory- and falsehood-laden book American Crusade depicts Islam as historic enemy of west

Donald Trump’s defense secretary pick Pete Hegseth, who has the crusader motto “deus vult” tattooed on his arm, has put bigoted anti-Muslim rhetoric at the center of several of his published books, according to a Guardian review of the materials.

Hegseth, especially in 2020’s American Crusade, depicts Islam as a natural, historic enemy of the west; presents distorted versions of Muslim doctrine in “great replacement”-style racist conspiracy theories; treats leftists and Muslims as bound together in their efforts to subvert the US; and idolises medieval crusaders.

Michael Anton, national security official in first Trump term, reportedly removed name from contention over feud

A frontrunner to be deputy national security adviser in Donald Trump’s administration reportedly withdrew from the running after learning that he would have to work with Sebastian Gorka, the president-elect’s choice as counter-terrorism adviser.

Michael Anton, a conservative speech writer and national security official in Trump’s first presidency, removed his name from contention over Gorka’s appointment against a backdrop of acrimonious past relations between the pair, the Washington Post reported.

About 300 families relocate after fresh violence between Sunni and Shia Muslims kills 32 people

About 300 families have fled sectarian violence in north-west Pakistan as fresh clashes killed 32 people.

Sporadic fighting between Sunni and Shia Muslims in the mountainous Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province bordering Afghanistan has killed about 150 over the past months.

Violence in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa follows killing of dozens of people in clashes between Sunnis and minority Shias

At least 42 people have been killed and 20 wounded after gunmen opened fire on vehicles carrying Shia Muslims in Pakistan’s restive north-west, in one of the region’s deadliest such attacks in recent years, police said.

The attack happened in Kurram, a district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province where sectarian clashes between majority Sunni Muslims and minority Shias have killed dozens of people in recent months.

A drag artist from a strict Muslim family embarks on a relationship with a strait-laced executive in Amrou Al-Kadhi’s strong feature debut

British-Iraqi drag artist and film-maker Amrou Al-Kadhi makes a strong feature debut with this coming-of-age dramedy of queer identity, which is heartfelt if slightly glib. It is well acted and fervent in its sympathy for the protagonist, though finally dismissive about the flawed person with whom that protagonist falls painfully in love. But perhaps survival and self-affirmation means dismissing those who are holding you back.

Bilal Hasna plays drag artist Layla, formerly (dead)named Latif, whose strict Muslim family is unaware of this vocation, although Layla’s affectionate and unjudging sister Fatima (Sarah Agha) picks up on something in the way that Layla dances at her wedding party. Layla’s lowest moment comes during a special daytime show with other queer performers at a corporation which wants to Pridewash its brand. The show ends in chaotic catastrophe, but Layla locks eyes with suit-wearing, straight-acting employee Max (Louis Greatorex), who impulsively bunks off work to come with Layla to a club, and soon they are having a passionate but secret affair.

Shabna Begum says racist riots will return if Islamophobia continues to be ‘an acceptable currency’ in politics

Islamophobia has become “brutally divisive” in the UK and failure to challenge its root causes will lead to more racist riots, the head of the UK’s leading race equality thinktank has said.

Shabna Begum, who became the chief executive of the Runnymede Trust earlier this year, said the country was entering a new phase in how it talks about Muslims.

Jewish and Muslim communities speak of heightened fears as questions linger about events around football match

Carrying white signs scrawled with messages urging unity, they took turns laying white roses at the statue of Anne Frank, steps away from the home where she, her family and four other people had hidden from Nazi persecution.

Days after Amsterdam was gripped by what officials described as “a toxic cocktail” of hooliganism, antisemitism and anger over the war in Palestine and Israel, the handful of imams and rabbis from European organisations had travelled to the city in an attempt to calm tensions.

Christian and Muslim groups say medics who refuse to help patients to die are not protected in England and Wales bill

A significant proportion of NHS medical staff in England and Wales are likely to exercise a “conscience clause” if assisted dying is legalised by parliament.

Labour MP Kim Leadbeater’s private member’s bill stipulates that no doctor would be under any obligation to participate in assisted dying.

The move has been described as ‘chilling’ by activists and rights groups as arrests mount over dress code breaches

The Iranian state has said that it plans to open a treatment clinic for women who defy the mandatory hijab laws that require women to cover their heads in public.

The opening of a “hijab removal treatment clinic” was announced by Mehri Talebi Darestani, the head of the Women and Family Department of the Tehran Headquarters for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. She said the clinic will offer “scientific and psychological treatment for hijab removal”.

Trump’s courting of Arab American voters and the Biden-Harris Gaza policy turned votes away from the Democrat

Kamala Harris received at least 22,000 fewer votes than Joe Biden did four years ago in Michigan’s most heavily Arab American and Muslim cities, a Guardian analysis of raw vote data in the critical swing state finds.

The numbers also show Trump made small gains – about 9,000 votes – across those areas, suggesting Harris’s loss there is more attributable to Arab Americans either not voting or casting ballots for third-party candidates.

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Imam who sponsored dialogue between Christians and Muslims but was accused of terrorism by the president of Turkey

In 1962, a 21-year-old imam, Fethullah Gülen, arrived in the southern Turkish port of Iskenderun to finish his military service. He also gave sermons in the town’s main mosque. This was the heyday of secular Turkey, and he quickly ran into difficulties from a secularist commanding officer who, seeing his sermons as a threat to the republic, ordered that he should be detained for two weeks.

Another officer, however, had a different approach. Spotting that the young soldier was highly intelligent and well-read in Islamic religious texts, but with almost no formal education inside the conventional school system, he recommended that Gülen should start reading western literary classics as well. The young recruit began to read, and enjoy, Dante, Camus and Dostoevsky, eventually developing a taste even for the German philosopher Immanuel Kant.

Danish politician Rasmus Paludan sentenced to four months for incitement against ethnic group

A far-right Danish-Swedish politician has been sentenced to prison on charges of incitement against an ethnic group for burning copies of the Qur’an and making offensive statements about Muslims.

Rasmus Paludan was the first person to go on trial in Sweden – and is now the first to be sentenced – for burning the Qur’an during an organised demonstration.

This forensic account of the 10-month-long trial of those involved in the 2015 Paris attacks, in which 130 people were killed, treads a fine line between empathy and moral judgments while shining a light on survivors’ memories

“V13” was the code name used by those who attended the monumental court proceedings that followed the 2015 Paris terror attacks in which 130 people died and 350 were injured. V13 (vendredi 13) stands for Friday the 13th (of November). The date is engraved on our collective memory: on an unusually balmy autumn evening, carefree youth out celebrating the weekend ahead were massacred in a series of coordinated shootings claimed by Islamic State. The target, it has often been said, was a way of life, the insouciance of terrasse culture and rock concerts, just as the Charlie Hebdo massacre months earlier had been an attack on a way of thinking, on freedom of expression.

Amid the vast cultural production line that the deadly attacks spawned – memoirs, testimonies, documentaries, fiction, film, not to mention the new Museum and Memorial of Terrorism, scheduled to open in 2027 – Emmanuel Carrère’s V13 holds a special place. It chronicles the high-security trial that was unique in its scope and length. Opening on 8 September 2021, it unfolded over 10 months in a room within Paris’s Palais de Justice that was purpose-built to accommodate some 2,380 plaintiffs, 350 or so lawyers, and the media. An author, screenwriter and film-maker, Carrère sat on the uncomfortable press benches to cover it for French magazine L’Obs, and was one of the few who had the dedication and stamina to witness all sessions.