The last couple of months have seen intense debate on European society’s openness towards Muslim immigrants. Following the Swiss ban on minarets and the French proposal to ban the burqa in public life, fears have been expressed over the exclusion of Muslims from European social and political life. Politicians have gained enormous capital by channeling fears over Islam and immigrants, and populist measures such as the burqa ban in France.
Which begs the question: does Europe have a problem with Islam? Are European politics and society inherently at-odds with the values of their Muslim citizens? One thing is clear: European politics [...]

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Europe, immigration, Islam

Blogging and general online activity has been slow since I am in Brussles nowadays looking for work, but I naturally paused and clicked when this headline from the NYT popped up on my RSS-feed.
This article talked mostly about how Indian expat-professionals found themselves disillusioned and disappointed by working culture back home . It provides interesting and entertaining caricatures of Indian bureaucracy and cultural values:
There are no shortcuts to spending lots of time working in the country, returnees say. “There are so many things that are tricky about doing business in India that it takes years to figure it out,” [...]

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culture, immigration, India

Check out Queen’s brilliant, hysterical song  ‘Mustapha’. I could not be sure, but Freddie Mercury is singing in Arabic, Persian and English, mashing names of prophets with ‘As-salam-alalikum’. The song is part of the Queen’s 1978 album Jazz, and they performed it live regularly.
In live performances, Mercury would often sing the opening vocals of “Mustapha” in place of the complex introduction to “Bohemian Rhapsody“, going from “Allah we’ll pray for you” to “Mama, just killed a man…”. However, sometimes the band performed an almost full version of the song from the Crazy Tour in late 1979 to The Game Tour [...]

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Britain, immigration, Music

I spent a large part of today watching Prof. Ian Buruma’s brilliant lecture series at Princeton university entitled ‘No Divine Rights: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents’ which I am posting here. Buruma is a scholar of great versatility. His subjects range from a fictional-biography of an Indian cricketer-prince, to works on European and Japanese history. In this lecture series he tackles the relation between state and religion in America, Asia and Europe, in which he makes extremely revelatory connections between religion and state in different societies. All the lectures here are extremely interesting especially for students of global history.
Buruma’s [...]

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Europe, Global History, immigration, Islam

This week two stories related to racist discrimination caught my eye. The first of these is from Dresden, not too far from a our beloved Leipzig, within a region that has been host to a spate of racist attacks.
It was while Marwa el-Sherbini was in the dock recalling how the accused had insulted her for wearing the hijab after she asked him to let her son sit on a swing last summer, that the very same man strode across the Dresden courtroom and plunged a knife into her 18 times.
Her three-year-old son Mustafa was forced to watch as his mother [...]

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deptention, Egypt, Germany, human-rights, immigration, Racism, U.S.A

Thereafter I walked to the Hauptbahnhof and a drunken young man passed me and shouted “hail Hitler” and it was at that precise moment, that I thought to myself welcome to Germany the place of Hitler (hoping secretly that Hitler would stand up from his grave to protest against me being here), the Second World War, The Berlin Wall and every other historical sight that I made a point of seeing … This is why I left South Africa, and I was secretly satisfied by this young mans outburst

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Germany, immigration