Yvonne Ridley on Facebook:

Will men of Faith and no faith stop telling women what to wear – whether in general, in protest or in preference. Just get the hell out of our wardrobes and stay out!

This is probably in reaction to Maajid Nawaz’s tweet on December 21:

My Muslim sisters who support International Hijab day. Why not take off hijab to support acid victims like [t]his too?

Ridley isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, is she. Who told women to wear hijab in the first place? It was a man, wasn’t it? She wears it herself, and in doing so, she is obeying a rule laid down by a man.

 … Read the rest

I have this collection of letters by Sylvia Townsend Warner and I started rather randomly re-reading it yesterday. She’s a demon with words – I’d forgotten.

She went to Barcelona in 1936 to help with the resistance to Franco’s coup, working in a Red Cross office.

Heard of it by wire, sprang into the car, and drove across France at a rate which would have been intolerable if we had not been on our way to Spain.

I don’t think I have ever met so many congenial people in the whole of my life.

She describes how the workers are running everything, and how terrific it all is.

There are a great many shells and skulls of churches. It seemed

A horrible tale of violent domestic abuse in Watford:

A woman who beat her teenage daughter-in-law to death has been jailed, along with five members of the girl’s family, in what a senior detective described as one of the most harrowing cases of domestic abuse he had seen.

Shahena Uddin, 19, died after suffering severe injuries and choking to death on her own vomit.

Over the course of the trial the court heard that Ms Uddin had suffered mental and physical abuse at the hands of her family, including being forced to drink toilet water and eat her own faeces.

The other family members were all siblings. One of her brothers was her guardian, and his wife is the … Read the rest

Hopeful news for Galápagos tortoises, maybe. First, the New York Times last week:

Originally there were at least eight species of Galápagos tortoise, scientists now believe. (One was discovered only this year.) At least three species are now extinct, including tortoises on Pinta Island. The last one, George, was discovered wandering alone in 1972 and taken into loving custody. His death, in 2012 at more than 100 years old, was a powerful reminder of the havoc visited by humans on delicate ecosystems worldwide over the last two centuries.

Whalers and pirates grabbed them up because they could live in a ship’s hold for up to a year without food or water.

There are two types of Galápagos tortoises:

Good news, up to a point:

Saudi authorities have reduced a Sri Lankan woman’s sentence for adultery from death by stoning to a three-year jail term after an appeal, Colombo’s foreign ministry has said.

The woman, 45, who is married and had worked as a domestic helper in Riyadh since 2013, was convicted in August of adultery with a fellow Sri Lankan migrant worker. The man was given a lesser punishment of 100 lashes because he was not married.

It’s great that she won’t be killed by having rocks thrown at her head. (It’s disgusting that that was ever a possibility.) It’s not great that she’s been sentenced to three years in prison. It’s a violation of her rights. … Read the rest

Golly. CJ Werleman on Twitter:

CJ Werleman ‏@cjwerleman
Maajid Nawaz tells Muslim women to remove their hijab. Slobbering, white, fascist atheists still think he’s a Muslim.

Why is CJ Werleman policing who is a Muslim? Why is he implying that Maajid Nawaz is not a Muslim, thus aligning himself with Islamists who try to incite violence against Maajid? Why is Werleman helping Islamists bully Maajid for being a reformist? Why is he doing it in such an ugly, abusive, vituperative way? What’s the matter with him?

(Also what’s this “white” bullshit? Does Werleman think he’s not white? Why do people do that?)… Read the rest

I agree with Fredrik deBoer up to a point, but only up to a point.

I was quoted in a couple prominent publications yesterday, repeating my complaints with Oberlin’s protest against the supposed cultural appropriation of bad cafeteria food. Predictably, this resulted in both a lot of praise and a lot of criticism on social media. I don’t take either too deeply to heart. But I am disappointed that, from both critics and supporters, this has resulted in a common refrain: that I must be something other than a leftist, that to differ with (for example) Oberlin college students on the question of cultural appropriation must mean that I’m a closet whatever.

In fact, I critique that practice because I

Kenan Malik in the New York Times compares and contrasts Donald Trump and Maryam Namazie.

What links them is that there are many people in Britain who do not wish to let one or the other speak.

Mr. Trump’s recent call for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” caused outrage across the world. More than half a million Britons signed a petition to Parliament demanding that he be barred from Britain, a demand that has been backed by senior political figures.

The furor over Ms. Namazie’s views has caused fewer ripples, but is no less significant. Ms. Namazie is a founding member of the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain, an organization that campaigns on behalf

It’s Jesus and Mo day, i.e. the day a new J & M appears.

So that means people like Maajid Nawaz and Irshad Manji and Tarek Fatah and Tehmina Kazi and Sarah Khan are totally outsiders, right? Of course.

Volume 7, Wrong Again, God Boy, with a foreword by ME, is out now.

The Patreon.… Read the rest

It gets more degrading every day.

Trump, last night:

“Even her race to Obama, she was gonna beat Obama,” the GOP frontrunner told a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan. “I don’t know who would be worse, I don’t know. How does it get worse? But she was gonna beat — she was favored to win — and she got schlonged. She lost.”

See what he did there? She got penised. The weak worthless pathetic woman got penised, because she’s so weak and pathetic and vagina.

I don’t like the way we do things here. It’s bad.

 … Read the rest

See everybody scream and jump and scream.

… Read the rest

Had you heard of the Harvard placemats? I hadn’t heard of them until just now.

The Washington Post reported:

It was just a matter of time before the campus debates over free speech and racial injustice took on a festive tone.

At Harvard, this has arrived in the form of a “Holiday Placemat for Social Justice,” an initiative from the Harvard Office for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion which was met with a recoil and an apology from two Harvard College deans this week.

These placemats, distributed in undergraduate dining halls, offered a script for answering questions about some of the more controversial topics of the year, from “Islamaphobia [sic]/Refugees” to “Black murders in the street.”

A script. Who … Read the rest

Well now look at that, Godless Utopia is doing a Woman Atheist of the Year poll with four categories (with four nominees in each category). It’s a Twitter-based poll, i.e. you vote by clicking a box on the relevant tweet.

One is for comedian; I of course voted for Kate Smurthwaite. There’s also actress and blogger (I voted for Maryam). The fourth is author; I voted for Taslima. But here’s the shocker: somehow I’m one of the nominees in that one. I won’t win of course but feel free to vote for me anyway! (But really you should vote for Taslima.)

(Voting has already started.)… Read the rest

Gagandeep Kaur in Delhi tells us more about those huts where women are isolated because they’re menstruating.

Poornima Javardhan, 25, felt dread and trepidation as she got ready to spend five days in a gaokor – a hut outside her village where girls and women are banished during menstruation.

“During the rainy season, it is all the more difficult to stay in a gaokor because water comes inside and sometimes the roof leaks,” says Javardhan, who lives in Sitatola, a village in central India’s Maharashtra state. Each month, custom dictates that she must stay in the thatched hut on the edge of a forest, sometimes on her own, or, if she’s lucky, with another woman.

There are no kitchens, … Read the rest

Asra Nomani and Hala Arafa say thanks but no thanks to the whole “wearing ‘hijab’ in solidarity” thing – not for the familiar and irritating reason that it’s “appropriation” but for the much better reason that it’s sexist shit.

Last week, three female religious leaders – a Jewish rabbi, an Episcopal vicar and a Unitarian reverend – and a male imam, or Muslim prayer leader, walked into the sacred space in front of the ornately-tiled minbar, or pulpit, at the Khadeeja Islamic Center in West Valley City, Utah, the women smiling widely, their hair covered with swaths of bright scarves, to support “Wear a Hijab” day.

The media obligingly reported this interfaith gesture.

For us, as mainstream Muslim women, born