Since the Second World War, the post-Christian West has tried to solve the old sexual ‘double standard’ by erasing all the bad vibes surrounding it. The answer, where men got their kicks and women got hurt, was to teach women to have sex like men – without conscience.

John Siddique is a British author who was born in 1964 in Rochdale, Lancashire to an Irish Catholic mother and a Muslim father originally from Jullundur (a city which after Partition was renamed Jalandhar and came to be situated in the Indian Punjab).

Whim                                 How did it begin? Where did my whim start its journey into this monstrous, magical thing? I think I travelled not outward, but within, and came back dragging bits of wreckage from my dreams: the ragged cloud, the… Read more »

My life has largely been defined by talking about ‘not being a man’. I am a transwoman. That means I was born with what society normatively calls a ‘male body’. But I define myself as a woman; and am usually seen and treated as such by people around me.

There exists a substantial group among Muslim men who hunger for simple answers. These men suffer from an acute inferiority complex regarding their religion and are perpetually engaged in proving the superiority of Islam over all other religions, ideologies and worldviews. They are devoted to a special type of popular literature known as ijaz, or ‘scientific miracles of the Qur’an’.

An Islamist is not a cross between Islam and some ‘ism or ocracy’ but a creature that escapes taming by either. Increasingly, the Islamist is called a ‘salafist’, an acolyte of the salaf, Islam’s first generation.