It was end of July, and I was headed along the coast of Trinidad on the Buccoo Reef, a passenger vessel that bore the name of the fishing village in which my father was born and to which, once we dropped anchor in Tobago, I would journey.

Hadith literally means a report or a saying. For Muslims, it is a report documenting the sayings, actions, physical features, and tacit approvals of the Prophet Muhammad.

The absence of black people from mainstream histories of Britain, and the lazy assumption that the presence of African and Caribbean people began with the SS Windrush docking at Tilbury, east of London, in 1948, means few today know there were black Romans, black Tudors, and black Stuarts here hundreds of years earlier.

I lived in Paris for most of the 2000s. For much of that time my then girlfriend worked overseas, and I ended up befriending her mother: a diminutive, chatty, and sharply analytical Egyptian woman in late middle-age.

Concerning evil, nothing occurs to me. Evil is simply the privation of good. This was the profound insight of the Church Father St Augustine which in its wisdom would advise feeble spirits to look no further.

The story of the prophet Jonah (Yunus) is briefly sketched out in the Qur’an (37:139-148): Jonah is a messenger on the run, bent on eluding the message, the God who gave it to him, and the duty to deliver it.