Not really the Muslim life, but spiritual life would have been more apt. Also, spoiler alert. I finally managed to watch ‘Life of Pi’ yesterday, I say ‘finally’ like I have been wanting to watch it for sometime now, but no – it was just a spur of the moment decision to go and watch it. I didn’t necessarily have it ...

I have a deadline today so I can’t spend more than ten minutes on this post. I was meant to do a year end post on 2012 which I may do soon. But for now, this new video by Youtube I think may go viral. The reason I post this however is that Jehan of Sri Lankan English fame is ...

Clashes have erupted in many parts of Egypt and many offices of the Muslim Brotherhood has been destroyed. Six have now been reported killed with more than 350 injured. The Egyptian liberals and secular elite are largely accepted to have instigated the violence after President Muhammad Mursi made a decree that places him above the judiciary (albeit temporarily) and ...

I am actually very busy these days with quite a few things to get out of the way, but this twitter exchange between Andrew Neil of the BBC and Labour MP Tom Watson caught my eye. It started with Andrew Neil tweeting the following : Labour stepping back from wanting Leveson “in its entirety” but still wants people to ...

I am back to blogging is what I meant to say. For those of you who have been in this long enough I have been blogging here since May 2006. But over the last year I have been inundated with a lot of things and never really got the chance to blog properly for one reason or the other. ...

First published here for The Platform.  Buddhist extremism has been on the rise in Sri Lanka and the way that Sri Lankan Muslims react in politically difficult times such as these will determine how they are perceived in the future The last few months have seen a rapid increase in anti-Muslim sentiment amongst sections of the political class in ...

First Published for The Platform The recent violence in the Gaza Strip excited three distinct groups in a battle far beyond the Middle Eastern frontline It is ironic that even the best of intentions, when circumstances change, they can have unintended consequences. The man who invented the wheel, for instance, would never have expected Top Gear, where viewers are bombarded ...

As I type this post, Troy Davis, a man convicted of killing a policeman twenty years ago awaits death. He will be executed by lethal injection in a matter of a few hours, two at most. I post paragraphs from one of my favourite essays ‘A Hanging’ by George Orwell, about death, killing and what it means to execute a ...

I write this post with some level of pain and sadness. I write this also as a Sri Lankan and as a Muslim. My credentials in the Sri Lankan blogosphere are established, if not anything at least as someone with genuine love to Sri Lanka where I was born, where I lived except for five years of my life and ...

I am currently reading Desperately Seeking Paradise: Journeys of a Sceptical Muslim. This is a semi autobiographical account of the author Ziauddin Sardar, a Pakistani immigrant who came to the UK as a child in the 1960′s. It deals with how he had to negotiate two identities, that of a Pakistani and that of a child growing up in Britain and ...