THE Protection of Information Bill or “Secrecy Bill” – its surreal passage through parliament now extended for a further two months – is an Orwellian creation befitting Animal Farm and 1984 as well as being a chilling shadow of the Apartheid era. As an attempt to re-write the clumsy Access[…]

The poem below was an answer to a challenge by colleague Irfaan Abrahams. “Write a poem for the inaugural Cape Slave in Cape Town hosted by Itheko Athletics Club,” he said. Sure. Except I forgot that I gave up trying to write verse over 20 years ago, realising that my[…]

THE other day on the Voice of the Cape radio station a maulana condemned a well-known Shaikh, a man regarded as a Grand Shaikh of the Naqshbandi Sufi Order. His central beef was that this Shaikh had supposedly claimed amongst other things – via a website – that he was[…]

TO foreigners we must sometimes appear to be a strange nation. Warm and hospitable one day, we are capable of unspeakable violence against each other the next. We were able to host the World Cup, our banking system is the match of any developed country, and yet, a five-star tour[…]

WHAT could our 2011 municipal elections have to do with the North African political earthquake, or, recent events in places such as Cote d’Ivoire or Uganda? As I watched the results unfold at the Independent Electoral Commission’s results centre in Bellville South last week, I realised that the answer was[…]

THE other day I wrote an article about the halalisation of our consumer space by Halal bodies. They were more concerned, I suggested, in making a fast buck than acting in public interest. The piece, which appeared in a mainstream publication, was a response to complaints by non-Muslims that they[…]

ROBERT FISK, the Beirut-based correspondent for The Independent, knows his way around the geopolitics of the Middle East better than most. But more than that, Fisk speaks with the rare authority of having been there. Over the last three decades he has covered most of its major conflicts. His political[…]

President Barack Obama’s announcement that the US’s most-maligned figure, Usama bin Laden, had been killed in a covert operation 50 kms north of the Pakistani Capital, Islamabad, has caused surprise and cynicism in the Muslim world. There are many Muslims, in capitals such as Cairo and Tunis, who regard it[…]

THE “Halalisation” of our consumer space continues unabated. In previous articles on this topic I’ve discussed Halal toothpicks and Halal water, both legal anomalies guaranteed to make classical Islamic scholars roll in their graves. My recent discovery in a local supermarket that milk and yoghurt have now been certified Halal,[…]

THE grand myth of the “Clash of Civilisations”, the clarion call of neo-cons and fundamentalists everywhere, has fallen. It fell during the Arab uprisings earlier this year when tyrants such as Ben Ali and Mubarak were toppled, and the bloodthirsty rule of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi overturned. The neo-con mantra that[…]