For non-Muslims the word caliph might bring to mind Harun al-Rashid, a caliph who features in a number of the fantastical tales of The Thousand and One Nights, as well as in for instance poems by Alfred Tennyson (‘Recollections of the Arabian Nights’) and W.B. Yeats (‘The Gift of Harun al-Rashid’), and in James Joyce’s novel Ulysses. The office of caliph and the institution of the caliphate have a complex and fascinating history. The recent proclamation by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, leader of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), of a caliphate in Syria, prompted me to say a bit about this and comment on its current significance.
Category Archives: News and media
Far from the madding crowd: Glastonbury’s spiritual side
Here is Marion Bowman talking about the spiritual aspect of the Glastonbury festival: https://theconversation.com/far-from-the-madding-crowd-glastonburys-spiritual-side-28239 .
Narendra Modi and the BJP surge in the 2014 Indian general election
Those watching the televised coverage of the victory in the 2014 Indian general election of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) under the leadership of Narendra Modi will have witnessed the sheer jubilation of his supporters. Modi was expected to do well and to emerge in a position where he would be able to lead a coalition government. As we now know, Narendra Modi at the head of the BJP secured an outright majority over the Congress Party, which had so long dominated post-Independence Indian politics, and the first outright majority since the 1980s when Rajiv Gandhi was elected at the head of the Congress Party. But that election followed after the assassination in 1984 of Rajiv Gandhi’s mother, Indira Gandhi, herself prime minister at the time of her death. The scale of Rajiv Gandhi’s victory was explicable to some extent in terms of popular revulsion prompted by this mother’s murder and sympathy for his loss, which is why it has been claimed that Modi’s victory in 2014 puts him a position of power more comparable to that of Indira Gandhi at the height of her popularity.
Animal religious slaughter and the politics of the multicultural
In the last few weeks the issue of religious slaughter of animals has again been widely discussed in the media, sparked it appears by an interview for The Times newspaper by John Blackwell, president-elect of the British Veterinary Association. In the background of the broader debate is the recent decision by the Danish government to ban religious slaughter for the production of kosher and halal meat. The point of this comment piece is not particularly to address the rights or wrongs of or dhabh, or consider their status from a philosophical, religious or political science point of view, but rather to reflect both historically and in the context of wider debates concerning British ‘multiculturalism’.