The decision by the French government to outlaw all forms of public face-masking, including the burka and niqab, is welcomed by all thinking Muslims around the world.
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Forward-looking and progressive British Muslims who resist the Talibanisation of Islam in the UK should lead a coordinated campaign to rid this country of this alien cultural monstrosity.

Two days before the French law became operative, a group of integrated Muslims in Oxford burned the burka as a mark of our collective disgust and disdain.

What needs to be done now is to introduce a twin track strategy of LMR (lampooning, mocking and ridiculing face-masking) which will be combined with a systematic programme of re-education and information that will empower Muslim women and make them realise that this tribal rag and cultural cloth is not intrinsic but incidental to Islam. It is purely the product of male chauvinism and not religious necessity.

Dr Taj Hargey is Imam of the Oxford Islamic Congregation and Chairman of the Muslim Educational Centre of Oxford.

”Those people behind the mosque have to respect, have to appreciate and have to defer to the people of New York,” [redacted] was quoted as saying by the magazine, which said the full interview will be published Sunday. “The wound is still there. Just because the wound is healing you can’t say, ‘Let’s just go back to where we were pre-9/11.’”

The answer is Prince al-Waleed bin Talal, a Saudi Prince, and one of the proposed Mosque’s funders.

His suggestion has already been rejected by the Mosque project.

To build a mosque adjacent to Ground Zero, named in memory of the Islamic conquest of parts of Europe and echoing the Islamist desire to regain all former Muslim territories, would be an act of reconciliation.

According to the latest research by the University of Reading’s Department of Archaeology, published in the March issue of the journal Antiquity, 4th-century Roman York was a multicultural town where individuals of North African descent moved in the highest social circles.

That’s a description of a multiracial society. That it was not multicultural is demonstrated by the “highest social circles” bit. And we know Roman society was multiracial but not multicultural; black, brown, white, if you lived in the Empire you were Roman. Multiculturalism is the idea of separate groups living separately, alongside one another.

For an example of a multicultural society, look to Belfast in the late twentieth century, not Roman York.