Tag Archives: activist

A leading Muslim activist has accused Conservative Party peer Sayeeda Warsi of allowing Muslim leaders with radical leavnings gain prominent positions within government. Fiyaz Mughal, founder of Tell MAMA (Measuring Anti Muslim Attacks), told the Sunday Telegraph that Lady Warsi – the first Muslim woman to sit in Cabinet – …

One of Britain’s most renowned and revered Sikhs – Daljit Singh Shergill, former president of the Smethwick Gurdwara, Britain’s first – has passed away.He was aged 70. The formidable and imposing Daljit Singh, affectionately known as Shergill Sahib, was born into a Sikh family in the Punjab and migrated to …

Mumbai-born British author Salman Rushdie is to share the 2014 PEN Pinter Prize celebrating freedom of speech with a jailed Syrian journalist, lawyer and human rights activist, it was announced Friday, the same day that an Indian children's rights campaigner and a teenage Pakistani education activist were declared co-winners of this year's Nobel Peace Prize.

Rushdie named Mazen Darwish as the international recipient of the Prize he won back in the summer.

The PEN Pinter Prize - named after author and Nobel Literature Prize-winning British playwright Harold Pinter and awarded by the literary - is awarded annually to a British writer who champions free speech and is then shared with an 'International Writer of Courage' who has been persecuted for speaking out about his beliefs.

Darwish was the director of the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression when he was arrested in February 2012 along with two colleagues.

The three have been charged with “publicizing terrorist acts.”

Rushdie said Darwish “courageously fought for civilized values — free expression, human rights — in one of the most dangerous places in the world.”

He said he hoped the prize would bolster calls for Darwish to be released.

In a statement read out at a ceremony at the British Library this week, Mr. Darwish referred to the fatwa issued against Mr. Rushdie in response to his novel “The Satanic Verses,” which led to the author spending years in hiding.

“Although we may have deeply disagreed with your views, we committed an unforgivable sin in the Arab world when we responded with indifference to the fatwas and calls for your death,” he said.

The violence in Syria is partly a result of that “collusion,” Mr. Darwish’s statement continued.

“What a shame this much blood has had to be spilled for us to realize, finally, that we are digging our own graves when we allow thought to be crushed by accusations of unbelief, calling people infidels, and when we allow opinion to be countered with violence,” he said.

“The disastrous consequences of this are clearly evident today across the Arab world, and especially in Syria, my country, where the ugliest forms of fascism and the dirtiest kinds of barbarism are practiced in the name of both patriotism and Islam in equal measure.”

Rushdie condemned Mr Darwish's imprisonment as "arbitrary and unjust" and warned of a "new age of religious mayhem and of the language that conjures it up and justifies it".

He attacked the "hate-filled religious rhetoric" that is influencing scores of young British Muslims to join what he called the "barbarians of ISIS". 

The language of religion, said Rushdie, “has been horribly mangled in our time”, by Christian extremists in America and by Hindu extremists in India, “but the overwhelming weight of the problem lies in the world of Islam, and much of it has its roots in the ideological language of blood and war emanating from the Salafist movement within Islam, globally backed by Saudi Arabia”.

A British Greenpeace activist has been barred from entering India in what the group said is a coordinated crackdown on environmental campaigners by the government in Delhi. Ben Hargreaves was reportedly on his way to a meeting in Delhi when he was turned away without explanation by immigration officials at …

Bollywood superstar Aamir Khan is better known these days as a man on a mission to fight injustice in Indian society but, it seems, he’s not averse to meting out less-than-fair treatment to those around him. The actor has allegedly launched a surreptitious campaign to elbow out residents of a …

A lecture on democracy in India by the country’s foreign minister at a London university on Wednesday was brought to a premature end after a Q&A session was hijacked by a vocal young activist haranguing the minister about the contentious issue of Kashmir. The unnamed student of the School of …

Malala Yousafzai is a living legend. That a 15-year-old girl would be targeted and shot by the Taliban, live to tell the tale and then continue to fight for the education of women in Pakistan is the kind of story that cuts through cultural and geographic boundaries. It’s the kind …

Pakistani education campaigner Malala Yousafzai has been awarded the 2013 UN Human Rights Prize, an honour handed out every five years and previously awarded to the likes of Nelson Mandela and former US President Jimmy Carter. It’s the latest honoured to be bestowed on the teenager who was shot and …

I’ve managed to catch Asifa Lahore half-way through her make-up routine.  Strangely, I’m trying desperately to reconcile her outlandish fake eye-lashes with the considered, eloquent manner in which she describes her work not just as a drag queen but as an unwitting activist for the South Asian LGBT community.  But …

Chairman of British Asian Conservative Link thrown out of party after ‘cash for access’ sting A prominent British Asian Tory activist has been thrown out of the party after being caught offering access to MP’s in return for cash.  50-year-old Rickie Sehgal, Chairman of the British Asian Conservative Link, was …