I am proud to announce the first release of Nurani, Meedan’s platform for cross-language scriptural discussion for Muslim and Christian scholars managed by the Cambridge Inter-faith Programme at the University of Cambridge, a programme of the Faculty of Divinity.

The long term goal is a federated system of discussion fora (Nurani, ScripturalReasoning.org and others run by new partners) drawing upon a common textual resource (the library).  The next phase in this vision is to be funded over 18 months by a UK Research Council Digital Economy Grant with two new developer positions to be hired at Cambridge with project management, design and strategy provided by Meedan.

On Wednesday 8 September, with the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks still three days away, Kabul police went on high alert for violent protests in the Afghan capital. The move was triggered not by the repercussions of a local conflict, but the actions of a little-known American church pastor thousands of miles away in Florida who was planning to burn copies of the Qur’an in a protest against what he called ‘radical Islam’.
The crisis, which elicited stark warnings from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the top U.S. …

The discovery of Ardi, the oldest hominid skeleton ever found, was big news for the science community around the world.

But in the Middle East, the news triggered a different order of debate.

‘A research team revealed Thursday that the discovery of “Ardi” proves humans did not evolve from chimpanzee-like ancestors,’ reported Al Jazeera on its Arabic language website under the headline ‘Ardi rebuts Darwin’s theory’.

One of Britain’s leading right wing newspapers, The Daily Mail, appears to have lost touch with its readers over its criticism of the fascist Islamophobic British National Party and its leader Nick Griffin.

In recent days, Mail readers have overwhelming voiced support for Griffin and the BNP on the paper’s website, despite trenchant attacks on the party by the outlet’s leading commentators.

The clash comes on the back of Griffin’s first ever appearance on the BBC’s flagship political debate programme, Question Time, on Thursday night in which the extremist defended his description of Islam as ‘vile and wicked’, repeated his view that homosexuals were ‘creepy’, and failed to refute that he had a record Holocaust denial.

Barack Obama will head to Turkey following the G20 summit in London for his first visit to a Muslim country in power.

The U.S. President is expected to address Turkey’s parliament and talk with opposition parties during the trip.

But aides have stressed the visit is not being planned as a platform for speaking to the wider Muslim world, according to Hurriyet newspaper.

U.S. officials do not want the visit to extend beyond bilateral affairs, the paper reports.

A Muslim blogger is creating waves for a book that tells her story of finding love.

Shelina Zahra Janmohamed’s ‘memoir of growing up as a Muslim woman’ tells of her quest to find the right man through the traditional route of arranged marriage.

With an extract published in The Daily Mail and an interview in The Guardian, Janmohamed has seen her book Love in a Headscarf shoot to a five star rating on Amazon, suggesting it has hit a chord with readers.

“I was really overwhelmed by how connected people felt to the story and how it had humanised what it meant to be a Muslim woman,” Janmohamed said. “That for me was really important.”