Islam

Cory Bernardi, Conservative Warrior

All About Cory

By Sally Neighbour

“When you first come into this place, all the walls are blank, and after the first bonhomie’s done and people say hello, you’re left alone in your office with your clock, and I remember sitting here one night thinking that’s the sound of life ticking away,” says Bernardi. “That’s the very first thought I had, by myself in this place – that whilst it ticks away I’ll always tr

John Safran’s new ABC TV project

The Quest for Muslim Jedis

By Craig Sherborne

The world is up this way, just over here. Follow me. Mind your head, you are entering human nature. There are narrow tunnels of religion. There is politics and bad blood. It’s a maze of superstitions and fears. Writers bother with this sort of thing but so does a thinker like John Safran. I call him a thinker because I don’t know what else he is. He’s not a comedian – he’s funny but

Niall Ferguson’s 'Civilisation: The West and the Rest'

Cry Freedom

By Malcolm Turnbull

In 1759 Samuel Johnson published his novel Rasselas about an Abyssinian prince who travels through Egypt with his philosopher guide, Imlac. Rasselas asks his teacher, “By what means are the Europeans thus powerful? Or why, since they can so easily visit Asia and Africa for trade or conquest, cannot the Asiatics and Africans invade their coast, plant colonies in their ports, and give laws to their natural princes? The same wind that ca

Aravind Adiga on VS Naipaul’s 'The Masque of Africa'

Magical Thinking

By Aravind Adiga

For over 40 years now, VS Naipaul has met, interviewed and annoyed people in dozens of countries to produce a body of travel writing that challenges the basic tenets of a liberal world view. Multicultural democracies such as India and the UK treat binary distinctions of identity (white–black, Christian–Muslim) with scepticism. See things from the other p

Damascus

Secret Worlds

By Robert Dessaix

For days I’ve just been mooching around the Old City in a dream, cocooned within its walls, time-travelling through the maze of its gloomy laneways, in and out of ancient mosques and palaces and churches. After all, that’s why you come to Damascus: to time

Sharia Law

The Way to the Watering Hole

By Sally Neighbour

Meanwhile, in a tiny office in Lakemba, south-western Sydney, with prayer beads hanging from the bookshelves and Islamic texts stacked to the ceiling, the Muslim minister and police chaplain Sheikh Khalil Chami quietly and methodically administers sharia law.

Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks

The Man Who Fell to Earth

By John Birmingham

Semantics aside, it remained a benighted sinkhole, although nearly 1300 years of fierce parochialism and independence shone through even after Rahman’s conversion of the locals. During the Soviet occupation (1979–89), the area was renowned as a graveyard for Red Arm

Richard Dawkins' 'The Greatest Show on Earth'

Unbelievers

By Ian Lowe

You wouldn’t believe me if I claimed that almost half the people in a rich, modern country still thought the earth was flat, or that the Roman Empire never existed. It would be a ridiculous assertion. Yet almost half of all adults in the United States believ

John Keane's 'The Life and Death of Democracy'

Democratic Hubris

By Tim Soutphommasane

It has been a mixed year so far for democracy. There have been peaceful elections in India and Indonesia, the world’s largest and third largest democracy, respectively. Yet elsewhere, there has been little to celebrate. In the United Kingdom, Westminster – the ‘mo

Incentivising

By Gideon Haigh

An age-old conjugation of democracy runs something like this: I am guided by the will of the people; you are a slave of public opinion; he is a crude and craven populist. It was on show in March, during the crazy few weeks that began with the hounding of the h

The Voyage of Globalisation’s Forefather

In the Wake of Magellan

By Simon Leys

First, though Magellan was indeed Portuguese, he sailed for Spain - personally commissioned by Charles V. His foreign origin provoked suspicion and resentment among his Castilian officers; some of them detested him, and their hostility was to climax in a mutin

Patrick French’s ‘The World Is What It Is’

More Than Picong

By Louis Nowra

Whenever I read Proust's magnificent In Search of Lost Time I have to try hard to forget that the author liked to masturbate while watching rats being tortured to death. There are parts of Ulysses where I cannot but help recall Joyce's scatological letters to his wife.

Peter Craven's Best Books for Summer 2007-08

By Peter Craven

A Report From Afghanistan

Mission Drift

By Chris Masters

Not in Translation

By Malcolm Knox

When Gough Whitlam told the young Kevin Rudd to go out and get a university degree, Rudd chose to study Chinese language and history at the ANU. What if a present-day mentor showed equal prescience and advised an ambitious protégé to go out and learn the lan

Islamism, Islamophobia and Australia

Yes, Virginia, there is a Clash of Civilisations

By Robert Manne

Unlike all previous migrant groups – Stone, who was once an anti-Asian Hansonite, now sang hymns of praise to his “nice” Chinese neighbours – Muslims did not disperse from the enclaves they formed. “Muslims do not so much move out as move in.” Afte

'Shalimar the Clown' by Salman Rushdie

The Great Unspooler. Romeo meets Juliet in 'Kashmir'

By Delia Falconer

Toward the beginning of A Satanic Affair, his analysis of the furore caused by The Satanic Verses, Malise Ruthven tells the following story. A month or so into the publicity for the novel, Rushdie was invited onto BBC radio’s Desert Island Discs. He chose the ten CDs

Swingeing Pom

By Phillip Knightley

A couple of years ago at Britain’s premier literary festival, Hay-on-Wye, two star performers dominated the program: former US president Bill Clinton and journalist/author/commentator Christopher Hitchens. Clinton arrived in his Secret Service car, attended a few parties, hit a few golf balls, made a stirring speech and departed to a boo or two for keeping a crowd of well-wishers waiting. H