Canada on Monday closed its embassy in Cairo to civilians, citing security reasons but providing very little details about a specific threat. It follows Britain, which shut down its embassy to the public on Sunday. The move comes as militant attacks in Egypt continue to be on the rise, with extremist group Islamic State (IS) calling for attacks on Westerners …

Dilly Hussain – 5Pillarz Professor Paul Baker of Lancaster University carried out a unique research entitled, ‘The Representation of Islam and Muslims in the UK Press 1998-2009‘. Along with three other academics, Professor Baker embarked on a rigorous study that involved the analysis of more than 200,000 articles, equating to over 147million words of journalism. The use of “corpus linguistic …

Kansas City Police on Saturday said that the car use by a man to kill a Muslim teen in a Kansas City hit-and-run case had an anti-Islam sticker glued to its rear window. The SUV used by 34-year-old Ahmed H. Aden when he rammed down 15-year-old Abdisamad Sheikh-Hussein had a sticker that read “Islam is worse than Ebola”. The police …

The tense autonomous region of Xinjiang has banned prayers and other religious practices in government business offices, schools and other buildings. Religious activities will only be allowed to take place in registered locations like mosques. Under new rules, people will also be not allowed to wear or force others to wear logos or clothes associated with extremist groups. It remains …

International rights group Human Rights Watch urged the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to release 25-year-old Lujain al-Hathloul and 33-year-old Maysa al-Amoudi from confinement – the two were held after al-Hathloul tried to drive a car into Saudi Arabia. The rights group urged the kingdom to release the two immediately given that they were reportedly detained for driving, and called for …

Jordanian King Abdullah II on Friday warned that the fight against militants from Islamic State (IS) is a “third world war”, as US President Barack Obama promised a sizable aid increase to Jordan. Obama and the Jordanian King met at the White House on Friday, with Obama set to increase aid from $660 million to over $1 billion per year. …

Al-Azhar University, the most prestigious center of learning for Sunni Islam, urged Christians living in the Arab world on Thursday to stand firm in resistance and not flee in the face of extremist violence. The call comes days after Pope Francis urged Muslim leaders to criticize extremists using Islam as a crutch, especially groups like al-Qaeda and Islamic State, and …

A Bahraini court sentenced opposition figure Zainab al-Khawaja, daughter of eminent rights activist Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, to three years in jail for insulting King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa by tearing up his photograph. According to rights group Amnesty International, Zainab al-Khawaja, who is already serving a life term, was also fined around $8,000 (3,000 dinars) in addition to the sentence. …

WELCOME TO ALGIERS, BABY. Joobin Bekhrad- Reorient Overshadowing, perhaps, even the bloody civil war that subsumed the country throughout the 90s and seeped insidiously into the early 2000s, the War of Independence remains, as one could well argue, the single most important and defining event in modern Algerian history. Beginning in the mid-1950s, only a short while after Gamal Abdel Nasser’s rise …

A car bomb on Wednesday targeting the Yemen residence of Iranian ambassador Hassan Sayed Nam in capital city Sanaa killed at least one person and wounded 17 people; Sayed Nam was not at the residence at the time of the attack, a security official said. The son of one the guards at the residence was killed in the blast, the …