Yunus Yakoub Islam (1963 -) is a UK-based Muslim, blogger, poet, and cyber-activist. Born Julian Hoare, he changed his surname to Anderson in 1982, prior to marrying his then girlfriend, Julie Harte. He discovered anarchism in the 1980s through the works of the punk band Crass, but later distanced himself from the anti-religious punk scene to explore academic learning, eventually converting to Islam in 1991. He now describes his politics as "postcolonial anarcho-pacifist" and is the author of the Muslim Anarchist Charter.
Yakoub has written for the Muslim World Book Review, Q-News, Alt.Muslim and Muslim Wake Up. He is an erratic correspondent to national newspapers, and his letters have been published in The Times, The Guardian and Sunday Telegraph. He campaigns against Islamophobia in both traditional and contemporary media, and is the author of "The Voyage in: Second Life Islamophobia", in S Sayyid & Abdoolkarim Vakil (Editors) Thinking Through Islamophobia: Global Perspectives (Hurst and Co, 2010).
Yakoub's son and youngest child was diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder in 1995. In 2002, Yakoub resigned his post as an SEN Teacher (autism) in order to become his son's primary care-giver. In 2012, he published a postmodern miscellany, The Muslim Age of Steam, as an ebook. The book ends with a disavowel of creative writing as an effective response to the civilizational crisis described by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed. He is now researching a work of non-fiction, provisionally entitled Essays on Muslim Anarchism.
Since 2004, Yakoub Islam has owned and managed a multi-purpose website currently known as The Muslim Age of Steam. From 2006, this website has incorporated a microsite devoted to raising awareness about Islamophobia in the media, called The Daily Terror. In March 2010, research carried out by David Stevens of Nottingham University on behalf of the Home Office Research Information and Communications Unit (RICU) identified The Daily Terror as one of the top 10 "pro-Islamic" British blogs - despite The Daily Terror not being regarded as a blog anywhere outside David Steven's research.
Famous quotes containing the word islam:
“Awareness of the stars and their light pervades the Koran, which reflects the brightness of the heavenly bodies in many verses. The blossoming of mathematics and astronomy was a natural consequence of this awareness. Understanding the cosmos and the movements of the stars means understanding the marvels created by Allah. There would be no persecuted Galileo in Islam, because Islam, unlike Christianity, did not force people to believe in a “fixed” heaven.”
—Fatima Mernissi, Moroccan sociologist. Islam and Democracy, ch. 9, Addison-Wesley Publishing Co. (Trans. 1992)