In the Muslim imaginary, both in the popular version and the learned genre, the Prophet Muhammad is remembered as the paragon of virtue.

Positive communication is a virtue by itself, aiming as it does to overcome barriers between people and thereby to increase understanding. Such communication has been the life work (so far!) of Scottish-Sudanese writer Leila Aboulela, whose first novel was called The Translator.

‘Meri jaan’. That’s what I called her. When she was anxious or concerned about something: meri jaan, my life, my love. I would put my arms around her. She was not a natural hugger.

There is an interesting contrast between the Biblical and Quranic accounts of the fall of Adam and Eve.

The task for all humanity, I modestly suggest, should be to make the world a better place – and that requires us first to decide what a ‘better place’ would look like.

Stoicism is ‘back,’ though it is more a rebuild than a resuscitation of Stoicisms of yore. But why Stoicism, and why now?

Logic has a bad reputation. Complaints vary from it being too abstract to it being reductive, and famously for it being too ‘mathy’. But what is too often overlooked is the window logic provides us into the foundations of our language.

The source of the English word virtue is Latin virtus derived from vir ’man’, the source also of English virago (‘manlike woman’) and ‘virile’, and so etymologically it denoted ‘manliness’.

In 1898, a young woman of twenty, newly married and living in Lahore, wrote a letter to her older sister: ‘I have decided to start a journal for women. Would you be willing to help me with the task, and write some essays for me?’.

In the dream factory farm of the Western pop music industry, women singer-songwriters with siren voices who are also anti-racist activists, gender non-conformists, emotional lightning rods and fountains of love are golden needles in a haystack.