Martin Derek Bright (born 5 June 1966) is a British journalist. He worked for the BBC World Service and The Guardian before becoming The Observer's education correspondent and then home affairs editor. From 2005 to 2009, he was the political editor of New Statesman. He had a blog for The Spectator, and was The Jewish Chronicle's political editor from September 2009 to March 2013. In 2014 he took a position at the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, but resigned after five months over a lack of editorial autonomy.
Since the late twentieth century, he has particularly covered the rise of Muslim extremism, terrorist attacks in Britain and abroad, and aspects of British governmental relations with the Muslim community in the United Kingdom.
In 2009 Bright founded New Deal of the Mind, a charitable company to promote employment in creative fields and working with organisations, government and all political parties.
In 2001, Bright wrote "The Great Koran Con Trick", an article in the New Statesman about the work of the scholars John Wansbrough, Michael Cook, Patricia Crone, Andrew Rippin and Gerald Hawting, associated in the 1970s with the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). [1] He reported the work of the scholars as "revisionist history" of Islam. They have developed new techniques of analysis, in some cases adopting methods from earlier biblical studies and using a wider range of sources, including non-Muslim, non-Arabic texts. Their conclusions have included:
Bright's arguments were ridiculed and debunked by the very scholars—including his own former SOAS tutor, Professor Gerald Hawting—whose work he drew upon to support his cover story. Three of these scholars wrote to the New Statesman raising objections to the article with one commenting that the "spurious air of conspiracy and censorship conjured up in Martin Bright‘s article is nonsense". [2] [3]
New archeological finds, such as scraps of manuscript at the Great Mosque of Sana'a in Yemen, have supported suggestions of the development of the Koran over time. [1] Some of the scholars reportedly disagreed with Bright's characterization of their work. The article was considered controversial among traditionalist Muslims.[ citation needed ] The Muslim intellectual Ziauddin Sardar argued the SOAS scholars approached the material from a Eurocentric point of view. [1]
In a documentary, Who Speaks for Muslims? (2002), and When Progressives Treat with Reactionaries: The British State's flirtation with radical Islamism (2006), a report for the Policy Exchange, Bright has examined issues of the contemporary Muslim community in the United Kingdom and the government's relationship with its constituencies. This has been a focus of his journalism.
Bright left the New Statesman in January 2009, and began writing a blog, "The Bright Stuff – Dispatches from Enemy Territory," for The Spectator .
In January 2009, Bright formed New Deal of the Mind, a coalition of artists, entrepreneurs, academics and opinion formers working to boost employment in Britain's creative sector during the recession. The organisation was launched formally at Number 11 Downing Street on 24 March 2009. The launch seminar was attended by more than 60 of Britain's leading creative industry figures, as well as several ministers and politicians from across the political spectrum.[ citation needed ]
In September 2009, Bright joined The Jewish Chronicle as political editor. He left the publication in March 2013, [4] but returned as a columnist, remaining until January, 2014. [5]
In January, 2014, he took a position at the Tony Blair Faith Foundation as editor of a new website on religion and globalisation produced in conjunction with the Harvard Divinity School. [5] [6] He resigned after five months, feeling Blair did not give him the autonomy he needed. [7]
Bright is married to Vanessa Thorpe, the arts correspondent of The Observer ; the couple have two children.
SOAS University of London is a public research university in London, England, and a member institution of the federal University of London. Founded in 1916, SOAS is located in the Bloomsbury area of central London.
Ibn Warraq is the pen name of an anonymous author critical of Islam. He is the founder of the Institute for the Secularisation of Islamic Society and used to be a senior research fellow at the Center for Inquiry, focusing on Quranic criticism. Warraq is the vice-president of the World Encounter Institute.
Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall was an English Islamic scholar noted for his 1930 English translation of the Quran, called The Meaning of the Glorious Koran. His translation of the Quran is one of the most widely known and used in the English-speaking world. A convert from Christianity to Islam, Pickthall was a novelist, esteemed by D. H. Lawrence, H. G. Wells, and E. M. Forster, as well as journalists, political and religious leaders. He declared his conversion to Islam in dramatic fashion after delivering a talk on 'Islam and Progress' on 29 November 1917, to the Muslim Literary Society in Notting Hill, West London.
John Edward Wansbrough was an American historian and professor who taught at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), where he was vice chancellor from 1985 to 1992.
David Morris Aaronovitch is an English journalist, television presenter and author. He is a regular columnist for The Times and the author of Paddling to Jerusalem: An Aquatic Tour of Our Small Country (2000), Voodoo Histories: the role of Conspiracy Theory in Modern History (2009) and Party Animals: My Family and Other Communists (2016). He won the Orwell Prize for political journalism in 2001, and the What the Papers Say "Columnist of the Year" award for 2003. He previously wrote for The Independent and The Guardian.
Nicholas Cohen is a British journalist, author and political commentator. He was a columnist for The Observer and is a blogger for The Spectator. Following accusations of sexual harassment, he left The Observer in 2022 and began publishing on the Substack platform.
The Festival of Muslim Cultures, a national celebration of Muslim cultures held in the United Kingdom, began in January 2006 and ended July 2007. It imitated an earlier event in 1976.
Gerald R. Hawting is a British historian and Islamicist.
Michael Allan Cook FBA is a British historian and scholar of Islamic history. Cook is the general editor of The New Cambridge History of Islam.
Martin Hinds was a British scholar of the Middle East and historiographer of early Islamic history.
Islamophobia Watch was a website which was initiated in January 2005 as a non-profit project to document material in the media, and in society at large, which it perceives to advocate Islamophobia. The site ceased by the end of January 2015.
Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West is a 2005 documentary film about the purported threat of Islamism to Western civilization. The film shows Islamic radicals preaching hate speech and seeking to incite global jihad. It also draws parallels between World War II's Nazi movement and Islamism and the West's response to those threats.
Lesley Hazleton is a British-American author whose work focuses on the intersection and interactions between politics and religion.
Muslim supporters of Israel refers to both Muslims and cultural Muslims who support the right to self-determination of the Jewish people and the likewise existence of a Jewish homeland in the Southern Levant, traditionally known as the Land of Israel and corresponding to the modern polity known as the State of Israel. Muslim supporters of the Israeli state are widely considered to be a rare phenomenon in light of the ongoing Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the larger Arab–Israeli conflict. Within the Muslim world, the legitimacy of the State of Israel has been challenged since its inception, and support for Israel's right to exist is a minority orientation. Pro-Israel Muslims have faced opposition from both moderate Muslims and Islamists.
John Ware is a British journalist, author, and investigative reporter.
The Islamic Forum of Europe (IFE) is an Islamic organisation based in the United Kingdom with affiliates in Europe. Its charitable arm is the Islamic Forum Trust.
Francis Beckett is an English author, journalist, biographer, and contemporary historian. He has written biographies of Aneurin Bevan, Clement Attlee, Harold Macmillan, Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. He has also written on education for the New Statesman, The Guardian and The Independent and is the editor of Third Age Matters, the national magazine published by the University of the Third Age. Beckett has been described as "an Old Labour romantic" by Guardian associate editor Michael White.
The revisionist school of Islamic studies is a movement in Islamic studies that questions traditional Muslim narratives of Islam's origins.