His novel was praised for giving a voice to the victims of Algeria’s brutal civil war. But one woman has accused Kamel Daoud of having stolen her story – and the ensuing legal battle has become about much more than literary ethics

Every November, leading figures of French literature gather in the upstairs room of an old-fashioned Paris restaurant and decide on the best novel of the year. The ceremony is staid, traditional, down to the restaurant’s menu, full of classic dishes such as vol-au-vents and foie gras on toast. In pictures of the judging ceremony, the judges wear dark suits; each has four glasses of wine at hand.

The winner of the Goncourt, as the prize is called, is likely to enter the pantheon of world literature, joining a lineage of writers that includes Marcel Proust and Simone de Beauvoir. The prize is also a financial boon for authors. As the biggest award in French literature, the Goncourt means a prime spot in storefronts, foreign rights, prestige. By one estimate, winning the Goncourt means nearly €1m of sales in the weeks that follow.

The Guardian’s community affairs correspondent, Chris Osuh, reports on the plot by two IS terrorists to massacre Jews in Manchester, and how it was thwarted by an undercover sting

Walid Saadaoui had once worked as a holiday entertainer, organising dance shows and quizzes at a resort in his native Tunisia. After moving to the UK and marrying a British woman, he became a restaurateur and an avid keeper of birds.

All the while, however – as the Guardian’s community affairs correspondent, Chris Osuh, explains – he was hiding a secret: he had pledged allegiance to Islamic State.

Long-term trust depends on demonstrating that state power can be corrected as well as asserted

On Monday, footage from Sydney’s CBD showed a group of men being dragged and shoved by police while praying. However, the men did not react with rage but with discipline. They continued their prayers even as officers approached. There were no fists raised, no retaliation, and no chaos; instead, there was the quiet continuity of a ritual that once begun could not be abandoned.

For observant Muslims, the moment of prostration – forehead to ground – is symbolically considered the closest proximity to God. It’s a posture of complete vulnerability with the body lowered, ego surrendered, and the world shut out. The ritual prayer is considered to be the foundation of Islam. This made the footage profoundly confronting for many Muslim Australians. Interrupting someone at their most defenceless position isn’t just moving a body; it’s intruding upon an intimate act of surrender.

Preparing simple, repetitive meals is the key to 30 days of fasting

Ramadan arrives this year in February, in the heart of winter. Short days, cold evenings and the pressure of everyday work mean that preparation is no longer about producing abundance, but about reducing effort while maintaining care. For many households balancing jobs, children and long commutes, the question is not what to cook, but how to make the month manageable.

The most effective approach to Ramadan cooking is not variety but repetition. A small set of meals that are easy to digest, quick to prepare and gentle on the body can carry a household through 30 days of fasting with far less stress than daily reinvention. The aim is to do the thinking once, not every day.

Shaista Gohir says every group has right to be protected after critics warn proposed definition risks breaking law

Failing to adopt a definition of anti-Muslim hostility would signal to British Muslims that their safety does not matter, a charity’s head has warned, as critics argue that adopting a definition risks breaking the law.

Shaista Gohir, a cross-bench peer and head of the Muslim Women’s Network, was part of a working group on anti-Muslim hatred and Islamophobia launched by the government in 2025 to define what would constitute unacceptable treatment, prejudice and discrimination against Muslims.

Led by women, queer-friendly, diverse: this model can break so many boundaries. But if we lose spaces to meet in, it can't happen

Something quietly profound happened last Ramadan. In a year when the war on Gaza hardened public debate into camps, when half the UK was found to believe that Islam – and therefore Muslims – to be incompatible with British values, when the general volume of Islamophobia was ratcheted several notches higher by Reform UK’s rise in the polls, hundreds of Muslim Londoners gathered every night to build the kind of community and connection we were told had been decimated. Lost to whatever the flavour of blame is at the moment: doomscrolling, the telly streamers, individualism promoted by late-stage capitalism, a society fractured by the cost of living.

For a month, Muslims came together in the capital and put on iftars, the evening meal that breaks the day’s fast, that reflected the world we want to live in: inclusive, often female-led and queer-friendly, properly diverse, rooted in generosity. A community without judgment, formed outside mosques, free from the performative piety Olympics. Which all sounds deeply earnest, but believe me when I tell you that these were some of the most vibey events I went to last year.

Nosheen Iqbal is the host of the Guardian’s Today in Focus podcast

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A burgeoning set of Muslim creatives and intellectuals are thriving amid the backdrop of Zohran Mamdani’s rise. We ask 18 of them about this historic moment in New York City life

Against the backdrop of Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral rise is a dynamic scene of Muslim creatives and intellectuals who are helping usher in a new era for New York City. Their prominence represents a rebuke of the ugly Islamophobia that defined the period following 9/11, and is in many ways an outcrop of the mass movement for Palestinian rights forged over the last two years. We ask 18 Muslim New Yorkers to discuss their work and what this moment means.
How Muslim New Yorkers are changing the city’s cultural landscape

Miqdaad Versi, Shaista Aziz, Aamna Mohdin and Nosheen Iqbal on the rise of the far right and growing Islamophobia in the UK

The far right is on the rise and much of its messaging is explicitly Islamophobic. In 2024 anti-Muslim hate crimes in England and Wales doubled. Meanwhile, the government has stated that it cannot even agree on a definition of what Islamophobia is.

How does all this make British Muslims feel? Miqdaad Versi, Shaista Aziz and the Guardian’s community affairs reporter Aamna Mohdin talk to Nosheen Iqbal about what’s changed.

Former PM called for national register and accreditation for imams, sparking backlash from Muslim leaders

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Leading Islamic community groups have condemned Scott Morrison as “deeply ill-informed” and “dangerous” after the former prime minister demanded a national register and accreditation for imams, and expanding foreign interference frameworks to capture foreign links in religious institutions.

The former Liberal leader, speaking at an antisemitism conference in Jerusalem on Tuesday, claimed the measures were needed in the wake of the Isis-inspired Bondi terror shooting at a Hanukah event, which left 15 people dead. Morrison demanded a focus on “radicalised extremist Islam”, noting the two alleged Bondi shooters “were Australian-made” and demanding local Muslim bodies do more to stamp out hate.

Innocent people are being frozen out of basic banking services – and it all traces back to reforms rushed through after 9/11

Hamish Wilson lives a few miles away from me, in a cosy farmhouse in the damp hills of mid Wales. He makes good coffee, tells great stories and is an excellent host. Every summer, dozens of Somali guests visit Wilson’s farm as part of a wonderfully wholesome project set up to celebrate their nation’s culture, and to honour his father’s second world war service with a Somali comrade-in-arms.

Inadvertently, however, the project has revealed something else: a deep unfairness in today’s global financial system that not only threatens to ruin the Somalis’ holidays, but also excludes marginalised communities from global banking services on a huge scale.

When organisers posted a TikTok promoting 45-minute pilates sessions, the video amassed 2m views. Now plans are afoot for female classes and youth clubs

It’s early afternoon on a gloomy day at the Jamia Usmania mosque in Bradford and a group of mostly elderly men have finished their midday prayers.

The assembly of mainly retired men would usually return to the familiar drumbeat of day-to-day life, but instead they make their way downstairs to tackle squats, glute bridges and the butterfly position in the mosque’s weekly 45-minute pilates class.

Laila Cunningham accused of endangering Muslims after saying it ‘has to be assumed’ people hiding their face for a criminal reason

Reform UK’s mayoral candidate for London has been accused of endangering Muslims after she said women wearing the burqa should be subject to stop and search.

Laila Cunningham, who was announced as Reform’s candidate for the 2028 mayoral elections last week, said no one should cover their face “in an open society”, adding: “It has to be assumed that if you’re hiding your face, you’re hiding it for a criminal reason.”

The protests were hijacked by Reza Pahlavi and notions of Persian supremacy, then brutally repressed by a violent regime

In late December, Iran experienced the beginnings of an uprising driven primarily by economic pressures, initially emerging among merchant bazaaris and subsequently spreading across broader segments of society. As events unfolded rapidly, calls for regime change became the focus of international attention. Consistent with its response to previous protest movements, the Iranian government once again opted for repression rather than engagement, violently suppressing demonstrations instead of allowing popular grievances to be articulated and addressed.

As visual evidence circulated depicting the accumulation of bodies at Kahrizak, it became increasingly evident that the primary instigator of the violence leading to these fatalities was the Islamic Republic itself, which has refused to tolerate civil unrest and has consistently responded to popular mobilisation with force.

Behrouz Boochani is a Kurdish writer. Mehdi Jalali Tehrani is an Iranian political commentator

Police allege a 47-year-old imam was assaulted after he and his wife were forced off the road by three people in Melbourne’s south-east

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A Victorian Muslim religious leader was punched in the face after he and his wife were allegedly forced from their car on a Melbourne freeway in what police allege was a racially motivated attack.

Police allege the pair were travelling along the South Gippsland Highway in Melbourne’s south-east at 7.40pm on Saturday when they were “racially abused” by three occupants of a small black hatchback.

Edward Ahmed Mitchell of Council on American-Islamic Relations says Texas and Florida governors abusing power

The deputy director of the US’s biggest Muslim civil rights and advocacy group warns that Republican governors’ steps to declare his organization a “terrorist organization” won’t stop with the Muslim community.

“No governor should have the power to unilaterally declare a civil rights or advocacy group he disagrees with a terrorist organization, take punitive action against them, all in violation of due process and free speech,” Edward Ahmed Mitchell, the deputy director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told the Guardian this month. “If any governor can get away with abusing that kind of power, then no organization is safe.”

No Muslim leader wants to diminish the suffering of the Jewish community or be seen as engaging in competitive victimhood. We must stand in solidarity with each other

While many Australians remain in a state of anger, grief and reflection due to the devastating Bondi terror attack, Muslim community leaders are in a predicament. What is to be done about the ensuing rise of anti-Muslim sentiment, hatred and racism that their communities face?

Following the 14 December mass shooting, community registers that document Islamophobia have largely been reluctant to speak publicly about the spike in Islamophobia, out of concern of being perceived to trivialise the killing of Jewish Australians, their suffering, or vying for sympathy from the public.

Democratic socialist mayor led historic push to lead New York, speaking on immigration, Trump and subway burritos

Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist who is now mayor of New York City, ran a campaign known for its soaring political rhetoric, its viral memes and its candidate’s witty quips.

Here are some of the quotes that came to define his historic push to lead one of the world’s most important cities:

New York will remain a city of immigrants: a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants, and, as of tonight, led by an immigrant. So hear me, President Trump, when I say this: to get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us.

What I don’t have in experience, I make up for in integrity. And what you don’t have in integrity, you could never make up for with experience.

No more will New York be a city where you can traffic in Islamophobia and win an election.

It’s pronounced ‘cyclist’.

I am young, despite my best efforts to grow older. I am Muslim. I am a democratic socialist. And most damning of all, I refuse to apologize for any of this.

I don’t think that we should have billionaires because, frankly, it is so much money in a moment of such inequality, and ultimately, what we need more of is equality across our city and across our state and across our country.

I hear you. I see you. And if you’re a burrito on the Q train, I eat you.

If anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it is the city that gave rise to him. So, if there is any way to terrify a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power. This is not only how we stop Trump, it’s how we stop the next one. So, Donald Trump, since I know you’re watching, I have four words for you: turn the volume up!

I have no interest in defending his social media posts, but calls to strip the newly freed activist of British citizenship pile torment on top of torture

What is the proper punishment for hateful social media posts? Should you lose your account? Your job? Your citizenship? Go to jail? Die? For the people who have launched a campaign against the British-Egyptian writer and activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah, no punishment is too great.

I have no interest in defending the awful tweets in question, which Abd el-Fattah posted in the early 2010s. Many are indefensible and he has apologised “unequivocally” for them. He has also written movingly about how his perspective has changed in the intervening years. Years that have included more than a decade in jail, most of it in Egypt’s notorious Tora prison where he faced torture; missing his son’s entire childhood – and very nearly dying during a months-long hunger strike.

Naomi Klein is a Guardian US columnist and contributing writer. She is the professor of climate justice and co-director of the Centre for Climate Justice at the University of British Columbia

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Despite fresh attempts to make women cover up, many believe the regime wouldn’t risk mass arrests for fear of sparking a wave of popular unrest last seen after the killing of Mahsa Amini

On the streets of Iran’s capital, Tehran, young women are increasingly flouting the compulsory hijab laws, posting videos online that show them walking the streets unveiled. Their defiance comes more than three years after the killing of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman taken into custody by the “morality police” for allegedly breaching the dress code rules. Her death led to the largest wave of popular unrest for years in Iran and a crackdown by security services in response, with hundreds of protesters killed and thousands injured.

Under Iran’s “hijab and chastity” law, which came into force in 2024, women caught “promoting nudity, indecency, unveiling or improper dressing” face severe penalties, including fines of up to £12,500, flogging and prison sentences ranging from five to 15 years for repeat offenders.

Two young female friends meet up in Laleh park to rest and drink tea together after a long working day. They used to be classmates studying English

Cair claims in lawsuit that Florida governor’s order blocking group from state resources was unconstitutional

A leading Muslim civil rights group in the US has sued Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, over his order designating it and another organization as a “foreign terrorist organization”, saying the directive was unconstitutional.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, known as Cair, has more than 20 chapters across the United States and its work involves legal actions, advocacy and education outreach.