FiveBooks

Elizabeth Harris is a senior lecturer in Religious Studies at Liverpool Hope University where she specialises in Buddhism. She says the Dalai Lama affirms that everyone likes happiness and not pain. He then stresses that this happiness must not infringe on the rights of others. And gradually he tells people what happiness really means – a happiness which is free from the craving for material things that Buddhism sees as the root of our suffering. Happiness, he says, can be about developing one’s own potential but it must have no conceit and pride about it. She chooses the best five books on Buddhism.

British Lawyer Ahmad Thomson converted to Islam in 1973. He is a noted speaker on Islamic matters and an author of several books on the subject. Thomson is a member of the Murabitun movement, founded by Ian Dallas, and a member and co-founder of the Association of Muslim Lawyers. In 1994, he founded Wynne Chambers: one of the first chambers to specialise in Islamic law as well as English law. He has actively campaigned for elements of Muslim personal law to be accommodated by English civil law. He says a whole zone of knowledge about Islamic truth and its wisdom has been kept at bay, if you like, by established educational institutions in what’s called the West. He tries to redress the balance here.

Turi Munthe is CEO and founder of Demotix – www.demotix.com – the multiple-awardwinning open newswire, with over 3,000 reporters in 190 countries around the world. Turi is English-French-Swedish and was brought up in London. He has been a publisher, editor, think-tank analyst (Middle East policy), lecturer, journalist and talking head. He has written for many of the world’s leading English-language newspapers, appeared on CNN, BBC, NBC, al-Jazeera, Asahi. He edited The Saddam Hussein Reader: Selections from Leading Writers on Iraq.

Simon Conway was born in California in 1967, educated in Britain and studied English literature at the University of Edinburgh. He served in the British army with the Black Watch and the Queen’s Own Highlanders. After leaving the military he worked for the HALO trust, clearing land mines and unexploded ordnance in Cambodia, Kosovo, Abkhazia, Eritrea and Sri Lanka. As Director of Landmine Action he ran projects in Western Sahara, Liberia and Guinea Bissau as well as successfully campaigning for an international treaty to ban cluster bombs. He has been following the Taliban since the mid-90s and exploring the extent to which the Taliban and al Qaeda are creations of the Pakistani Intelligence Services backed by Saudi money. In his latest book, A Loyal Spy, there are uncanny parallels between the plot and real life.