Khaled al-Shaya, a top Saudi cleric, recently called on Islamic countries to ban and legislate against Google, after the internet search giant’s apparent “disrespect of Islamic beliefs” in continuing to display an inflammatory video against Islam, news website CNN Arabic reported on Saturday. Google - the parent company of video sharing site Youtube, which hosted the controversial video entitled “The Innocence of Muslims” - had “insulted the Prophet” by not removing the video, said Shaya.

A far-right UK Independence Party (UKIP) politician reiterated on Tuesday his belief that a declaration denouncing specific parts of the Quran must be signed by Muslims living in Britain. Gerard Batten, an MEP, renewed his suggestion first proposed in 2006 while speaking to the British daily news website the Guardian, adding that Europe made a huge mistake by allowing “an explosion of mosques across their land.”

Tunisia’s National Constituent Assembly is close to passing a new Constitution that legislators across the political spectrum, human rights organizations and constitutional experts are hailing as a triumph of consensus politics. Two years in the making and now in its third draft, the charter is a carefully worded blend of ideas that has won the support of both Ennahda, the Islamist party that leads the interim government, and the secular opposition. It is being hailed as one of the most liberal constitutions in an Arab nation.

Jihadists have been on the internet a long time, and they probably know how to use it better than you do. Since the early years of the world wide web, radical Islamist groups used it for a number of different jihad-y means, from recruitment and financing to propaganda and communication. But how has this changed over the past decade, and in the wake of Edward Snowden's revelations of NSA spying, what does the future hold for jihadists and the internet?

Nearly eight months after President Hassan Rouhani's surprise election victory, in which the centrist cleric trounced influential conservative candidates, Iran's hardliners are behaving as if they never lost. Shadowy vigilantes on motorcycles have menaced the family home of a pro-Rouhani filmmaker, and reform-minded journalists are showing up on target lists.

In recent years, Somalia’s al-Shabab militia has banned smoking, playing soccer, watching movies, wearing bras, anything it deemed Western. Now, the al-Qaeda-linked group has targeted something else common in most of the rest of the world: the Internet.

Wearing some form of head covering in public is an important sign of Islamic identity in many Muslim-majority countries, but there is considerable variation in the extent to which women are expected (and sometimes mandated) to cover up. A recent Pew report, based on a survey conducted by the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research from 2011 to 2013 in seven majority-Muslim nations, reveals just how widely opinions about female attire differ in the region.

The time seemed right to most observers, the place not entirely thought out. Why would the sitting, though troubled, prime minister of a country visit another sitting, but less troubled, premier of another country at a city other than the capital?