Articles

After two weeks of political uncertainty, the situation in Lebanon began to stabilize on January 25 when the Hizbullah-led alliance secured the support of 68 parliamentarians compared to 60 for the ousted Prime Minister Saad Hariri. President Michel Suleiman asked Najib Mikati, another former prime minister, to form the new government.

The Palestinian issue has been virtually stalemated since before Israel’s war on Gaza in 2008–2009, with Hamas, the most popular and legitimate Palestinian leadership bottled up in the besieged and densely populated Gaza, and the West Bank under the increasingly repressive rule of Mahmood Abbas’s Palestinian Authority (PA).

The assassination of Punjab Governor Salman Taseer on January 4 at the hands of his own bodyguard has exposed the numerous fault lines criss-crossing the social fabric of Pakistani society over the blasphemy law. It has pushed the country toward two extremes drowning out rational and knowledge-based discussion.

Last month’s events have confirmed, yet again, with striking clarity how deeply polarized the Pakistani society is. The killing of Salman Taseer, Governor of Punjab Province, by his own bodyguard on January 4 has scared the living daylights out of the already cowardly rulers.

It is now widely expected that Yemen’s current unrest will lead to secession and not merely to the flight of its president, as has happened in Tunisia. The background to this situation is that the Republic of Yemen was born in May 22, 1990, when the two states of North and South Yemen merged after several clashes that led eventually to negotiations and a commitment to unity.

"In Azerbaijan the government has never arrested leaders of secular political parties. However, the IPA leadership was imprisoned on numerous occasions without any legal basis."

In the month of Rabi‘ al-Awwal, Muslims worldwide celebrate the birthday of the noble Messenger of Allah (pbuh). Lectures are delivered highlighting aspects of his great personality and the miracles he performed. Would it not be more appropriate to express our love for him by reviewing his life-struggle and the pain he endured in order to achieve the supremacy of Islam by establishing the Islamic State? Zafar Bangash, Director of the Institute of Islamic Thought, discusses some of these issues.

In the month marking the 46th anniversary of Malcolm X’s shahadah (real name El-Hajj Malik Shabazz), the task of tabulating his political legacy is a rather delicate enterprise. In US cinematic culture, he is perhaps known best from Spike Lee’s 1992 film.

The people of Egypt refuse to be intimidated by curfews, violence and US-supplied tear gas shells fired at them by the police. For several nights, people have defied the curfew as government control begins to crumble.

The fourth day of protests in Egypt has reached “the point of no return,” as numerous commentators on the street have noted. President Mubarak recently imposed a country-wide curfew, bringing in the military to complete the job that the police force failed to do—contain the Egyptian population’s mass protests.