Articles

If anyone hoped that the security pact being negotiated between the US and Iraq was rising above the cycle of frustrations and false starts, then such fanciful thoughts can now be dismissed. On September 17 Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Maliki told a group of Iraqi journalists that “there are very serious and dangerous obstacles facing the deal.

A powerful truck bomb tore through the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad a few hours after Asif Ali Zardari, Pakistan’s newly-elected President, addressed a joint session of Parliament on September 20. According to police sources, 53 persons were killed and more than 250 injured.

On September 8, a jury at Woolwich Crown Court found three Muslim men, Abdulla Ahmed Ali, Assad Sarwar and Tanvir Hussain, guilty of conspiracy to murder using home-made bombs. Four of their co-defendants, Arafat Khan, Waheed Zaman, Ibrahim Savant and Umar Islam, had earlier pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy to commit a public nuisance.

There are many unknown victims of the US’s global war on Islamic dissidence. The plight of one of them hit the headlines earlier this summer, after years in which nothing was known of her. FAHAD ANSARI reports on the case of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, a Muslimah now in US custody after disappearing in Pakistan in 2003.

To mark the cccasion of Yaum al-Quds this year, Crescent International in South Africa published a booklet analysing the rise of Hamas and the current state of the Palestinian struggle. Here we publish an abridged version of this booklet. The full version is available on the website of the Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought.

The long-overdue resignation of former general Pervez Musharraf from the presidency of Pakistan may have lifted his dark shadow from the political scene, but the problems of the people of Pakistan are far from over. They are now confronted by the frightening prospect of Asif Zardari, leader of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), becoming the country’s president.

That the first volume of The Ascendant Qur'an, Imam Muhammad al-Asi's new tafseer of the Qur’an, would be well received inSouth Africa was never in doubt, given his great popularity within the Muslim community; what was unclear was the degree of support it would receive.

The last Friday of Ramadan each year is marked around the world as Yaum al-Quds: the Day of al-Quds. This tradition was begun by Imam Khomeini r.a. shortly after the Islamic Revolution in Iran, as an annual affirmation of the Ummah’s solidarity with the Muslims of Palestine in their struggle for the liberation of al-Quds .

For people above a certain age, there is something almost comfortingly familiar about the international politicking over Russia’s invasion of Georgia and its subsequent recognition of the ‘independence’ of the two separatist regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

When US and Iraqi officials said on August 25 that they had agreed a text for the long-awaited treaty covering a full withdrawal of US troops by 2011, it should have been a major political story. The fact that it wasn’t reflects certain political realities that make the treaty virtually worthless.