Articles

Hopes that the persecution of hijabi women in Turkey – a substantial majority of the population – might soon be eased were dashed on June 5, when the Turkish constitutional court overturned the decision announced by the government February to relax the hijab ban in universities. The Court ruled that the government decision was unlawful because it was anti-secularist and unconstitutional.

The US supreme court verdict on June 12 that detainees at Guantanamo Bay are entitled to habeas corpus (the right to be free from illegal detention and, if held without charge, to challenge it in a civilian court) was welcome to human-rights activists and lawyers, but so far appears to have left the US government unmoved.

In recent months, politics in the UK has been dominated by debate over how long the authorities should be allowed to hold suspected terrorist before they are charged or released. Fahad Ansari points out that in fact many Muslims are already held for years in British jails without trial.

While Muslims everywhere are concerned with the attacks on Islam and Muslims by our external enemies, particularly the US and its allies, far less attention is paid to the fact that Islamic history and culture are under attack from those who claim to be their guardians. ZAFAR BANGASH, the Director of the Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought (ICIT), discusses the Saudi authorities’ destruction of historical sites in the Hijaz.

Ideological blinders often lead ideologues to stumble into serious blunders. That US president George W. Bush’s Iraq adventure has gone awry has escaped no one but the warmongering neo-conservative cabal dominating the Bush White House and the stalwart intellectuals who blithely rationalized the irrational war.

The election of Michel Sulayman on May 25 as Lebanon’s twelfth president closed the chapter on one of the longest political crises to have gripped the country since its ‘independence’ in 1943. Sulayman, a former commander of the armed forces, took oath of office immediately after he was elected with 118 votes out of the 127 legislators attending the parliamentary electoral session.

One of the most enduring myths about the Western media is their supposed objectivity. The grossly ill-informed and gullible Americans apart, the Muslims are its biggest victims. Muslims often ask why the Western media do not give their side of the story in such trouble-spots as Palestine, Iraq or Afghanistan.

This month, millions of Muslims all over the world will mark the nineteenth anniversary of the death of Imam Khomeini on June 4, 1989. The Imam was undoubtedly the most important figure in recent Muslim history, the man whose thought and leadership effectively gave birth to what we now know as the global Islamic movement.

The first volume of Imam Muhammad al-Asi’s tafseer of the Qur’an, The Ascendant Qur’an, was formally launched by the Instituteof Contemporary Islamic Thought at a function at the Islamic Society of York Region in Toronto on May 24. It was a low-key event, aimed mainly at the local community, rather than a massive event designed to be unmissable by Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

In September last year, Israeli aircraft launched an unprovoked and entirely illegal air attack on a Syrian military installation, destroying what Syria said were unused buildings in the middle of the desert. In April, the US State Department published what it claimed were intelligence materials proving that the building was an illegal nuclear reactor, allegations which were rubbished by neutral observers.