Articles

US President Barack Obama’s much-anticipated speech to the Muslim world delivered in Cairo on June 4 was quite rhetorical duly impressing his audience. He touched all the right emotional buttons: commencing his address with the traditional Muslim greeting of Assalamu alaikum and quoting verses from the Qur’an.

On the political front, it appears the US has resigned itself to the fact that there is nobody capable of replacing Karzai at present.

Muslim political thought seems to have drifted from the teachings of the Qur’an, and the Sunnah and Sirah of the noble Messenger of Allah (s). In Part I of this essay, Zafar Bangash, Director of the Institute of Contemporary Isla-mic Thought, places it back in the Sirah to enable the Islamic movement to transform wayward Muslim societies.

Abu Rideh is a man who has never been charged with any offence, terrorism or otherwise; he has never been asked a single question about his alleged involvement with terrorism nor has he ever been told why he is suspected of being a threat or shown any evidence that is being used against him.

The officers involved here stand accused of holding the heads of victims inside a toilet and repeatedly flushing it, as part of their interrogation.

After more than two months of military operations in Swat Valley, the Pakistan army spokesman, major general Athar Abbas claimed that 95 percent of the Valley had been cleared of militants.

Under the terms of a peace agreement signed in 2005 between northern and southern Sudan, the latter is expected to vote for secession in a referendum in 2011.  But the traditional competition between nomadic groups in the south for the best cattle and grazing land has developed into a serious ethnic conflict in recent months, so the region could be too unstable to hold either the elections due next year or the referendum. 

What started as a media manufactured rift in Malaysia’s Islamic Party (PAS) soon became real after its top leader openly condemned a section of the leadership who has been in talks with the ruling UMNO.

Despite US President Barack Obama’s claims of non-involvement in Iran’s affairs, few people believe that the US was an innocent bystander in the recent riots in Tehran.The US not only has a long history of interfering in Iran’s internal affairs, these intensified during former President George Bush’s era.

The larger story from Lebanon’s June 7 parliamentary elections was neither the “defeat” of Hizbullah, as the Western media claimed, nor the resounding victory for the US-Saudi backed and financed March 14 movement. Its real significance lay in the fact that it may usher changes in Lebanon’s political landscape in ways that would have been unthinkable barely five years ago.