Articles

Over the last few years, Crescent International has serialised a new tafseer of the Qur’an by Imam Mohammad al-Asi. The first volume of this tafseer is now being published by the Institute ofContemporary Islamic Thought (ICIT), as the ICIT’s Director ZAFAR BANGASH explains.

Tuhfat al-Mujahidin (“Tribute to the Strugglers”) is one of the earliest extant historical treatises about the southern Indian state of Kerala. Its author, the sixteenth-century Shaikh Zainuddin Makhdum, hailed from the renowned Makhdum family of the town of Ponnani in Malabar, northern Kerala. This family traced its descent to migrants from Yemen, who played a leading role in the spread of Islam in southern India. Following in the footsteps of many of his forefathers, Shaikh Zainuddin rose to become a leading Islamic scholar. He spent ten years studying in Makkah, where he also joined the Qadiriyya order. On his return to his native Malabar, he spent almost four decades teaching at the central mosque in Ponnani, then a major centre for Islamic studies in southern India. He also served as the envoy of the Zamorins, the Hindu rulers of Calicut, to Egypt and Turkey.

There is open talk of impending war in Lebanon these days. Lebanese of many factions are speculating about potential scenarios for another war being waged on Hizbullah by Israel. These discussions concentrate on the question of when, rather than whether, such a war will erupt.

Commanding the collective good and forbidding evil must rank as the most important obligation of Muslims, the Islamic movement and the Islamic state. The Qur'anic ayah, “amr bilma‘roof wal nahy ‘anil munkar” (3:104 and 110) is often mistranslated as “enjoining good and forbidding evil”, minimising its forcefulness and giving it a pacifist twist.

The neo-cons’ commitment to promoting democracy in the Muslim world was quietly discarded after Hamas’s victory in the Palestinian elections in January 2006, when they finally realised what most observers had been saying all along: that free elections in Muslim countries would almost invariably result in governments that the West would not like because they would promote the concerns and interests of their own people above those of Washington.

In the early years of Muslim history we had most of the political pulses that we have today. Not many Muslims, not even many intellectual Muslims, are willing to examine human nature, cultural influences, social trends and political priorities fourteen hundred years ago as well as today.

That there are now two ruling coalitions in Malaysia – UMNO’s and another led by Anwar Ibrahim (pic, left) – aptly describes Malaysia’s post-election reality. For the first time, the opposition’s credibility is being put to test at the governing level.

When US president George W. Bush claimed last month that Iraq had been a victory for the US, hollow laughter echoed around the world. In this article, KHALIL FADL considers the real legacy of the Iraqwar, five years after the toppling of Saddam Hussein.

In the contemporary Ummah, Sufism is often associated with apolitical, pacifist Islam of the type that the West would like to promote as “true Islam” all over the Muslim world. FAHAD ANSARI looks back at the great tradition of jihadi Sufis in recent Muslim history.

On March 14 Iranians in overwhelming numbers participated in the country’s 28th elections since the Islamic Revolution (1979) to elect members of the eighth Majlis (parliament). At least 25 million people, constituting more than 60 percent of the electorate, cast their ballots to choose 290 members from a field of 4,225 candidates.