Articles

Last month marked the third anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq and the toppling of Saddam Hussain. Few now doubt that the invasion was the culmination of a long-held plan on the Americans’ part, and that the intense international politicking of the months leading up to the war, with the talk of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and links between Saddam Hussainand al-Qa’ida, UN resolutions and weapons inspectors, was no more than a process designed to justify the invasion.

As this issue of Crescent goes to press, and barely two months after the Palestinians elected Hamas to power in the parts of occupied Palestine in which they have a degree of political autonomy, the people of Israel are going to the polls to elect a new parliament and government.

The images are still fresh in our minds, the characters are still around, and the memories will not go away. In Islamic centers and masajid, Islamic annual conferences and halaqat, even at hajj and the ‘umrah, books, tracts, essays, and pamphlets, and sometimes cassettes and CDs, were liberally distributed, free of charge.

An essential pre-requisite for the proper cure of a disease is its correct diagnosis. This is true of social ills as well as individual illnesses. Although modern science provides many tools to determine an individual’s ailment, it is much more difficult to diagnose the problems of society.

The diversity of the human condition and experience is one of the most wonderful elements of the world that Allah subhahanu wa ta‘ala has created for us. The evolution of human societies over time, and the need for people to learn from the experiences of earlier generations, is one of the major themes of the Qur’an.

Egyptian politicians and intellectuals often claim that other Arabs borrow their ideas or attitudes from Egypt. It would not, therefore, be surprising if they claim that the Saudi rulers are copying president Husni Mubarak in their recent overtures to France, in an apparent attempt to distance themselves from the US, which has become very unpopular in the Muslim world.

Egypt, under president Husni Mubarak, receives the second largest amount of US foreign aid per annum after Israel, but unlike Israel pays a very high price for it. Not only does it openly and loyally back US foreign policy in the Middle East and the rest of the Muslim world, but it is also publicly committed to the US government's ‘war or terrorism', which is really an ill-disguised assault on Islamic activists and Islamic groups.

Rich countries, led by the US, spend millions of dollars in the Horn of Africa to pre-empt what they call "al-Qa'ida's designs" to turn the region – particularly Somalia – into a "safe haven". But they have clearly chosen to ignore urgent appeals by international aid and food agencies to save the lives of millions of the region's population that are at risk of imminent death from famine caused by a combination of conflict and drought.

America’s anti-Iran rhetoric, already intense, has gone into overdrive since the release on March 16 of US President George Bush’s second report on national security strategy. It reads more like an anti-Iran diatribe than a serious analysis of the US’s situation under Bush.

In this month is the 10th anniversary of the death of Dr Kalim Siddiqui. The occasion will be marked by a Kalim Siddiqui Memorial Conference in London on April 23, on The Islamic movement: between moderation and extremism. Here we republish one of Dr Kalim’s most important writings, Processes of Error, Deviation, Correction and Convergence in Muslim Political Thought, which was first published in 1989.