Articles

Religious conflict between Nigerian Muslims and Christians is traditional, and the clashes between members of the two faiths which took place in late February are not a new phenomenon. What is new is that the clashes were set off by the cartoons recently published by Danish and other European newspapers that depicted the Prophet Muhammad (saw) in an extremely offensive manner.

All is not well in the "land of the pure": the "stans"—Baluchistan and Waziristan (both North and South)—are on fire; the dams' controversy has subsided somewhat, but has been replacedby the fury surrounding Europe's cartoons. The anger of the protests is also fuelled by the exorbitant prices of essential commodities, and Pakistan's opposition parties, sensing blood, are going for the jugular.

Since the conflict in Darfur began three years ago, about 180,000 people have died, mainly because of hunger and disease; about 2 million have been displaced. Clearly, the conflict is too vicious and costly to be allowed to continue, but the current efforts of the African Union (AU) to resolve it are not equal to the task. But the so-called international community cannot seriously be concerned about the fate of the people of Darfur or of Sudan as a whole.

The controversy resulting from Europe's insulting cartoons merely confirms what Muslims have always known: that there is deep animosity for Islam and Muslims within the Western establishment. It was to reflect on this and other matters that the conference “Peace and Justice in the Age of Imperialism” was organised on the occasion of the twenty-seventh anniversary of the Islamic Revolution in Iran.

People all over the world held events on February 23 to remember the tragedy of the Chechen people, after the Save Chechnya Campaign, a support and advocacy body based in London, led a campaign to have February 23, the date of Stalin’s deportation of the Chencens to Central Asia in 1944, proclaimed as World Chechnya Day.

On April 23, Crescent International and the Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought (ICIT) will hold a Kalim Siddiqui Memorial Conference in London to mark the tenth anniversary of the death of one of the Islamic movement’s modern giants. The theme of the conference will be The Islamic movement: between moderation and extremism. As part of our commemoration of Dr Kalim’s work, we are reprinting some of his major works. In this issue we reprint a paper he wrote in 1984, reflecting on the Islamic Revolution in Iran.

The subservience of Pakistan’s rulers was again displayed on January 13: the US bombed a border village in Pakistan's Bajaur Agency, killing 18 civilians, six of them children. Far from confronting America's state terrorism, Pakistani officials from general Pervez Musharraf down proffered lame excuses: "foreign terrorists" were the intended target, for instance. In particular, they claimed that Ayman al-Zawahiri was a guest at one of the houses for an Eid al-Adha celebration in Damadola village.

Officially, the world has been taken by surprise by Hamas’s overwhelming victory in Palestine’s parliamentary elections on January 25. Yes, there had been fears that Hamas would seriously dent Fatah’s long-established dominance of Palestinian politics, and might have to be accommodated in the Fatah-dominated political institutions, perhaps even to the extent of being given a ministry or two, but that was only to be expected, given the problems that Fatah has had in recent months.

This month, Muslims around the world will celebrate the 27th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, at a time when the Islamic State is facing a greater direct threat than at any time since the end of the imposed war, when US military forces intervened to ensure that Saddam Hussain was not defeated and the Muslims of Iraq were not liberated by Iranian mujahideen.

As the Islamic New Year approaches, there is every sign that it could be as significant as the year of the Ahzab (the coalition of the willing mushriks). This time, instead of Islamic Madinah being besieged by Arabian military forces, it is Islamic Iran surrounded by American military forces.