Articles

In June, the Islamic Human RIghts Commission (IHRC) held a conference in London on Liberation Theology and the right to resist. Here we publish two papers delivered at that conference. The first is by RIMA FAKHRY, a member of the political council of the Islamic Resistance Movement in Lebanon, usually known as the Hizbullah.

August marks the 60th anniversary of the beginning of the nuclear era with the US;s use of atomic bombs against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. YUSUF AL-KHABBAZ, who was in Hiroshima for the commemorations, discusses those momentus events and their implications.

As the first presidential election since 1981 that can be contested by more than one candidate – at least in theory – approaches, president Mubarak, who has ruled Egypt for 24 years, is stepping up his already formidable rigging programme to secure re-election for his fifth term.

America’s humiliation in Iraq has led some observers to describe it as another Vietnam. This is not quite accurate; the US’s Iraqi experience is much closer to the Russians’ in Afghanistan, with very similar outcomes, both positive and negative. Should the US military stay in Iraq extend for a decade or more, as did the Red Army’s in Afghanistan, there will perhaps be noUnited States left to return to, at least as far as its superpower pretensions are concerned.

For the third time since Jakarta and the fighters of Aceh signed their first ‘treaty' in May 2000, both sides have again reached a deal, hoping to pave the way to a lasting solution of the conflict in North Sumatra. This time the negotiations were conducted in the wake of the region's worst catastrophe: the tsunami of December 26 last year.

The election of Mahmoud Ahmedinejad as president of Iran in June shocked Western governments, apparently misled by their own propaganda that suggested that Iranians had turned against the Islamic State. ZAFAR BANGASH, director of the Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought, explains why Iranians elected him, and the threats Iran now faces.

The principal task of the UN Security Council – established under the founding charter of the UN as one of the UN's main organs – is supposedly to promote international peace and security in every part of the world. Yet it is undoubtedly more notable for its failures than for its achievements since its first official meeting, which took place on January 10, 1946.

As soon as it became clear that the chaos on London’s public transport on the morning of July 7 was the result of something rather more than the usual maintenance problems, Muslims inBritain knew that they would come under immense pressure if it was confirmed that Muslims were responsible, as most observers immediately suspected.

The plight of the Afghan people under American occupation is no better, and in many instances much worse, than it was under the Russian occupation in the nineteen-eighties, despite US drum-beating about bringing democracy to the country, a recent report concludes.

The Muslims who had the courage to storm government offices and force president Askar Aliyev to flee Kyrgyzstan in March deserve better leaders than those replacing him after the election held on July 10. Both the new president, Kurmanbek Bakayev, and the prime minister, Felix Kulov, a former KGB officer, served as times in the Akayev government–sharing Akayev's subservience to Russia and animosity to Islam and Islamic activists, and displaying their readiness to live with corruption and practise it.