Articles

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.

The celebration of Islamic festivals such as Eid al-Adha and the annual Hajj last month — both connected to Prophet Ibrahim's (as) willingness to sacrifice in fulfillment of Allah's command — is meant to revive the spirit and purpose of the Ummah.

April 18 this year will be the tenth anniversary of the death of Dr Kalim Siddiqui, the founder of the Muslim Institute, London, and the Muslim Parliament of Great Britain. For the last decade and a half of his life, between the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979 and his death in South Africa in 1996, Dr Kalim dominated Islamic movement activism in Britain and was a major figure in the global Islamic movement.

A sense of nightmarish unease must have descended on ruling circles in Damascus when former Syrian vice-president Abd al-Halim Khaddam became, shortly before the start of the New Year, the country’s first high-level official to break ranks with the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Asad.

As this article is written, it is still far from clear as to whether the Palestinian Legislative Council elections, scheduled for January 25, will take place. At the time, the situation is that special polling centres had opened their doors on January 21 for members of the Palestinian security forces to cast their votes in three days of early voting.

Kuwait is often described as a democracy, because of the fact that it has a constitution (introduced a year after it gained its independence from Britain in 1981) and an elected parliament. But neither the constitution nor parliament has been able to prevent the ruling family, the House of al-Sabah, from monopolising power and controlling the Emirate's oil-wealth;

The West, led by the US and Britain, has worked itself into a lather over Iran's removal of seals from centrifuges at the Natanz nuclear facility to enrich uranium by turning it into a gas (uranium hexafluoride) as part of its civilian nuclear-research programme.

Six Asia-Pacific countries – the US, China, India, Australia, Japan and South Korea – held a conference, the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, in Sydney (Australia) on January 11. It was their reaction to the conference held in Montreal in December by the signatories of the original Kyoto Protocols in order to renew and extend those Protocols.

The Save Chechnya Campaign (SCC) UK proposes to commemorate the Stalin-era genocide of the Chechen people as World Chechnya Day (WCD) on Thursday 23 February 2006. This momentous tragedy in the history of the Chechen people resulted in the deaths of about two thirds of the Chechen people.