Articles

In June, the Islamic Human Rights Committion convened a conference on liberation theology and the right to resist. Here we publish the keynote paper presented by DR SAIED REZA AMELI of the Institute for North American and European Studies, University of Tehran.

It must seem wrong to most Muslims for an Islamic movement, regardless of whether it is ‘moderate’ (as the Ikhwan al-Muslimeen is often described) or ‘extremist’, to approve of any election that is obviously designed to secure yet another term for a dictator.

That there is a serious disconnect between Islam and the West is not in doubt; what is hotly contested is whose fault it is. Each side blames the other but, given that the Western media dominate almost all discourse, Islam and Muslims are blamed for everything that goes wrong in the world.

On August 24 the British government announced details of new measures to be taken against foreign Muslims living in Britain. Foreign Muslims will be deported from Britain, or not permitted to enter the country in the first place, if they are considered by the government to be “fostering hatred or fomenting, or glorifying terrorist violence”.

Nothing illustrates the West’s hypocrisy better than its attitude to the issue of nuclear technology and its use for the generation of energy. There are several layers of hypocritical behaviour: countries that do not possess nuclear know-how must be denied its use because it is alleged that this would lead to their making nuclear weapons.

The peace deal signed last January for which the late John Garang fought for more than two decades secures for southern Sudan the right to secede, which it will exercise through a referendum to be held in six years’ time. There is little doubt that Garang would have insisted on the referendum being held, had he lived, and that the southerners will vote for secession because of their strong hostility towards the north and their backers’ keenness to have the “largest Muslim-dominated country in Africa” broken up.

By camping outside US president George Bush’s Crawford ranch and demanding to meet him, the mother of a slain American soldier has given a human face to the anti-war movement. She has also energized it in a way that had not seemed possible only a few weeks earlier.

Even the elaborate Independence Day celebrations on August 14 could not conceal the panic that has gripped Pakistan’s ruling elites since America’s military and nuclear agreements withIndia in June and July respectively.

Because president Vladimir Putin cannot be elected for a third term unless the Russian constitution is amended, he and Kremlin officials are preoccupied with the parliamentary elections in2007 and with ensuring the election of an approved successor as president in 2008.

There has been an air of excitement in the Ummah since the presidential elections in the Islamic Republic of Iran. The older generation of Imam Khomeini’s friends and followers, this writer included, are uplifted by the fact that “one of us” – a Revolutionary – has become the president of an Islamic state that was, during the incumbency of the last two presidents, losing its Islamic character while promoting its nationalist and sectarian inclinations.