Articles

​This is the second part of a paper (read Part One here) presented by ARZU MERALI at the Islamic Human Rights Commission’s one-day conference on ‘Islamic and Western Perceptions of Human Rights’ in London on September 12, 2003. In the first part of the paper, published in the October 2003 issue of Crescent, she provided a detailed critique of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Western assumptions of universality underpinning it. In this concluding section, she discusses the Islamic attitude to human rights.

​The study of the Seerah of the Prophet (saw) to learn lessons relevant to the contemporary Islamic movement is a major project of the Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought. Here, IMAM MUHAMMAD AL-'ASI, of Washington DC, discusses the centrality of Makkah in the strategy of the Prophet’s Seerah, and its implications for Muslims today.

Since the war on Iraq ardent calls for "change" have become fashionable in Arab countries. These appeals come from various quarters. However, the variety of the demands for change betray the nature and the extent of the power-war currently unfolding in the region.

Speaking on the campaign trail in Kentucky on October 10, George W. Bush brushed aside the embarrassing failure of US officials to find the weapons of mass destruction that he had made the centrepiece of his case for war in Iraq, saying that the US invasion "thwarted future plots against the US by the madman Saddam."

It is perhaps not surprising that of all the incidents of violence in Palestine over the last month, the one that attracted the most headlines worldwide was the roadside bomb that killed three US ‘security guards’ (CIA agents, according to some reports) on October 15.

A prominent human rights campaigner in Saudi Arabia told western journalists last month that the government plans to hold national elections in three years’ time.

Is a "clash of civilizations" between Islam and the West inevitable? Those Muslims desperately trying to avert one miss a crucial and obvious point: a full-scale war against Islam and Muslims...

Thanks to his rightwing advisors (better known as ‘neo-conservatives’ or ‘neo-cons’), US president George Bush has been trapped between Iraq and a hard place; in fact several hard places – Afghanistan, the US economy and a public that are at last beginning to realize that they have been lied to in a big way.

The Western world has seldom seen public demonstrations on the scale that occurred during the weeks preceding the invasion of Iraq earlier this year. Millions of men, women and children marched in the streets of London, Paris, Madrid, Berlin, San Francisco, Chicago and Washington DC, in the hope that this public outcry would stop the impending attack

Azeri authorities launched a major crackdown on political opponents and critical journalists last month, after observers and opposition parties denounced major irregularities in the presidential elections of October 15.