Articles

Most Americans have now seen through the hoax perpetrated by president George Bush and his fellow right-wingers to justify the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. Bush himself was forced to concede in a speech on September 17 that there was no link between Saddam Husain’s regime and al-Qa’ida but he couched his admission in language that still left most people with the impression that he was. Not surprisingly, most Americans(between 57 and 70 percent, depending on which poll one consults) still believe that Saddam, no doubt a tyrant, was somehow linked to the September 2001 incidents.

Two years after the US’s invasion of Afghanistan, there are increasing signs that the US may be looking for potential partners among the Taliban leaders for a possible peace agreement. At a time when its proxy regime under Hamid Karzai lacks all legitimacy, and anti-American forces representing both the Taliban and other mujahideen groups increasing their pressure on the US forces in the country, it is hardly surprising that the US should be looking for a way out of Afghanistan’s quagmire.

I have followed Crescent since I was a child and have even had the occasion to meet and talk with Zafar Bangash a couple of times. Today the Islamic Movement is facing its worse crisis in over a generation. Yet I am very disappointed with the way Crescent has dealt with 2 issues: the Taliban and al-Qa`idah. The lack of ideological and Islamic clarity on these two threatens to seriously devalue Crescent in future.

Generally speaking, there can be no single culture, since culture, as understood by social scientists today, refers to the way of life of a particular people at a particular time and place. Culture also has two dimensions, the material dimension and the symbolic dimension.

The title is a way to get us rethinking the simplistic notions of globalization being Americanization, which is endlessly, and often fruitlessly, debated. In a way, framing a discussion in terms of going "beyond" Americanization, is way to encourage thinking about globalization as a complex topic. Many of those who say globalization is Americanization miss the positive aspects of globalization - with our without America.

Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich. Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd., London, 2002 (first published in 1971 by Calder and Boyars). Pp. 116. Pbk. £8.95.

The bombing of the UN office in Baghdad on August 19 was the largest resistance attack on the Western occupiers since the invasion in March. At least 20 people were killed, including Sergio de Mello, the diplomat heading the UN’s mission in Iraq...

ZAFAR BANGASH , director of the Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought (ICIT), discusses the challenges facing Iraqi ulama under American occupation and their responses to those challenges.

A few weeks after the September 2001 incident, the Egyptian authorities began an appeal for what they called "the renewal of religious discourse".

Colonel Mu’ammar Qaddafi’s humiliating attempts in the last several years to woo the US have culminated in his country’s formal acceptance of responsibility for the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.