Articles

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.

India's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is exploring various options to boost its electoral fortunes in the forthcoming general elections. As usual, in the past, its main strategy is raining nationalist sentiment against Pakistan, and Hindu fascist sentiments against India’s beleaguered Muslims.

Hundreds (perhaps thousands) of Muslims took to the streets in Khartoum and other Sudanese cities on October 13, to celebrate the release from house arrest of Shaikh Hasan al-Turabi, the leader of Sudan's Islamic movement and of the Popular National Congress (PNC) party.

Britain’s ruling Labour Party expelled its dissident Member of Parliament George Galloway on October 23, after a special hearing of the national constitutional committee found him guilty of bringing the party into disrepute. His case is seen by some commentators as evidence of how worried British prime minister Tony Blair is by popular opposition to his pro-American foreign policy.

Culture is nothing more than the way we live our lives, and it can be informed by religion or not. If you are asking about a more monolithic entity like "civilization" then maybe we can say that Muslim civilization has declined, but that is nothing new. All civilizations rise and fall, including the Western civilization. It is somehow natural, and civilization is what we make it. Culture, on the other hand, is more local and regional, more amorphous and less linked to material objects like monuments and cities, which are what we usually use to judge civilization.

Those Muslims and Islamic movement activists who support ‘democracy’ or ‘democratic’ understandings of Islam often get a bad press within the movement. This is understandable, for many are nothing more than apologists for the wholesale importation of Western political thought into the Muslim world, and with it – whether they realize it or not – Western political hegemony into the Muslim world.

Hajj is the largest gathering of the Ummah, held in Makkah every year. More than two million Muslims from around the world gather in Makkah to perform this pilgrimage. Potential hujjaj (pilgrims) make material, physical and spiritual preparations before they approach Makkah to perform this vital pillar of Islam. One such preparation is to consult Hajj ‘manuals’, ‘guides’ and books that give details of the "hows" and "whats" of the various rituals that comprise the Hajj. Yet very few hujjaj are interested in the "whys" of Hajj rituals; for that matter, there is hardly any Hajj manual that attempts to explain the implications of Hajj. Ali Shari’ati’s Hajj stands out like a beacon to illuminate this darkness and fill this vacuum.

When US president George W. Bush came to the UN General Assembly on September 23, there was some expectation that his tone would be magnanimous and conciliatory. Six months after the US rode roughshod over the UN by launching a unilateral war against the wishes not only of the majority of the world’s unimportant states, but also of senior members of the Security Council, it was expected that the US might come to mend fences, as if from a position of strength, but with the underlying reality that the US needs international cooperation in the administration of occupied Iraq, given the problems it is having in securing its catch.