Articles

The Mind Al-Qur’an Builds by Syed Abdul Latif, new edition. Pub: Islamic Book Trust, Kuala Lumpur, 2002. Pp: 141; price: RM19.00.

Anger is a dangerous emotion. In anger people say and do what they would never say or do when in full control of their faculties. Interestingly, it is also often an honest emotion.

​In the mid-1990s, the Hindu-Christian duopoly in Mauritian politics was shaken by the emergence of a Muslim challenge. This month Cehl Fakeermeeah, founder of the Hizbullah party, is expected to be committed to trial on what most Muslims believe are politically motivated charges. FAISAL BODI reports.

George W. Bush finally published the resolution he would like the UN Security Council to pass to justify a military attack on Iraq on October 1. The resolution, also supported by Bush’s loyal servant Blair, is clearly designed to provoke an Iraqi rejection, thereby providing the pretext for a US invasion.

Morocco’s “moderate” Islamic Justice and Development Party (JDP) was the major gainer in the country’s elections last month, when results were finally announced on October 1, four days after the polling on September 27.

The world’s attention has been gripped for the past few weeks by US saber-rattling over Iraq. But this war mania has blinded much of the world to other developments in Washington’s open-ended drive to settle scores and “lead the world,” while pretending to fight a “war on terrorism.”

It seems that the US’s hopes of making Indonesia its prime ally in Southeast Asia may be dashed. President Megawati Sukarnoputri is being forced to decide which to heed, Washington’s bully-tactics or her own cabinet’s opposition to their country becoming a US stooge.

The Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought (ICIT) held the latest of its International Seerah conferences in Colombo, Sri Lanka, from October 5-6. The conference was the latest part of the ICIT’s Seerah project, based on the pioneering approach proposed by the late Dr Kalim Siddiqui before his death in 1996...

On October 3, the International Awakening Centre (IAC) recommended the names of the Indian prime minister, AB Vajpayee, the US president, George W Bush, and the British prime minister, Tony Blair, to the Norwegian Nobel Institute for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.

Understanding mental illness in the modern world entails grasping two issues: 1) how mental illness is defined over time and across cultures and who does the defining, and 2) accepting the recent evidence that the causes of many mental problems lie outside a person's head, e.g. in the realm of culture and society.