Articles

Shaykh Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifah, Bahrain's emir, proclaimed himself king on February 14, declaring the emirate the Kingdom of Bahrain and adding a crown to its flag. At the same time, he also conferred assent on constitutional amendments, and called for municipal and legislative elections in May and October respectively.

In a chilling reminder of sights common during the Serbs' war against the Muslims of Bosnia-Hercegovina a decade ago, Israeli troops rounded up all males aged from 15-45 in the Deheishe refugee camp near Bethlehem on March 11, forcing them to strip to the waist before handcuffing and blindfolding them, standing them for hours in the sun, and then force-marching them into an empty factory for interrogation.

This is an abridged version of a paper presented by Abhoud Syed M. Lingga, Chairman of the Bangsamoro People's Consultative Assembly, at a Peace Forum organized by the University of the Philippines in Davao City, Mindanao, on February 28, 2002.

A week of mayhem by Hindu terrorists that erupted on February 27 left at least 700 people officially dead, most of them Muslims, in the western Indian state of Gujarat. Eyewitnesses, including western journalists, have put the death toll at three times this figure, with many deaths from remote villages not being recorded at all.

Georgia, a member of the former Soviet Union, is in Moscow’s own back yard. So when America’s military links with Georgia were first announced, senior Russian officials were outraged by the prospect of the forces of their former cold war adversary being so close.

Soon after September 11 reports surfaced of Arab and Muslim men being arrested, shackled, denied access to lawyers and families, refused medical attention and sometimes even beaten, while in the custody of United States authorities.

As the fighting on March 2 in the Arma mountains showed, the war in Afghanistan is far from over. On March 4th, the Pentagon admitted that eight American soldiers had been killed and 50 injured in the latest US offensive.

The five Central Asian Muslim countries — Kazakhstan, Turk-menistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kirghizstan — dropped out of the Soviet belly almost by accident after Gorbachev’s reform of the old Soviet Union. At the time, a few naive, over-optimistic Muslims saw their ‘liberation’ as another sign of the rise of Islamic civilization after the lean years of the twentieth century

The attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon on September 11 gave the US a pretext to attack Islamic movements far more directly than would previously have been possible. Tens of thousands of people in Afghanistan may have died (and more are continuing to die) in the US’s military operations...

After the establishment of the Islamic State, Imam Khomeini (ra) issued annual messages to the Ummah as the hujjaj gathered in the Hijaz. Ayatullah Sayyid Ali Khamenei has maintained the tradition.