Articles

Jenin: remember this name. Every time you lose faith in humanity, recall it. Repeat it inside yourself, slowly, when you are feeling down and frail; it should lift your spirit...

War is a grim business, the more so in Afghanistan, but occasionally nuggets of humour emerge even from that harsh landscape. The latest is the Americans’ announcement that they will train Afghans to fight...

Indian Muslims won a brief respite last month when Hindu extremists were forced to postpone plans to start building a temple on the site of the demolished Babri masjid in Ayodhya on March 15...

Colonel John Garang, leader of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), which has been fighting Khartoum for almost two decades to establish a separate state in the south of the country, has apparently secured US backing for his programme, if the high-level reception and the funding he received during his recent visit to Washington is anything to go by...

Tatarastan, the only Muslim republic still in the Russian Federation, is losing the autonomy that it gained in 1991 after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and had consolidated since then. It has also been forced to put on hold the legislation it passed in early 2001, in defiance of Russian objections...

US needs some one now, as it has needed in the past, to position as an "evil other" in opposition to its good self. The "evil other" in history has taken on many names and shapes, from despots, to pirates, to bandits, to terrorists. In Western civilization, which is ferociously dichotomous, there is a necessity to define through opposition, and therefore a "terrorist" or some other nefarious character -- real or imagined -- is actually necessary for the maintenance of a western self image.

Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia by Robert W. Hefner. Pub: Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, USA, 2000. Pp: 286. Pbk: $17.95 / £12.95.

This month marks the sixth anniversary of the death of Dr Kalim Siddiqui (r.a). On April 18, 1996, he suffered his last heart attack in Pretoria, South Africa, at the end of another successful Crescent International conference and lecture tour.

The Jews are pillaging Palestine, and the world is looking away. A few feeble-minded declarations and toothless resolutions notwithstanding, no one with the capability to say or do anything of substance seems to care.

This month marks the sixth anniversary of the death of Dr KALIM SIDDIQUI, one of the leading intellectuals of the contemporary Islamic movement. Here we reprint an abridged version of an article first published in 1983.