Articles

Ariel Sharon, Israel’s prime minister, could not have done more for his reputation as a heartless, bloodthirsty war-criminal. Dozens of rotting bodies littering the streets and homes of West Bank cities...

Israel’s murderous attacks on Palestinian towns and refugee-camps, which intensified on March 29 and were continuing at Crescent International press time (April 9), have set the Muslim masses on fire. Massive demonstrations have been held in such places as Cairo, Amman, Beirut, Rabat and Jakarta.

It is not often that one sees a consensus among Arab states on any issue, but the two-day Arab summit held in Beirut on March 27 and 28 unanimously endorsed a Saudi-inspired plan for Middle East ‘peace’, offering Israel normal ties and full peace in return for complete withdrawal from the Arab lands it occupied in the June 1967 war and recognition of an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.

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.