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The US and its allies have intensified military activities in Somalia and along its 2000-mile coastline to prevent ‘al-Qaeda terrorists’ from finding refuge or setting up new bases there, according to American officials.

To the chagrin of Sudanese president Omar Hassan al-Bashir, there is growing evidence to suggest that it makes little difference (perhaps none) in Washington whether Khartoum stands with or against the US-led “war on terrorism.”

In the past human beings lived very close to nature and it was unthinkable to be separate from nature, including animals, weather patterns, and other things that are rarely part of "human" life today. We have enveloped ourselves in cities and buildings, living in so many boxes, controlling every feature of temperature and light, in an artificial environment. We no longer have a sense of where our food comes from. If we have contact with animals, they are for the most part domesticated. I think the Qur'an presumed a kind of human existence that was somehow closer to nature than most of us are today.

There are two different types of consumerism. One is associated with shopping and advertising, the other with consuming in general, which can include consuming ideas, thoughts, practices, behaviors, what have you. On one level, a consumer society is that which likes to shop a lot, but on another level a consumer society is a derivative society, one that has no sense of itself other than what it consumes, and this can be with respect to knowledge, education, technology and many other things.

The idea of "knowledge is power" has well served the Western world elite over the centuries, and some of the most brutal wars have been fought to protect its exclusivity. It still underwrites the international system of recolonization we are calling Western development. But this just makes it more difficult to see why Bacon's dictum is today splattered all over the mental environment.

​THE VITAL ILLUSION by Jean Baudrillard. The Wellek Library Lectures. Pub: New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Pp. 102. Hbk. Price: US$18.

The contrast between the words and actions of the West’s leaders, and the remarkable ability of most Westerners to believe their politicians, and to accept uncritically a totally West-centric view of world affairs, despite the mass of contrary evidence before them, is frustrating at any time.

أصل هذا الكتيب … رسالة بعث بها سيد رحمه الله إلى أخته أمينة قطب . وكانت مجلة الفكر التونسية قد نشرته في عددها السادس من السنة الرابعة ، آذار (( مارس )) 1959م بعنوان ( أضواء من بعيد ) ولما كثر الطلب على هذه الرسالة طلبنا الإذن من الأستاذ محمد قطب حفظه الله لإعادة نشرها فأذن لنا بذلك جزاه الله خيرا .

The sudden collapse of the Taliban under the attack of the US surprised and disappointed many Muslims. Dr Perwez Shafi, of the Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought in Karachi, discusses the reasons of the Taliban’s failure in Afghanistan

Algerian President Abdulaziz Bouteflika claimed spectacular diplomatic success last month when he concluded security accords with the US and NATO and signed an economic agreement with the EU that provides, on his own insistence, for cooperation in the “war against terrorism”.