Articles

Black activist Al Sharpton, who organised a vigil at the site of the shooting on February 9, asked at a forum on police brutality on the night of the shooting, ‘Are we talking about policing or are we talking about a firing squad?’ He pointed out that Amadou must have fallen to the ground after being hit twice or thrice.

People Against Gangsterism and Drugs (PAGAD), a Muslim organization based in Cape Town in South Africa, where crime and drugs are a growing threat to everyone, has had a particularly bad press in South Africa.

The men who surround Nawaz Sharif, with hard looks, bulging bellies and overflowing bank accounts, are casting nervous glances over their shoulders these days. The prime minister of the ‘heavy mandate’ suddenly appears clueless and out of his depth.

Sister Safa Merve Kavakci’s hijab battle dominated the political debate in Turkey about the functioning of democratic norms and secularism until it was buried by the August earthquake. While the secular Kemalist government got egg on its face for its poor handling of the rescue efforts, the hijab issue is still being debated.

Liberalism and human rights are two of the major ideological sticks the west uses to beat Islam. They represent, we are constantly told, universal values based on humanity’s collective experiences and mature rationality.

The Uthmaniyyah sultanate, which claimed the legitimacy of khilafah, was as corrupt and rotten as any monarchy in Muslim history. This was a massive contributory factor in its decline and ultimate collapse.

The US is presently engaged in an intensive witch-hunt against Islamic movement activists all over the world, on the grounds that they are part of an ‘international terror network’ controlled by Osama bin Ladin and responsible for the bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and numerous other ‘terrorist acts’ against US installations and interests around the world.

It is perhaps indicative of the present state of the Ummah that, outside his native Egypt and a small circle of Islamic activists, few Muslims are aware that August 29 marked the thirty-third anniversary of the martyrdom of Sayyid Qutb.

Palestinians in Zionist-occupied Jerusalem last month marked the 30th anniversary of the arson attack on the Masjid Al-Aqsa on August 21, 1969. Palestinian Islamic leaders used the occasion to highlight continuing threats to the mosque, as well as other Islamic sites under Israeli rule

The routine bombing of Iraq by the US and Britain, and the UN sanctions kept in place by their vetoes, have taken a heavy toll of Iraqi lives, destroyed the country’s once-thriving economy, and reduced its people to poverty.