Articles

At least 10 people in Aceh were wounded by gunfire, and many more injured in other incidents, on December 4, when Indonesian troops and police fired on people celebrating the territory’s ‘national day’.

Indonesian president Abdur Rahman Wahid raised eyebrows on December 4 when he told his new economic affairs commission that Israel had agreed to invest $200 million in Indonesia.

It was the sort of drama that makes for good press copy, and of course the international press was there to watch it. As the result was announced, hundreds of men applauded, while a “Muslim fundamentalist” reportedly screamed that Kuwaitis don’t want women’s rights.

Now that the dust has settled after the death and state burial of Julius Kambarage Nyerere, ex-President of the Republic of Tanzania, it is time for some of the inconsistencies and paradoxes of the most Islamophobic leader in post-colonial Africa to be discussed and put into context.

The plight of the Chechens trapped in Johar-Gala (‘Grozny’) was briefly brought to the west’s attention earlier this month when the western media highlighted a leaflet dropped in the city by Russian aircraf

Hijab has also come to symbolise the Islamic identity of Muslim women. All over the world, Muslimahs in hijab have become targets for attack by secularists and others seeking to attack Islam. Even Sri Lanka, where Muslims have lived in harmony with the majority Sinhalese community for over 1,000 years, Muslimahs in hijab are now coming attack.

The agreement concluded between Sudanese president Omar Hassan al-Bashir and opposition-leader and Ummah Party chief Sadeq al-Mahdi in Jibouti on November 25 sets out the principles on which these men think that any political settlement of the Sudanese conflict should be based.

For Muslims, 1999 arrived with mayhem and bloodshed, not very different from the previous year. First, there was the four-day slaughter in Iraq which was euphemistically described as the ‘fireworks display over Baghdad’ by Christiane Amanpour, CNN’s latest darling from the scene.

America’s war on Islam suffered a setback on November 29, when Nasser Ahmed, an Egyptian asylum seeker, walked free after spending three-and-a-half years in a US prison. Nasser Ahmed’s ‘crime’ was that he was the court-appointed interpreter for Shaikh Omar Abdel Rahman, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in January 1996 after a kangaroo trial.

Among the western civilization's more dubious claims is that western man possesses the ability to define and delimit all knowledge. While colonization used murder and bribery to great effect, a lasting impact of the western incursion is in the area of epistemology, the nature of knowledge.