Articles

Palestinian and Israeli negotiators opened separate talks with US officials in Washington on November 19, the first stage of a new effort to restart the ‘peace process’ that was stalled by the launching of the Al-Aqsa intifada at the end of September.

Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad, who has been abandoned by his erstwhile Malay Muslim supporters since the dismissal and arrest of former deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim, suffered yet another blow on November 29.

As the al-Aqsa intifada continues in Palestine, Muslims all over the world are taking to the streets to express their support.

Ethiopia and Eritrea signed a peace-deal in Algeria on December 12 and formally ended a two-year border-war that has cost tens of thousands of lives, displaced hundreds of thousands of people, and wrought havoc on the economies of two of Africa’s poorest countries

The military regime in Pakistan has enough egg on its face over the Nawaz Sharif episode to feed a battalion. But those who expected it to behave differently should have known better.

Imam Muhammad al-Asi is a Research Fellow of the ICIT. He is also elected Imam of the Islamic Centre in Washington DC. He presented this paper at the International Seerah Conferences convened by the ICIT in Colombo, Sri Lanka (June 16-18, 2000) and Karachi, Pakistan (June 25, 2000).

This paper was presented by Zafar Bangash at the International Conference on 'The Seerah: A Power Perspective' convened by the Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought (ICIT) and Crescent International in Colombo, Sri Lanka, on June 16-18, 2000. Zafar Bangash is Director of the ICIT. In this paper, he outlines his understanding of the nature of leadership in Islam, and practical aspects of a leader.

In the early nineteenth century, an African Muslim was living out the rest of his adult life in chattel slavery on a plantation in Antebellum America. Before dying on the eve of the Civil War, he left a handwritten Arabic manuscript with an acquaintance of his slave master.

How things have gone wrong in Pakistan can be gleaned from the following episode at the end of last month. The chief justice of the Baluchistan High Court, Justice Amir-ul Mulk Mengal, was travelling to Nushki/Kharan when his car was stopped at the Chagai checkpost by the Frontier Constabulary (FC) on November 26. On orders of the checkpost in-charge, a captain Butt, the FC personnel requested that the vehicles be searched.

Despite the proclamations of a post-modern era, of an age driven by information, many of the trappings of modernity drive western civilization. Mechanization, reductionism, and rationality are pervasive in most of the supposedly newly-emerging realities in western science, technology, economies and politics.