Articles

With the Ummah confronted by so many burning issues - Kosova, Palestine, Afghanistan, Sudan - it may appear a trifle incongruous to focus on the question of Kashmir at this time. But of all the other areas, together with Palestine, Kashmir stands at the top of the agenda.

The difference between Shari’ah (Canon law) and fiqh (Canonical Jurisprudence) is not well known as these two terms are frequently used synonymously.

It would be funny if it were not so tragic. With most of its population trapped in poverty and pervasive unemployment, and its national assets being plundered by a corrupt ruling elite and foreign business interests under the guise of an IMF structural adjustment programme...

President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt is ruthlessly, if somewhat desperately, exploiting the bombing of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the American cruise missile attack on Khartoum and Afghanistan to secure international action against ‘terrorism.’

Amid uncharacteristically strong defiance, the people of Malaysia have kept the tempo of demonstrations despite the arrest of former deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim last month.

At a time when millions of Iraqis are being starved to death and a Pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, Sudan was destroyed by US missiles for allegedly producing chemical weapons, a South African doctor has revealed that he had unresticted access to western chemical and biological weapons programmes in the eighties.

After refusing for years to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) - an international agreement aimed at limiting the proliferation of nuclear weapons - both Pakistan and India announced in late September that they were willing to do so.

The demons of Serbian nationalism are on the loose again, this time in the overwhelmingly Muslim province of Kosova. With their blood lust not nearly satiated in Bosnia even after three years of macabre killing rituals, they have now turned their wrath against the defenceless people of Kosova.

Days before Iran’s foreign minister Kamal Kharazi met his British counterpart Robin Cook in New York on September 24 agreeing to restore full diplomatic relations, the British media had launched a campaign linking this to the Salman Rushdie saga.

This paper was first presented by Imam Muhammad al-Asi at the Kalim Siddiqui Memorial Seminar in London in October 1998. It was then published in: The Seerah: A Power Perspective by Imam Muhammad al-Asi and Zafar Bangash, The Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought, Toronto, London, 2000.