Articles

Hindu chauvinist organisations - the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS) - have chalked out new strategies in their quest for electoral success leading to power in India.

Three weeks after Turkey’s constitutional court announced its decision to ban the Refah Party and Necmettin Erbakan for being too Islamic, publication of the verdict and its reasons in the official gazette are still awaited.

A high-level delegation of American religious leaders, hand-picked by the white house and approved by Beijing, which is touring China does not include American Muslims and will not visit Muslim regions or meet Chinese Muslim representatives, although its official mission is to assess the state of religious freedom in the communist country.

Globalization means not merely uniformity but also conformity to the dominant, primarily American culture. This applies as much to food as it does to music and clothes.

The Muslim rulers’ pre-occupation with the ‘enemy within’ - in most cases a euphemism for Islamic resistance - has made them a natural ally of the ‘enemy without’ and consequently, a strategic threat to the security of the Muslim world.

Barely a month ago, pundits from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were proclaiming from every soapbox how Southeast Asian leaders had ignored their warnings about an economic meltdown before the house collapsed on them.

Muslims living in non-Muslim societies cannot remain complacent about their value system. If the society around them faces serious social problems, so do the Muslims. The divorce rate among Muslims, though as not as high as the North American average (nearly 50 percent), is rising alarmingly.

The signing ceremony of the anti-personnel landmine treaty in Ottawa last December was attended by a group of landmine victims - many of them amputees in wheelchairs or on crutches.

Turkey’s secular fundamentalist establishment struck the country’s Islamic movement another blow on January 16, when the Supreme Court voted by 9-2 to ban the Refah Party for being Islamic and to banish the Party’s leader...