Articles

The US claimed a major victory on July 19 when Radovan Karadzic finally stepped down as leader of the Bosnian Serbs. The resignation from public life of all those indicted for war crimes by the Hague Tribunal was a key part of the Dayton accords signed last December.

Whatever else one may say about the state of affairs in India, there is one thing for which Indian policy makers deserve credit. No matter who is in power, the policies of State have a consistency about them, unlike in neighbouring Pakistan.

The Muslim community in the UK is rallying around Saudi dissident, Professor Muhammad al-Mass’ari, in the face of intensified pressure on the British Home Secretary to deport him following statements made in the aftermath of last month’s bombing of the US military accommodation block in Saudi Arabia...

Even as Muslims in the US were celebrating their small but significant victory in getting the US News and World Report to apologise for its willful distortion of historical facts, another magazine repeated the same lie.

It is clear now, within days of the joyous installation of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government at the Centre with dances and record sales of sweets in its bastions, that it is going to be an extremely short-lived wonder, unlikely to survive beyond 31 May...

The face-to-face talks between Russian president Boris Yeltsin and Chechen leader Zelimkhan Yandarbayev (photo) on May 27 in Moscow were a humiliating climb-down for the Kremlin boss. Since October 1991 when the Chechens declared their independence under their late leader Dzhokar Dudayev...

The supporters of the RM15 billion Bakun Dam Hydroelectric Project to be built in Sarawak claim that it will be the answer to all our electricity supply problems.

Let me acknowledge at once that there now exists a state of war between the 'progressives', whose representation of 'European values' Rushdie finds 'attractive', and those 'in revolt against history'. The latter Rushdie rightly and accurately names as 'Siddiquis and Hizbollahs and blind sheikhs and ayatollahs'.

On 8 April 1980, Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr was executed. His execution aroused no criticism from the West against the Iraqi regime, however, because Sadr had openly supported the Ayatollah Khomeini's regime in Iran and because the West was distracted by the turbulence in Iran that followed the revolution. Governments both in the West and in the region were concerned that the Iranian revolution would be “exported,” and they set about eliminating that threat. When Ayatollah Khomeini called upon Muslims in Iraq to follow the example of the Iranian people and rise up against the corrupt secular Baʿthist socialist regime, they interpreted it as the first step in the spread of Islamic radicalism that would eventually lead to the destabilization of the whole region.

Not since Ibn-Khaldun's al-Muqaddima in the fourteen century did any Muslim scholar make a significant contribution to the understanding of the historical process. The late Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr from Iraq made a serious effort in giving his vision on the development of the history. His interpretations of history can be considered as part of his effort to prove that Islam, through the ulama (jurists) of the traditional religious schools, is still capable of contributing to the advancement of knowledge and resolution of problems facing man in this temporal world.