Dr Ahmad Ghorab is to be commended for his fine book, Subverting Islam: The Role of Orientalist Centres. His courage and forthright honesty is an inspiration for concerned Muslims in search of the truth. He has succeeded in identifying an important front in the current Euro-American crusade against the Islamic movement: the formation of an anti-Muslim network of institutions and scholars marching under the banner of `Islamic Studies'.

It is bad enough when Americans indulge in jingoism and proclaim the non-existent virtue of their country. It is infinitely worse when non-Americans start drum-beating about it. Perhaps it is then time for some serious reflection.

In a multi-religious, multi-ethnic and multi-linguistic country, that India is, secularism has been a far cry. The Muslim community has been the worst victim of this pseudo-secularism.

Over the last 1400 years, Muslims have developed a number of ‘schools of thought’ and systems of law (fiqh). In the global conditions prevailing today, there are a number of approaches, or systems of ‘political thought’, competing with one another.

WHO can survive and who cannot is a question that has always occupied the minds of theologians, historians, philosophers and scientists. Elaborate theories have been developed around this theme. The more famous are those of Plato, Abdur-Rahman, Ibn Khaldun, Karl Marx, and Charles Darwin.

The enemies of Allah can kill at will but Muslim must not defend themselves. They must not talk about these issues even in the House of Allah! Has not Allah commanded the believers to fight if they are attacked?

In my view we have yet to explore and discover the great spiritual and intellectual dimensions that lie in the political thought and Ijtihad of the late Imam Khomeini, may Allah’s mercy be upon him. I would go so far as to suggest that perhaps a whole new research institute should be established dedicated to research and writing on the contribution of Imam Khomeini.

A minority with a specialized area of influence and competence is referred to as an elite. A modern society normally has several elites. The best known are the political elites. Others are referred to as the military elite, business elite, landed elite, industrial elite. religious elite, professional elite. etc.

Never has a man set for himself, voluntarily or involuntarily, a more sublime aim, since this aim was superhuman: to subvert superstitions which had been interposed between man and his creator, to render God unto man and man unto God...

THE oil-rich countries of the Middle East lag behind some of their more impoverished neighbours in science and technology, according to a survey of science in the Arab world published by UNESCO, the United Nation Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation.

Ahmad Mazhar Sa`du interviews Muhammad Ali al-Mahfuz, the secretary-general of the Bahrain Islamic Front, the organisation at the forefront of the uprising against the Bahraini regime.

IT would be a great pity if the American public does not know what US policy-makers know: That there is growing opposition to US presence in Saudi Arabia. The bomb blast in Dhahran was the boldest and bloodiest expression of that opposition.

More than three weeks after a bombmaker with a British passport apparently blew himself up in an East Jerusalem hotel on April 12, mystery continues to thicken as to his true identity and the real purpose of his mission, largely as a result of the news blackout imposed two days later by the Israeli authorities.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) was given a blunt choice: agree to scrap the condition that US soldiers would be subject to UAE law or there would be no mutual defence agreement with Uncle Sam.

Tunisia’s president Zeinal-Abidin Ben Ali is no ‘democrat’ by any stretch of the imagination, while his vicious crackdown on the country’s Islamic movement is well-documented.

Arab rulers, long denied their favourite passtime - rhetoric - as a result of the US-sponsored ‘peace process’ in the Middle East, have discovered a new sport: belching. At least 20 kings, shaikhs, presidents, generals and colonels met in Cairo for two days from June 21 in what was to be a summit of loud belching.

The story of how the beduin’s camel under the pretext of getting his head inside the tent to escape from the cold night in the desert took over the whole tent is well-known.

What is there in the jungle? Plenty. There are thousands and thousands of trees - big trees, small trees, dead trees, cut-up trees. And climbing these trees are the vines and lianas. Underneath, on the ground surface is a layer of leaf-litter, fully decomposed or in various stages of decomposition.

The question is not what to give the world’s richest man for his birthday. Rather, what do you call a white prince presenting the richest man a walking stick?

In what is a major blow to the Malaysian government’s democratic pretentions, the country’s High Court declared on June 19 that Malaysia’s controversial Bakun Hydro Electric Dam project invalid.

When a former senior bureaucrat in Pakistan was waylaid recently (this being the second time that this misfortune was befalling him and his family) his daughter-in-law who was sitting with him in his BMW asked one of the dacoits who had seized them as to why he had taken to this profession.

In May 1988, Mohammad Salleh Abas, the then Lord President of Malaysia, the most senior judge in the country, was suspended following a statement he made allegedly containing ‘political innuendos’.

Juvenile delinquency, a phrase hitherto associated with America and the rest of the West, is making its presence felt in Malaysia. “Throughout the nation, a total of 11 cases involving juvenile delinquents were recorded daily in 1993.

This school boy craze for scoring the first in everything seems to be the Malaysian idea of progress. Malaysia can now boast of having the largest number of everything tallest, longest and biggest - tallest flag-mast, tallest twin-tower, tallest telecommunication tower, longest bridge and in another decade the biggest dam in the world.

It is true that Malaysia enjoyed a certain reputation among Muslims of the world as a ‘good’ Muslim country. It is not that they were impressed by the rapid development but by the fact they still could hear the azan over the TV, well kept mosques all over the capital and also Malaysian leaders still swearing their loyalty to Islam.

Some Malays are not so easily impressed with the claim that the Malays have finally ascended the ladder of success. Critics have been arguing for a reorientation of methods and goals.

The problem with ‘strong’ leaders is that they do not leave behind an obvious successor. This is further complicated if the ‘strong’ leader also happens to be in power for a long time.

THE controversial Bakun Hydro-Electric Project has come under severe criticism from public-interest groups, including CAP and SAM, but the Govt is bent on implementing it. These groups have raised important and pertinent questions on the need for, viability and safety of, this mega-project...

The denim-clad host of the music programme on the Metrovision channel looks like any other presenter on MTV. Her youthful good looks and her affected American accent make her identity seem truly universal but also bland and indistinguishable.

People in Africa have good reason to be wary of the new, USS 25 billion initiative launched by the United Nations on March 15 to help the impoverished continent. Called the ‘System-wide Special Initiative on Africa,’ the programme will be phased over a 10 year-period.

Last month, Shaikh Hasina Wajed, leader of the Awami League, was sworn in as the prime minister of Bangladesh, thus ending 21 years in the political wilderness.

Necmettin Erbakan, the leader of Turkey’s ‘Islamic party’, was finally confirmed in the prime minister’s office when he won a vote of confidence on July 8.

HINDUTVA is specifically a post-colonial development which took birth under the impact of British Orientalist scholarship and which imparted a great deal of its own meaning and political content to Hinduism.

A week is scarcely sufficient to turn one into an expert on the affairs of another country, especially one as complex as the State of Israel but it does give one a fairly good idea of some of the major challenges facing that country.

Zafar Bangash describes how from caravan robbers, the House of Saud occupied the Haramain.

The Serbs will ‘celebrate’ the first anniversary of their occupation of Srebrenica, a UN designated safe area in eastern Bosnia.

The demons of Serbian nationalism unleashed in former Yugoslavia had their greatest feast in Srebrenica. Exactly a year ago, before the very eyes of the so-called United Nations peacekeeping forces...

“How can Ethiopia, with a 45 per cent Muslim population, engage in holy anti-Islamic war against the Sudan, as Clinton’s special envoys urge us to do? Why is America so off-beam these days?”

Politicians are quick to condemn Arab terrorism like the 1983 attack that killed 241 U.S. servicemen in Beirut, Lebanon, the Oklahoma City bombing (which turned out not to be from Arab terrorists), the World Trade Center bombing and the Saudi Arabian bombing that killed or injured hundreds of people.

The political and military association between the Saudis the kuffar is not so much a relationship of collaboration as of subjection. The Saudi family subject the lands, seas, and all the resources to Western, specifically American, political interests in the region.

The assumption that western culture is inherently superior to all other cultures is the vantage point from which all social and religious philosophies are judged by the west. Muslim societies are, thus, regarded with special interest, fear and ignorance.

Pakistan appears to be repeating its three-year cycle of political instability. On July 21, Karachi, Lahore and a number of other cities were virtually paralyzed over a transport strike organised by the opposition parties protesting against massive taxes imposed in the June 13 budget.

The Russians have proved, yet again, that they cannot be trusted. The peace agreement signed between Russian president Boris Yeltsin and Chechen leader Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev in Moscow on May 27 and whose details were worked out in Nazran, the capital of Ingushetia, over several days...

China has succeeded in securing the full support of its Central Asian and Russian neighbours to contain the growing tide of Islamic revivalism in its north-western autonomous region of Xinjiang...

THERE are apologists and then there are apologists. And then there is Sai’d Al-Ashmawy, former chief justice of Egypt’s Supreme Court and the author of 15 books on Islam.

On April 21, Chechen leader Dzokhar Dudayev - a formidable leader with mythical qualities - passed into history as one of the most courageous Muslim leaders of the twentieth century.

On September 16, 1994, two conscientious scientists, Dr Garth Nicolson (Chairman of Tumor Biology Department at the M D Anderson Cancer Hospital University of Texas, Houston), and his wife Dr Nancy Nicolson (a Bio-Physicist) revealed a sinister deed of the allied troops during the 1990-91 Gulf War.

Well known for his unreserved support for the Islamic Revolution of Iran and its chief exponent to the outside world, Dr. Kalim Siddiqui, the late founder-leader of The Muslim Parliament in Britain, believed that the Muslim world needed a series of revolutions.

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...