Hamas: Political Thought and Practice by Khalid Hroub. Pub: Institute for Palestine Studies, Washington DC, USA, 2000, pp. 329, $16.95.

After months of street turmoil and parliamentary drama, Indonesia returned to relative calm with the removal of Abdurrahman Wahid from the presidency last month. His tumultuous 21-month rule was marked by moves to open up political freedom in the world’s fourth most populous Muslim country.

General Pervez Musharraf, president of Pakistan, came, saw and returned without conquering: not Kashmir but his ancestral home at Naharwali Haveli, Delhi. Yet another summit-level talk between India and Pakistan had collapsed.

Two months before the International Seerah conference to be held by the Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought (ICIT) in South Africa (September 21-23, 2001), a major conference on the Seerah took place in Ottawa, Canada. ZAFAR BANGASH, director of the ICIT, was there.

With Ariel Sharon, the butcher of Beirut, at the helm, the “only democracy in the Middle East” has gone berserk. It is using US-supplied Apache helicopters against Palestinian activists, in complete disregard of human life. Amer Hudeiri, a Hamas activist, was martyred on August 5 when Israel fired two missiles at his car in the West Bank town of Tulkerm...

August 2 was the 11th anniversary of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Eleven years later, the consequences of the invasion continue to cloud the political landscape in the Middle East, as proven by Washington’s doggedness in sounding the drums of war against Baghdad.

The beleaguered Mahathir regime in Malaysia appears to have a knack for finding strategies that have unintended effects. In its latest campaign to silence the opposition, ten more people, including Nik Adli Nik Abdul Aziz, the son of PAS chief Nik Abdul Aziz, were abducted in the first week of August under the notorious Internal Security Act (ISA)...

Ten years after the end of the US attack on Iraq, more than 5,000 Iraqis remain stranded and largely forgotten in appalling conditions in the Rafha refugee camp in north-eastern Saudi Arabia.

The Taliban authorities in Afghanistan arrested 24 staff members of a German charity working in Kabul on August 5, setting off yet another international outcry about their alleged inhumanity.

Until a month ago it was a firm western policy to arm the Macedonian military and isolate Albanian fighters by branding them as ‘terrorists’ out to break up the country in their alleged pursuit of ‘Greater Albania’.

Since China and Russia recently signed a treaty of friendship in Moscow, supposed by some to be a response to US president George W. Bush’s missile project, trade and military contacts between Moscow and Washington have mushroomed.

The recent ban on Turkey’s Islamist Fazilat (‘Virtue’) Party (Fazilet Partisi or FP) caused division in the ranks of the country’s largest Islamist party along the lines of a longstanding rift between its so-called “traditionalist”/ “loyalist” and “modernist” / “reformist” factions.