The Individualized Society by Zygmunt Bauman. Pub: Polity Press, Cambridge, UK / Polity Press, Malden, MA, USA, 2001. Pp. 259. Pbk: £14.99 / $24.95

The West’s enmity to Islam was brought home to Muslims in Britain earlier this month, when the British government published its list of proscribed “terrorist” organizations, most Islamic or Muslim.

Switzerland, which is totally surrounded by European countries and has a population that is mostly Christian and speaks French and German, has overwhelmingly rejected accession talks with the European Union, at least for several years to come.

Following the Islamic Revolution in Iran, Imam Khomeini (r.a.) established the tradition of issuing an annual Hajj message to the Ummah. This year, Imam Sayyid Ali Khamenei went for Hajj and issued his message from the Hijaz

Always smooth, Dr Hassan al-Turabi, leader of Sudan’s opposition Popular National Congress (PNC), has been honing his skills lately. But the latest rabbit he pulled out of his turban, the alliance the PNC forged with the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), has landed him and scores of his supporters in prison.

During his three-day Mideast tour last month, US secretary of state Colin Powell left no doubt about what the Bush administration has in store for Iraq and the region. Throughout his visit, Powell remained unrepentant about the recent American and British air-strikes on Iraq.

In what is seen as a sign of desperation by the Mahathir regime, Ezam Nor, a leading Malaysian political activist, was arrested on March 5 for his role in a series of well-attended street demonstrations in Kuala Lumpur over the last few months.

Western pharmaceutical companies, which monopolise the right to fix the price of life-saving drugs throughout the world by patents protected by the World Trade Organization and governments, are facing new challenges that demand unprecedented concessions.

The west’s handling of the recent outburst of violence in south-eastern Serbia and north-western Macedonia has exposed what it stood for all along: to quash the aspirations of ethnic Albanians in the former Yugoslavia for independence and freedom...

Mass-graves containing bodies of civilians executed in the last four months have been discovered near Russian military bases in Chechnya by a Moscow-based human-rights group.

Amid continuing scepticism over the possibility of a pan-African confederation, some 40 heads of state and government have pledged to speed up the birth of an African union.

Once the American experience had provided a foretaste of how terrorism legislation can be misused, it was a foregone conclusion that once the Terrorism Act came into force on 19 February, Muslim organisations would fall like dominoes under its impact.