The Society of Muslim Brothers in Egypt by Brynjar Lia. Pub: Garnet Publishers, Reading, UK. Pp: 328. Price: £30.

History, it is often said, is written by the victors. In these terms, the Ottoman sultanate has been doubly damned, its history having been variously written by the West that dismantled it and Turkey’s nationalist-secularists, who have been determined to accept the West’s contempt for it.

The drama of the arrest of the US Navy’s EP-3E spy-plane by the Chinese in April drew international attention to the USA’s intelligence operations around the world. Twenty-four Americans were held in China for 11 days following the incident, before being allowed to fly back to America after some intense diplomacy. Four of them were US navy servicemen; the rest were civilian analysts working for the National Security Agency (NSA).

In order to understand fully the nature of the Revolution, and in particular if lessons are to be learnt by Islamic movements seeking to achieve similar results, it is the essence of Imam Khomeini’s work and vision that must be grasped.

As Muslims all over the world celebrate the birthday of the noble Prophet Muhammad sall’Allahu alaihi wa sallam, ZAFAR BANGASH, Director of the Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought (ICIT), discusses the Prophet’s role in bringing about change in society.

The success of the Hizbullah in expelling the zionists from Lebanon last year provided a boost to Islamic movements all over the world. After the beginning of the Al-Aqsa intifada, the Hizbullah launched military operations to support the intifada. Here we present the speech of Hizbullah secretary-general SHAIKH SAYYID HASSAN NASRULLAH at the International Conference on the Palestinian Intifada in Iran in April.

For more than a year irrefutible new evidence of war crimes committed by French forces during the Algerian war of independence has been surfacing in French newspapers and in memoirs by senior French generals. These men personally directed the atrocities now being revealed...

The Israeli war against the Palestinian people reached new heights on May 18, when Israel used F-16 fighter aircraft supplied by the US to attack targets in Nablus and Ramallah. A total of 10 people were killed in the two attacks.

There appears to be no method in George W. Bush’s madness; since becoming president in a dubious presidential election, he has unleashed a flurry of policy statements and directives that have irked friend and foe alike.

With the transnational corporate news media increasingly legitimizing ideas and informing people, it becomes increasingly important to scrutinise what is left out of the stories being told. The global news media uniformly trumpet the virtues of ‘globalization’...

Colin Powell, the first black US secretary of state, began a tour of four African countries on May 22. He gave the continent first place on his schedule over Asia and Latin America, which are at first sight far more vital to US interests.

A Japanese foreign office committee, called the Committee for Islamic Studies (CFIS), has issued its first report. It accuses Japan of failure to study and relate to a faith “embraced by a fifth of the world’s population”.

Tatarstan, the semi-autonomous Muslim republic in the Russian Federation, is dropping the Cyrillic alphabet imposed on it by Joseph Stalin in 1939, adopting instead the Latin alphabet.