The most important work that our exalted Imam did in the world of Islam was that he revived the political and social dimensions of Islam. He held up the banner of the justice-seeking aspect of Islam. The Imam rediscovered Islam’s hatred of discrimination, class differences and arrogance.

Following the Islamic Revolution, Imam Khomeini (ra) began the practice of issuing an annual message to the hujjaj. It has been continued by his successor, AYATULLAH SAYYID ALI KHAMENEI. This is a translation of his message to this year’s hujjaj.

June 4, 2003, was the 14th anniversary of the death of Imam Khomeini rahmat-Allah alaihi, the founder of the Islamic State of Iran. To mark the occasion, we here reprint an article written by the late DR KALIM SIDDIQUI on the first anniversary of the Imam’s death. Below we also publish an extract of a speech given by the current Leader of the Islamic Republic, Imam Sayyid Ali Khamenei, in Tehran on June 4 this year.

​DR KALIM SIDDIQUI, Director of the Muslim Institute, London, and founder of Crescent International, was one of the greatest Islamic movement intellectuals of the twentieth century. This month marks the seventh anniversary of his death in South Africa on April 18, 1996. To mark this occasion, we are reprinting an abridged extract from his final book, Stages of Islamic Revolution (1996).

The two summit meetings at Sharm al-Shaikh on June 3, attended by US president George W. Bush, Palestinian prime minister Mahmoud Abbas, and the leaders of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Bahrain, and at the royal palace at Aqaba, Jordan...

Since its independence from the Soviet monolith (1991), Kazakhstan has been mired in a succession of political crises. Kazakhstan has been the scene of serious human-rights abuses and the denial of fundamental freedoms.

The US has become a menace to the world. This is not merely the opinion of Muslims, but also of its traditional allies. At the G8 summit in France earlier this month, Bush told the Europeans, especially the French, bluntly that they must tailor their policies to America’s interests.

Since the overthrow of Saddam Hussain by the western coalition, there has been much debate about the weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) that were used as a pretext to launch the war, but which have not been found.

The "suicide bombing" by two young women (both apparently Chechens) on July 5, which killed 14 people at an open-air rock festival on the outskirts of Moscow, has proven to be a blow to president Vladimir Putin’s efforts to convince the Russian people that the war is over, and has been won.

Yashwant Sinha, India’s external affairs minister, has joined the fire-breathing Indian home minister L K Advani in threatening a "pre-emptive strike" against Pakistan over Kashmir. In an interview published in the Hindustan Times on April 6, Sinha repeated the threat which had first been carried by the French news agency, Agence France Presse (AFP), three days earlier.

That the unanimous approval of the Shari’ah Bill by the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) assembly on June 2 should send the secular elites into a frenzy is a telling sign of the true state of affairs in the "Islamic Republic" of Pakistan.

US attorney general John Ashcroft remains unrepentant despite a stinging rebuke by Glenn A. Fine, his department’s own inspector general, confirming enormous abuses of detainees since September 2001. In a report released on June 3, Fine highlights the mistreatment of 762 persons, some of them held by the government for as long as eight months without charge.

During his African tour this month, there were both questions about the invasion of Iraq and jokes about president Bush, especially relating to the growing US budget deficit. On Iraq he was asked about Iraq’s alleged purchase of uranium from Niger.

President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan is one of Central Asian’s most repressive rulers. Yet the US, which claims to be the world’s main protector of human rights, has made him its ‘best friend’ in the region since September 2001.