Here we reprint a paper delivered by DR YUSUF PROGLER at the Kalim Siddiqui Memorial Conference in London in April 1999, on the damage that western hegemony has done to Muslim thought, and how it can be addressed.

The supposedly inferior position and treatment of women in Islam is often used by Westerners to attack Islam. A recent poll of Muslim women reveals very different attitudes towards their own lives, Islam and the West. WASEEM SHEHZAD reports.

The sudden expulsion last month of the warlords who had ruled Mogadishu for 15 years took everyone by surprise – including the US government, which backed and financed them to prevent any Islamic group from assuming power in the failed state.

In May, Lebanon marked the anniversary of the Hizbullah’s successful expulsion of Israeli forces from southern Lebanon in 2000. For Muslims around the world, the Hizbullah success was a triumph for the courage and steadfastness of its members in the field of battle and in the far more complicated arena of Lebanese politics.

The West's commitment to liberalism and democracy has always been a convenient façade that falls apart at times of crisis. People have freedom so long as they do not need it; the West is tolerant only to the point that people conform to its prevailing values and policies.

Some clear truths are too serious for diplomatic dissemblers to acknowledge. One of these it the clear reality of the nature of theWashington regime's foreign policy. For at least half a century, American foreign policy has matched Israel's in its hostility to the self-determination of Muslims.

Somalia is a country that tends unfortunately to be associated with famine and civil war, rather than anything more positive, for that is how it most often appears in the Western media. It is also a country about which many Muslims know little; many may not even realize that it is a Muslim country.

A month of Israeli attacks on Palestinian targets in Ghazzah and the West Bank, killing over 40 Palestinians, mostly civilians, culminated with Israeli troops moving into southern Ghazzah on June 28, as Crescent was going to press.

Time was obviously not on the side of Australia and the US, right from the day respected alim Abu Bakar Basyir was sentenced to jail two years ago for a crime he was too frail to plan or carry out. On 14 June, it was like a discordant alarm-clock that went off too early for Canberra, the self-appointed deputy sheriff of Bush's international police force.

The death of Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi in an American air strike on June 7 has been greeted with joy by the beleaguered US regime. Among Muslims, his image was mixed: some saw him as a courageous resistance leader, fighting against a global superpower, others as a murderous sectarian extremist. NASR SALEM discusses the life and legacy of a symbol of modern Iraq.

After making a grand retreat from the deliberately contrived nuclear standoff with Iran that even its close allies had found distasteful, US officials still continue to behave as if everyone must snap to attention whenever they click their fingers. This was again seen on June 21, when US president Bush was in Vienna for talks with European rulers.

Even before the annual meeting of heads of member-states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) opened on June 15, officials in Washington were pulling their hair at what they perceived as a challenge to US hegemony in the vital Eurasian region.

Muslims in Canada were startled by the arrest on June 3 of 15 individuals, all of them Muslims, on charges related to terrorism. Two other alleged suspects were already in jail for gun-smuggling. Five of the 17 are under 18 years of age, so their names cannot be divulged, but that has not prevented the police or intelligence agencies from leaking damaging information about them.

The agreement reached on June 22 at Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, by Somalia's nominal transitional government and the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) – which is in control of the capital,Mogadishu, and most of southern Somalia – has been hailed as a first step towards the restoration of peace, tranquillity and unity to the violence-ridden "failed state".