There is open talk of impending war in Lebanon these days. Lebanese of many factions are speculating about potential scenarios for another war being waged on Hizbullah by Israel. These discussions concentrate on the question of when, rather than whether, such a war will erupt.

Commanding the collective good and forbidding evil must rank as the most important obligation of Muslims, the Islamic movement and the Islamic state. The Qur'anic ayah, “amr bilma‘roof wal nahy ‘anil munkar” (3:104 and 110) is often mistranslated as “enjoining good and forbidding evil”, minimising its forcefulness and giving it a pacifist twist.

The neo-cons’ commitment to promoting democracy in the Muslim world was quietly discarded after Hamas’s victory in the Palestinian elections in January 2006, when they finally realised what most observers had been saying all along: that free elections in Muslim countries would almost invariably result in governments that the West would not like because they would promote the concerns and interests of their own people above those of Washington.

In the early years of Muslim history we had most of the political pulses that we have today. Not many Muslims, not even many intellectual Muslims, are willing to examine human nature, cultural influences, social trends and political priorities fourteen hundred years ago as well as today.

That there are now two ruling coalitions in Malaysia – UMNO’s and another led by Anwar Ibrahim (pic, left) – aptly describes Malaysia’s post-election reality. For the first time, the opposition’s credibility is being put to test at the governing level.

When US president George W. Bush claimed last month that Iraq had been a victory for the US, hollow laughter echoed around the world. In this article, KHALIL FADL considers the real legacy of the Iraqwar, five years after the toppling of Saddam Hussein.

In the contemporary Ummah, Sufism is often associated with apolitical, pacifist Islam of the type that the West would like to promote as “true Islam” all over the Muslim world. FAHAD ANSARI looks back at the great tradition of jihadi Sufis in recent Muslim history.

On March 14 Iranians in overwhelming numbers participated in the country’s 28th elections since the Islamic Revolution (1979) to elect members of the eighth Majlis (parliament). At least 25 million people, constituting more than 60 percent of the electorate, cast their ballots to choose 290 members from a field of 4,225 candidates.

As NATO heads of state converge on Bucharest, the Romanian capital, in the first week of April, the question uppermost on everyone's mind will be the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan. Despite the presence of more than 50,000 NATO troops, the security situation has worsened and the insurgency has escalated.

On March 3, there was further evidence of the US's involvement in Ethiopia's occupation of Somalia, when a Tomahawk missile fired from a US submarine hit the town of Dobley in southern Somalia, five miles from the border with Kenya, destroying at least one house and injuring six people.

Pakistan has a brand new prime minister—Syed Yusuf Raza Gilani, scion of a feudal family from Multan, who was sworn in on March 25. He has served as minister and parliamentary speaker in earlier governments and under General Pervez Musharraf’s military rule and spent five years in jail on charges of nepotism for awarding jobs to undeserving people when he was speaker of the National Assembly.

Sudan and Chad are highly unstable neighbours, whose territorial integrity and national security are put at risk not only by internal feuding that spills over their common border but by direct hostility that drives them to support each other's insurgents and at times to go to war.

In a clear illustration of the extent to which the US can influence the policies of Muslim countries such as Pakistan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, the member-states of the OIC held a summit inDakar, the capital of Senegal, on March 13 to "update" its charter, amend it to address "Islamic terrorism", and entrench secularism in Muslim countries.