Eight years after the spectacular attacks of September 11, widespread skepticism continues to exit regarding the official version put out by the US government. And this is not confined to Muslims alone who never bought into the US allegation that Muslim hijackers, working for Osama bin Laden had carried out these attack. Western academics in the US, Canada and Europe, many of them leading scientists have expressed grave doubts about what the US has claimed about the perpetrators...

Since the election of Barack Obama as President, US rhetoric about war on terror has been toned down but the policies instituted by his discredited predecessor continue...

At the end of July when 10 people, among them several rabbis, were arrested in New Jersey, USA, it was assumed that this was little more than a case of tax fraud by another charity.

Jawad’s release came following a US federal judge’s ruling on July 30, after a war crimes case against him was dismissed for lack of evidence and concerns about his age...

KindHearts officials have denied being connected to any terrorist group ever since federal agents sealed the charity’s office in 2006...

Last month, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) demanded that President Barack Obama’s administration release information on 600 detainees held at Bagram...

Muslims have naturally expressed concern over this latest assault on the Islamic sacred text...

Racial profiling in the US is so pervasive that it has affected virtually every Muslim living or visiting there. On August 16, there was the well-publicised case of Shah Rukh Khan, Bollywood’s top star, who was subjected to invasive questioning for more than two hours when he arrived on a British Airways flight at Newark, New Jersey airport...

Afghanistan’s presidential elections held on August 20 may be over but the uncertainty continues; indeed it has deepened with no clear winner. The two front-runners represent opposite sides in Afghanistan’s ethnic divide — the incumbent Hamid Karzai is a Pashtun while his main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah represents the Tajik-Uzbek bloc...

Almost until the expensive limousines carrying senior Fatah members began converging on Bethlehem on August 3 and 4, it had been unclear whether the convention would go ahead...

After a few years of relative lull in resistance activity, last year Kashmir was hit by some of the biggest anti-India demonstrations since the eruption of the insurgency against India’s rule in 1989 that has left more than 100,000 people dead...

Beyond the moralizing statements by British and Scottish officials about the release of a sick and dying Libyan, AbdelBasit Ali al-Megrahi from a Scottish prison is the more earthly question of naked British commercial interests...

As part of the commemoration of Yaum al-Quds last month, Crescent International (South Africa) published a booklet called The Struggle for al-Quds. Here we reprint the foreword of that book, written by ZAFAR BANGASH, Director of the Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought (ICIT) in Toronto, Canada...

After the Islamic Revolution, Imam Khomeini made the liberation of Palestinian a key issue for the Islamic State, declaring the last Friday of Ramadan to be Yaum al-Quds. Here we reprint a paper by DR KALIM SIDDIQUI on “the road back to Palestine” and the role of the Islamic State. This paper was presented at a conference on Palestine in Tehran in 1991...

Although the Chechen people have suffered immensely in the last decade, their cause has been overlooked in recent years. HAJIRA QURESHI reports on the work of the Save Chechnya Campaign, a new support group established in the UK...

In the second paper we are publishing from the IHRC conference “Towards a New Liberation Theology”, GHADA RAMAHI discusses the right to resist. In its attempt to reconstruct humanity, the contemporary state system has given itself the authority to delegate rights to inhabitants of the earth...

In June, the Islamic Human RIghts Commission (IHRC) held a conference in London on Liberation Theology and the right to resist. Here we publish two papers delivered at that conference. The first is by RIMA FAKHRY, a member of the political council of the Islamic Resistance Movement in Lebanon, usually known as the Hizbullah.

Since the early eighties, Crescent International has been covering political developments in Malaysia. Recently the country's largest opposition party, the Islamic Party (PAS), got extensive media attention after its party elections. The election of its new leaders, particularly that of the deputy president, whom the media have heralded as ‘moderate' and ‘reformist', is seen as a turning-point for PAS and described as a sign of sweeping changes to come. Where does PAS go from here? ABDAR RAHMAN KOYA talks to Dr Nasharuddin Mat Isa, the new deputy president of PAS, about a number of issues affecting Muslims in Malaysia and the Islamic movement.

Such are the problems and crises facing Muslims in the world today that many Muslims become deeply pessimistic, even hopeless, about the future of the Ummah. In his talk at a Milad Conference in Pretoria last month, ZAFAR BANGASH, Director of the Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought, highlighted the centrality of optimism in the Seerah.

This month - Rabi al-Awwal in the Hijri calendar - sees celebrations of the birth of the Prophet (saw) all over the Muslim world. In this article, ZAFAR BANGASH, Director of the Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought (ICIT), discusses some key elements of the Seerah.

The ICIT conference in Toronto marking the 26th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution was attended by several senior Islamic movement leaders. This is the paper presented by HUJJATUL-ISLAM MOHAMMAD BAQER ANSARI of the Department of International Affairs of the Rahbari (the office of the Leader of the Islamic Revolution).

On February 12 the Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought (ICIT) and the Islamic Society of York Region convened a conference in Toronto to mark the 26th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Here we publish a report on the conference.

The heavy American assault on Falluja in November ranks among the worst crimes ever committed against Muslims. ZAFAR BANGASH, director of the Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought, answers two key questions that it raises.

Rwanda was once Africa’s most Catholic nation, until the Church was deeply implicated in the genocide of 1994. Now the Muslim population has more than doubled. M. D. ABDULLAH, a Crescent reader in Dar es-Salaam, Tanzania, sent this report.

Academic freedom, like most other freedoms in North America, has become a thing of the past. Not just the US but also Canada has been affected by a virulent strain of racism couched in the excuse that "things have changed" since September 11, 2001...

American ‘televangelists’ (missionaries or preachers who reach large audiences by television) are able to influence public opinion heavily; unfortunately they tend to be not the most honest people. Since September 11 last year, televangelists and zionists have launched yet another campaign against Islam and Muslims...

These are tough times to be a Muslim in North America, especially living in the US. Muslims travelling from Canada to the US at the beginning of September to attend the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) annual convention in Washington DC were told bluntly by US customs officials that Islam and America do not mix...

On September 24 the British government published a "dossier of evidence" against Saddam Hussein that critics quickly dismissed as a "weapon of mass deception". Iraq’s fate was determined by decisions made long ago, argues FAISAL BODI.

If paranoia has become the official dogma of US domestic policy, militant unilateralism and hegemonic tendencies born of a sense of raw power have taken hold of Washington’s foreign policies...

Within hours of the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon on September 11 last year, Muslims in America were being blamed and made the targets of retribution. WASEEM SHEHZAD examines the problems American Muslims have faced over the last year...

Thousands of members of Islamic groups are rounded up each year in Egypt and Syria and put in jail. Most of them are never brought to trial but, instead, held incomunicado and tortured...

Educationists in the West are presently in the middle of a intense debate about purpose and means of providing education. YUSUF AL-KHABBAZ argues that this provides an opportunity for Muslims...

Terrorism is one of the most widely used words in the world today. It also has numerous meanings. YUSUF AL-KHABBAZ discusses the way the West uses the word and exploits the phenomenon...

Questions about the US’s knowledge of the attacks of September 11 were raised even before the dust had settled in New York. Now details are emerging. Officials in the Bush administration are struggling to explain embarrassing revelations...

As some sort of normality — albeit a uniquely Palestinian kind of normality — settles in the West Bank following the Israeli invasion in March and the atrocities at Jenin, there is a growing sense that Palestine is at another crossroads, another stage at which the struggle for freedom and self-determination makes a new start in a new direction...

In the early eighties, Peshawar was the hub of activity for anti-Soviet fighters.

When news emerged of fighting in the southern Gaza town of Rafah after jumu‘ah prayers on August 14, many observers would have been surprised to learn that it was between Hamas authorities and militants belonging to a Salafi-Jihadi group known as Jund Ansar Allah — “Soldiers of the Followers of Allah”...

Michael Jackson’s burial on August 29, more than two months after his death, will finally allow his soul to rest in peace. But there is a troubling side to his troubled life and equally troubling death...

Can Israel ever be repentant, and in what way? by Azzam Tamimi. FOUR years ago when the PLO and Arab governments were racing to make peace with the Zionist entity, millions of Muslims - Arabs as well as others - despaired of ever being able to liberate Palestine and dismantle the Jewish state...

Morocco's king Hasan II, the progenitor of the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty, and launderer of Shimon Peres and the late Yitzhak Rabin into currency acceptable in Arab capitals, paving the way for the 1993 Oslo sellout...

The Shi'ite Movement in Iraq by Faleh A. Jabar. Publisher: Saqi Books, London, 2003. Pp.: 391. Pbk: £15.99/$24.95. By Nasr Salem

AN ENQUIRY INTO THE ALGERIAN MASSACRES edited by Youcef Bedjaoui, Abbas Aroua and Meziane Ait-Larbi. Pub: Hoggar Books, Geneva, Switzerland, 1999. Hbk: UK24.00 (UK); pp: 1,473.