The Palestinians have suffered not only at the hands of the zionists but the truth about their suffering is also deliberately suppressed and distorted worldwide so that people would not learn about it. This may be changing, slowly but surely. The saga of the zionist theft of Palestinian land is being graphically depicted through maps that are finding their way onto the transit systems in the US. This is a small but significant victory.
Considered already by many to be a definitive work, Professor Manning Marable’s Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (Penguin Group (USA) Inc., New York, 2011; 594 pages; hbk. $30.00) is reviewed for CI by staff writer Zainab Cheema.
Pakistan turns 63 this month but it would be difficult to say a great deal positive about its style of governance or development in all these years. True, its birth was marred by great suffering and bloodshed, not in a formal war but during the migration of millions of people that were uprooted from their homes in India in August 1947.
CULTURE JAM: THE UNCOOLING OF AMERICA by Kalle Lasn. New York: Eagle Brook and William Morrow, 1999. Pp. Xvii & 251. Hbk. US$25.
When a former senior bureaucrat in Pakistan was waylaid recently (this being the second time that this misfortune was befalling him and his family) his daughter-in-law who was sitting with him in his BMW asked one of the dacoits who had seized them as to why he had taken to this profession.
Not since Ibn-Khaldun's al-Muqaddima in the fourteen century did any Muslim scholar make a significant contribution to the understanding of the historical process. The late Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr from Iraq made a serious effort in giving his vision on the development of the history. His interpretations of history can be considered as part of his effort to prove that Islam, through the ulama (jurists) of the traditional religious schools, is still capable of contributing to the advancement of knowledge and resolution of problems facing man in this temporal world.
There is a whole world of differences separated “Islamic revolution” from “revolutionary Islam”; the former expression means a comprehensive process of transformation that is conducted in accordance with Islam but does not exhaust the entire content of Islam, whereas the latter means an Islam reduced to being the instrument of revolution and defined completely in terms of socio-economic processes. Mutahhari was the most articulate defender of “Islamic revolution” against the encroachments of “revolutionary Islam.” The present book is in a sense a document of combat is confirmed by its abrupt ending; Mutahhari was assassinated before he was able to complete it. But the book should be read as more than a record of ideological struggles; it has lasting value as a statement of essential Islamic doctrine on the twin topics of society and history, and thus serves to complement perfectly the first volume of Mutahhari’s writings published by Mizan Press, Fundamentals of Islamic Thought.
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