It is long overdue. The Syrian Ikhwan al-Muslimeen has recently demonstrated renewed determination to become a rallying point to unify the country’s opposition. Between August 23 and 25, the Brotherhood held a conference in London, under the slogan “Syria for All Its People.”
Colonel Mu’ammar Qaddafi, Brother Leader of the Revolution in Libya, arrived in Khartoum on July 17 for two days of talks with president Omar Hassan al-Bashir in connection with the peace proposals sponsored jointly by his country and Egypt.
The Society of Muslim Brothers in Egypt by Brynjar Lia. Pub: Garnet Publishers, Reading, UK. Pp: 328. Price: £30.
The issue of Palestine is central to the Islamic movement. Obviously, the occupation of Islam’s third holy city by the greatest enemies of Islam and the greatest powers of kufr that history has ever known is a situation that Muslims can never accept. But the experience of opposing that occupation is proving a severe testing-ground for the Ummah.
Throughout his long rule, Egypt’s president, Husni Mubarak, has paid lip-service to ‘traditional Islam’ and to ‘freedom of expression’, while in practice repressing Islamic activists. Even the Ikhwan al-Muslimeen, who cannot possibly be accused of being Islamic revolutionaries, are banned as a political party.
President Husni Mubarak stepped up his assault on the Ikhwan al-Muslimun in Egypt earlier this month by issuing a presidential decree transferring the cases of 20 of the movement’s most senior and prominent members, who were arrested last month, from the civil court system to military courts.
This paper was presented by Imam Muhammad al-Asi at the ‘Dr Kalim Siddiqui Memorial Conference' convened by the Muslim Institute for Research and Planning and the Muslim Parliament of Great Britain in London on November 3, 1996.
[This paper was originally written in 1992 as the introduction for an earlier book called In Pursuit of the Power of Islam which Dr Kalim Siddiqui adapted from previously published writings in 1991-92. The book had reached proof stage before Dr Siddiqui concluded it was not satisfactory and decided to write a new book from scratch in its place. This new book was Stages of Islamic Revolution (London: The Open Press, 1996). This paper was first published in Zafar Bangash (ed), In Pursuit of the Power of Islam: Major Writings of Kalim Siddiqui, London and Toronto: The Open Press, 1996.]
Maulana Sayyid Abul Ala Maudoodi (1908 – 1979) is the best-known modern Muslim writer and activist and his books, both in their original Urdu and in translation are probably more widely read in all countries than any other contemporary Muslim author. As founder of the Jama’at-e-Islami in Lahore in 1941, he is unique among Muslim scholars in that he was also a man of action who, through his political movement, strived to the limits of his mental and physical strength to implement into practical life all that he wrote.
[Kalim Siddiqui, Political thought and behaviour of Muslims under colonialism, London: The Muslim Institute, 1986. This was the keynote paper presented at the Muslim Institute World Seminar on ‘Muslim Political Thought during the Colonial Period’, London: August 6-9, 1986. It was reprinted as the introduction to Kalim Siddiqui (ed), Issues in the Islamic Movement 1985-86, London and Toronto: The Open Press, 1987, and in Zafar Bangash (ed), In Pursuit of the Power of Islam: Major Writings of Kalim Siddiqui, London and Toronto: The Open Press, 1996.]
[Paper was written and published as the introduction to Kalim Siddiqui (ed), Issues in the Islamic Movement 1981-82, London and Toronto: The Open Press, 1983, and reprinted in Zafar Bangash (ed), In Pursuit of the Power of Islam: Major Writings of Kalim Siddiqui, 1996.]
