Western regimes like to project themselves as enlightened and tolerant but their record of abuse of Muslim minorities exposes their fraudulent claim. In Muslim majority countries, Islamic Iran stands out as a beacon of tolerance with not even a hint of propaganda against religious or ethnic minorities.
The elite and media outlets never tire of proclaiming the virtues of freedom and democracy in the West. They denigrate others that do not conform to their way of life. How much freedom and democracy are there in the West and what is the nature of these notions? We look deeper.
After each election in the West — Barack Obama’s first election as president of the US in 2008, Jeremy Corbyn’s election as leader of the British Labour Party in Au-gust and the recent election of Justin Trudeau as Prime Minister of Canada — much euphoria is generated.
Where Imam Khomeini’s anniversary drew hundreds of people to the program, it also attracted an odd assortment of parasites and anti-Islamic mobsters that had escaped from Iran because of their links with the despicable regime of the Shah.
1One of our correspondents shares his experiences of working with the Crescent International and what it has contributed to creating awareness about regional as well as global issues. After writing for ICIT’s publication, Crescent International, since 2009, one of our journalists decided to share his understanding and experience of working with the oldest surviving Islamic publication on current affairs.
1Muslim organizations and their leaders are being challenged to adopt an anti-intervention policy as permanent feature of their discourse. It is not likely but what the call shows is that ordinary Muslims are beginning to challenge the spineless leadership.
Democracy is a much used and abused term. It is essentially a tool in the hands of the rich and powerful to legitimize their ill-gotten gains.
For a civilization and value system that places such great emphasis on “freedom”, there are still plenty of ways that dissidents can be targeted in the modern West. Freedom has been described as a “hurray word” — a word “with little substantive meaning… an empty signifier in a hegemonic language game, to which we all have to defer”, in the words of Mark Haugaard, political scientist and editor of the Journal of Power.
Every four years the world watches the political soap opera of the US presidential elections with a combination of amusement, bemusement and incredulity as the world’s most powerful nation, and the supposed flag-bearer of democracy, lays open its true nature. Although the polls are not due for over a year, the formal process began months ago, with Barrack Obama having announced the start of his re-election campaign in April.
Concepts are useful tools that aid our understanding. Children learn new concepts through association with things familiar; adults learn through experiment and experience. Just as children learn not to put their hand in the fire because it burns...
None of this is easy to say. No one can argue that those humans in history who were in possession of the best ideas were Allah’s Prophets (swt)...
The West insists that it is “civilized”; so civilized in fact that it wants to export its values to the rest of the world. Those unable to appreciate Western values must be uncivilized, especially Muslims, who cling to such
By staging a walk out while President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad of Iran was addressing the UN anti-racism conference in Geneva on April 20, the European countries have exposed their own racism without affecting the ultimate outcome of the meeting. Representatives from a tiny minority of European countries that have a chequered history regarding human rights are all former colonialists who have perpetrated horrible crimes during the colonial era.
While the public mind waits to see what drama we will have next in the American-led (but Israeli inspired) war on Islamic self-determination, otherwise known as “the war on terror”, zionists or people working for them succeed in assassinating ImadMughniyyeh, a commander of Hizbullah, in – of all places – the diplomatic quarter of Damascus, the capital of Syria.
1The long history of encounters between Western civilization and Islam has produced a tradition of portraying, in largely negative and self-serving ways, the Islamic religion and Muslim cultures. There is a lot of literature cataloguing (and sometimes correcting) these stereotypes. It is not my intention to rehash this corpus here, though I do rely upon some of the more important works. What I want to do instead is focus on a particular dimension of these encounters, and examine why the West has consistently constructed and perpetuated negative images of Islam and Muslims. My focus will be on the utility of Islamic imagery in Western civilization.
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.
That there is a serious disconnect between Islam and the West is not in doubt; what is hotly contested is whose fault it is. Each side blames the other but, given that the Western media dominate almost all discourse, Islam and Muslims are blamed for everything that goes wrong in the world.
The compatibility or incompatibility of Western and Muslim societies are often debated. WAHEEDA VALLIANTE, a family counsellor and national vice-president of the Canadian Islamic Congress, suggests an alternative to the “clash of civilizations” thesis.
So powerful is the West’s propaganda that mere mention of the word “warlord” immediately conjures up images of a bearded thug terrorizing hapless civilians in Afghanistan. Just as terrorism has been made synonymous with Muslim activism, so warlordism has become the exclusive preserve of the Afghans.
An increasing proportion of popular entertainment in Muslim countries now comes from the West, particularly the US. YUSUF KHABBAZ discusses whether such entertainment is proper for Muslim families and societies.
