Turkey is a predominantly Muslim country and, as such, has no place in the European Union, as president Jacques Chirac of France recently said candidly, without any direct reference to Islam...
The results of the Iranian Majlis elections in February silenced many who had expected them to produce a massive popular rejection of the Islamic system. But in Islamic Iran people are looking ahead, not back. ZAFAR BANGASH looks forward...
Until his defeat in Spain’s elections in March, José María Aznar was a key member of the US-led ‘Coalition of the Willing’. His defeat, coming after the Madrid bombing, caused fury in Washington. FRANCISCO J. ROMERO SALVADÓ discusses its causes and repercussions...
Over the last few weeks, the Western media has watched keenly as Iran went to the polls to elect a new Majlis (parliament), highlighting every perceived shortcoming in the electoral procedure and hoping that the elections would prompt a crisis in Iran’s Islamic system of government...
Among the topics discussed at the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) meeting in Kuwait in December was that of textbook revision...
We open the section with IQBAL SIDDIQUI, editor of Crescent International, discussing the centrality and relevance of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, and the Islamic State that it created, to the struggle of the contemporary global Islamic movement.
For this special section, we particularly wanted an Iranian perspective on post-Revolutionary Iran. HUJJAT UL-ISLAM M. SAEED BAHMANPOUR, an academic currently based in London, discusses Iran’s progress in the last 25 years.
In December last year, AYATULLAH SAYYID ALI KHAMENEI, the Vali-e Faqih of the Islamic Republic of Iran, convened a meeting of Islamic movement leaders and representatives in Tehran. Here we reprint extracts from his talk to the gathering. It is impossible to imagine any other statesman in a position of authority in the Muslim world speaking so openly and frankly about the state of the world today, clearly identifying the Ummah’s errors and weaknesses, and the dangers and challenges facing us.
Thanks to his rightwing advisors (better known as ‘neo-conservatives’ or ‘neo-cons’), US president George Bush has been trapped between Iraq and a hard place; in fact several hard places – Afghanistan, the US economy and a public that are at last beginning to realize that they have been lied to in a big way.
The Western world has seldom seen public demonstrations on the scale that occurred during the weeks preceding the invasion of Iraq earlier this year. Millions of men, women and children marched in the streets of London, Paris, Madrid, Berlin, San Francisco, Chicago and Washington DC, in the hope that this public outcry would stop the impending attack
Even two years after the Taliban’s removal from power, the hapless Afghans continue to suffer under a reign of terror; the perpetrators are none other than the US-backed warlords ensconced as ministers or wearing pompous titles such as commander. Rape, robbery, and murder and the bloody-mindedness of the US occupation forces have turned almost every Afghan into an anti-American fighter.
While Americans mark the second anniversary of the attacks on September 11, 2001, Muslims will be marking another tragedy. ZAFAR BANGASH remembers the massacres of Sabra and Shatilla.
Two years after the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon, it has now been acknowledged even by US congressmen that president George Bush and his advisors had foreknowledge of the impending attacks but did nothing to prevent them. Even when it became known that passenger planes had been hijacked...
After weeks of dismissing the attacks on their troops as the last gasp of the deposed Ba’athist regime, increasing resistance has forced American officials to admit that something like a real guerrilla movement is gathering momentum in Iraq.
Since its creation in the 1990s, al-Jazeera Satellite Television has become a darling of parts of the Western establishment, hailed as a voice of modernity and democracy in the Middle East. YUSUF AL-KHABBAZ asks why...
DR PERWEZ SHAFI, director of the Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought in Pakistan, examines the reasons for the spectacular difference of opinions between the US and major European powers over the US’s plans for war war against Iraq...
Since its independence from the Soviet monolith (1991), Kazakhstan has been mired in a succession of political crises. Kazakhstan has been the scene of serious human-rights abuses and the denial of fundamental freedoms.
The US has become a menace to the world. This is not merely the opinion of Muslims, but also of its traditional allies. At the G8 summit in France earlier this month, Bush told the Europeans, especially the French, bluntly that they must tailor their policies to America’s interests.
Since the overthrow of Saddam Hussain by the western coalition, there has been much debate about the weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) that were used as a pretext to launch the war, but which have not been found.
Although much attention has been paid to zionist policies in the West Bank and Ghazzah, Palestinians living inside 1948 Palestine – the area which the UN recognised as Israel in 1948 – are also coming under increasing attack. NASSER SALEM reports.
