A Sceptical Islamist

Balancing the external and internal elements of the Islamic movement's work

2010-07-01T16:03:00+01:00

(Perspectives, Crescent International, July 2010.) The key objectives of the Islamic movement are the reassertion of Islamic values in Muslim societies, and the establishment of Islamic states in place of the corrupt, self-serving regimes that currently predominate in the Muslim...

The Islamic movement needs institutional platforms for intellectual discourse

2010-06-01T00:52:00+01:00

"The global Islamic movement is not organizationally or institutionally a single entity; instead it consists of countless scholars, intellectuals, activists, groups and movements, operating separately and independently, and following different strategies, methods and priorities according to their perceptions of the...

Book Review: The Islamic projects of Muhammad Asad and Alija Izetbegovic

2010-05-28T15:22:02+01:00

"Discussing these early analytical works by Asad and Izetbegovic, Sherif points out that, without any influence from political Islamic movements in the Middle East, both men conclude from their reflections on Islam that it contains public and political elements as...

British Muslims and the problem of mainstream politics

2010-05-01T10:32:00+01:00

"As in all general elections, British Muslims have been bombarded with advice as to whether and how they should vote. All the parties have appealed to the Muslim vote in constituencies where it has the potential to affect the result,...

Muslims intellectuals must take on the universal myths of democracy

2010-04-01T09:44:00+01:00

"Sooner or later Muslim intellectuals, particularly those operating within Islamic movements, must take on the task of challenging the universal myth of democracy instead of pandering to it, and dare to define their ideas and the aspirations of the Ummah...

Lessons for the Islamic movement seven years after the invasion of Iraq

2010-03-01T21:13:00+00:00

"This month marks the seventh anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. The invasion was no surprise of course; it was preceded by months of international politicking as the neo-con Bush administration tried to build international consensus for...

The Ikhwan’s difficult path between accommodation, repression and militancy

2010-02-01T20:50:00+00:00

"The election last month of Mohammed Badei as the eighth Murshid al-‘Am (General Guide) of the Ikhwan al-Muslimun (Muslim Brotherhood) in Egypt, and the results of December’s elections for the Ikhwan’s Maktab al-Irshad (Guidance Bureau), have caused ructions among many...

The centrality of Arabic to the unity of the Ummah

2010-01-01T20:44:00+00:00

"The fragmentation of the Ummah has been more than just political; just as serious has been its intellectual disintegration. Where once there was an Ummah-wide network of intellectual discourse that linked Muslims all over the world, today the Ummah is...

Palestinian politics settle into familiar pattern after hints of radical change

2010-01-01T20:39:00+00:00

(News/Analysis, Crescent International, January 2009.) For a few short weeks in the fall, after Palestinian president Mahmood Abbas announced that parliamentary and presidential elections would take place this month, and that he would not be standing for re-election, Palestinian politics...

The importance of history for resisting the "imperialism of the mind"

2009-12-01T20:31:00+00:00

"The decades of colonialism and postcolonial neo-imperialism have established another kind of hegemony over the Muslim world, which intellectuals such as Malek Bennabi and Ali Shari‘ati recognised long ago (and which was also discussed by non-Muslims such as Franz Fanon),...