Crescent Magazine

By M. I. M. Mohideen in Colombo

Soon after defeating LTTE terrorism in May 2009, President Mahinda Rajapaksa said that there are no minority or majority communities in Sri Lanka today. There are only patriots and traitors, he insisted. Muslim ministers and political leaders supporting his United People’s Freedom Alliance (UPFA) Government have also said that there is no need for communal political parties and wanted the Muslims to join national political parties.

Under these circumstances, it has become pertinent to have a closer look at the plight of Muslims, particularly in Colombo, for being patriots and loyal members of the National political parties in Sri Lanka.

We, Muslims are proud of the fact that we are citizens of Sri Lanka, our motherland, where our ancestors, the Arabs originated the Sri Lanka Muslim race, more than 2,500 years ago. As people professing the religion of Islam, we have been here for more than 1,430 years.

By Tahir Mustafa

Apart from external instruments used against Muslims, imperialists have mastered their ability to infuse fifth columnists inside the Muslim Ummah. Not only have we observed the phenomenon of injecting poisonous ideologies into the Muslim Ummah whose real intentions became evident almost immediately, there are also those whose appearance, rhetoric and ambitions appear on surface to be based on the primary sources of Islam. The unfortunate reality is that in the Ummah there are people, organizations and groups that inflict great damage on Muslims because of their political, social and academic simplicity and narrow-mindedness. It is the naivety of such groups that is used to impose the war of terror on Muslims by the forces of global arrogance.

The regrettable reality is that the global Islamic movement, the respected scholars of Islam, and the vanguard of the Islamic resistance did not even begin to address the stagnation imposed by these fringe groups on the wider Muslim Ummah. So far the polemics and discussions have remained within a narrow sectarian framework and have not extended into the wider Islamic discourse on solving this important problem. However, the events instigated in Gaza by “Jund Ansar Allah” in mid-August 2009, if properly analyzed and presented to the wider Muslim Ummah may instigate the much needed discourse and open the eyes of many Muslims that will lead to a non-sectarian solution to the problem.

By Waseem Shehzad

Numerous high ranking intelligence officials from Central Asian countries and Azerbaijan have visited Israel in recent weeks. According to reports the Central Asian intelligence officials requested the help of Mossad in eliminating the presence of Hizbut-Tahrir in their countries. Zionist officials expressed interest but refused to provide level of assistance needed until the Central Asian states agreed to cooperate with Israel in isolating Iran. Interestingly, the Israelis do not consider Hizbut-Tahrir a terrorist organization so it operates more freely in Hebron and East Al Quds, than in any Central Asian country. However, Central Asian intelligence officials were reluctant to provide the kind of support demanded by the Zionists in isolating Iran. Israeli news sources believe that because of high trade volume with Iran and their dependence on Iranian goodwill to export their goods that could be jeopardized in the event of Iranian retaliation, the Central Asian regimes are reluctant to provide the degree of assistance demanded by the Zionists.  

News of Israeli cooperation with regimes of the former USSR should not come as a surprise. It is widely known that this region is one of the key recruitment centers for Israeli settlers in occupied Palestine. The Zionist regime exploits the lack of Islamic awareness among Muslims of the former USSR because of 75-year communist rule. Thus, concern for Palestine’s occupation does not rank at the same level in the Central Asian countries as it does in other parts of the Muslim world. This provides a good opportunity for Israel to operate in Central Asia since many Muslims there do not realize what cooperation with the Zionists entails.

Islamic organizations in Azerbaijan have been much in the news over the last few months. Crescent International interviewed Haji Ramin Bayramov, Press Secretary of the Islamic organization, the National-Moral Values Union, and founder of the Azeri Islamic news portal www.islam-azeri.az. 
 

CI: Azerbaijan was under communist rule for 75 years.  Since gaining de-facto independence in 1990 how would you quantify the process of Islamic revival in Azerbaijan?