By Maulana Nademul Wajidi

Prophet’s picture in textbook stirs row in Uttar Pradesh, India by IANS

Hafiz Saeed – India’s Most Wanted Free in Pakistan by Mukhtar A. Khan

Wheree did US Ten billion dollar aid to Pakistan go? by Dr Ashfaque H Khan

Nigerian Islamist Attacks Spread

Al Qaeda seen gaining new foothold in Yemen by Andrew Hammond

Nigeria and Al Qaeda by Douglas Farah

Sufi Soul: A List of Essential Sufi Books

Hamas dress code aims to make Gaza more Islamic by DIAA HADID

Global media’s war by Manzoor Ali Memon

Pakistan arts-lovers defy Taliban stage fright by David Loyn

Ironic similarity of Iranian women to Iranian Baha'i's by Faramarz_Fateh

German University Takes Step toward Integrating Islamic Education by Bernd Volkert

Compiled by Syed Asadullah

Mr. Sultan Shahin has made an excellent suggestion to the Indian Muslims on the late Babri Masjid. While I support his suggestion of taking the spiritual path of forgiveness, I must express some reservations that I have.  Mr. Shahin is apparently a very highly spiritually evolved Muslim. But he doesn’t seem to have his feet firmly on the ground.

Sultan Shahin on Babri mosque dispute: A spiritual response

http://www.newageislam.org/NewAgeIslamArticleDetail.aspx?ArticleID=1559

Babri Masjid: Opportunity for Muslims 

Sharm El-Sheikh Joint Declaration May Be Manmohan Singh’s Big Gamble on India-Pakistan Relations

It may be early days yet, but events of the past two weeks point towards a fascinating shift in the way India relates to Pakistan, by de-hyphenating its own policy towards the US and others engaged in Project Pakistan. Manmohan Singh’s government has now announced India’s intention to break away from a Pakistan-centric view of its Pakistan policy and join this larger project, thereby globalising its Pakistan strategy. The US and India, therefore, for the first time in their engagement, are talking less of Pakistan’s compliance on one incident or the other, but on its very future. There are risks, particularly in a situation where your friends (the US) could be as unpredictable as your adversaries. But Manmohan Singh has decided to lead his troops out of the trenches, says Shekhar Gupta, editor-in-chief of the Indian Express, New Delhi, one of the most insightful observers of Indian foreign policy among Indian opinion makers.

Muslim Personal Law is not tantamount to shari’a

Secondly, as the great Indian jurist A. A. A. Fyzee explained in 1963, MPL is not tantamount to shari’a because so many dimensions of law from the colonial period on, including criminal law and the all-important law of precedent and procedure, are secularly defined. In a headline-grabbing alleged rape by her father-in-law of a poor Muslim country woman named Imrana two years back, there was considerable discussion of MPL, even an ill-informed denunciation of it in The New York Times by the acclaimed writer Salman Rushdie, though MPL was in no way at all involved. What was at stake was a fatwa (advising the woman to sever her current marriage), which was completely ignored. --   Barbara Metcalf, Professor of History and Director of the Centre for South Asian Studies at the University of Michigan.

Obviously, Islam fulfils all the requirements of Deen. Islam, as Iqbal puts it, "is neither dogma, nor priesthood, nor ritual."8 It is much more than any of these or all of these. It is the vivid sense of God's directive force and unflinching working of His laws. It is absolute iman in God's wisdom and His purpose. It is hearty participation in the upward progressive trend and movement of life and the world viewed as the expression of God's creative force. Islam stands for life-fulfilment and rejects life-denial as unworthy of man. It commands us to face facts and not to shrink from them and take refuge in fantasy, and requires us to control and harness natural forces for achieving our ends. Asceticism, quietism and monasticism are all repugnant to Islam. Islam lays stress oil social life and on its value for man, and does not regard the body as an evil and as an impediment to "spiritual" progress. It wants man to respect the rights of the body as well as the rights of the self. For this reason, Islam does not approve of self-abnegation and self-mortification. There is nothing mysterious in it and it has no place for mysticism. It aims at the establishment of a social order based on permanent values in which all its members act as free agents striving for a higher and noble cause of making man’s abode on this earth more beautiful, and making him fit for further evolutionary stages of life.

    Islam, as a living force, will continue to play a vital role in the moral uplift and social, cultural and political unification of mankind. It will continue to make valuable contributions to the knowledge and culture of mankind. Above all, it will continue to enrich the "spiritual" 9 life of man and thus strengthen and elevate his self or his personality. -- Allama Ghulam Ahmad Parwez

Unfortunately, the United States has acted in ways that have often empowered the militants. We have lavished more than $11 billion on Pakistan since 9/11, mostly supporting the Pakistani Army. Yet that sum has bought Pakistan no security and us no good will. In that same poll, 59 percent of Pakistanis said that they share many of Al Qaeda’s attitudes toward the United States, and almost half of those said that they support Al Qaeda attacks on Americans. One reason is that America hasn’t stood up for its own values in Pakistan. Instead of supporting democracy, we cold-shouldered the lawyers’ movement, which was the best hope for democracy and civil society. -- NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Israel's education ministry has ordered the removal of the word nakba – Arabic for the "catastrophe" of the 1948 war – from a school textbook for young Arab children, it has been announced. The decision – which will alter books aimed at eight- and nine-year-old Arab pupils – will be seen as a blunt assertion by Binyamin Netanyahu's Likud-led government of Israel's historical narrative over the Palestinian one. -- Ian Black, Middle East editor, Guardian, London

Serious rethinking within Islam is long overdue. Muslims have been comfortably relying, or rather falling back, on age-old interpretations for much too long.

This is why we feel so painful in the contemporary world, so uncomfortable with modernity. Scholars and thinkers have been suggesting for well over a century that we need to make a serious attempt at Ijtihad, at reasoned struggle and rethinking, to reform Islam. At the beginning of the last century, Jamaluddin Afghani and Mohammad Abduh led the call for a new Ijtihad; and along the way many notable intellectuals, academics and sages have added to this plea - not least Mohammad Iqbal, Malik bin Nabbi and Abdul Qadir Audah. Yet, ijtihad is one thing Muslim societies have singularly failed to undertake. Why? -- Ziauddin Sardar

By: Irshad Ahmad Haqqani

Allow me to quote the British novelist Martin Amis, writing about Persia in the Guardian: “Iran is one of the most venerable civilisations on earth: it makes China look like an adolescent, and America look like a stripling”. Iranians, aware of that history, are a proud people. They do not take kindly to being played around with, nor to seeing their country turned into a laughing stock. They do not like the memory of an election campaign that now seems like pure theatre, the expression of the sadistic whim of some puppeteer. So the line I take away from the important Friday sermon of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the two-time former President who believes that the Islamic Republic’s future lies in compromise rather than endless confrontation, is this one: “We shouldn’t let our enemies laugh at us because we’ve imprisoned our own people”. There’s been tragedy aplenty since June 12 — dozens of killings, thousands of arrests, countless beatings of the innocent — and I hope I belittle none of it when I say there’s also been something laughable. -- Roger Cohen