1. INTRODUCTION Five years ago, I read in the Toronto Star issue of July 3, 1990 an article titled "Islam is not alone in patriarchal doctrines", by Gwynne Dyer. The article described the furious reactions of the participants of a conference on women and power held in Montreal to the comments of the famous Egyptian feminist Dr. Nawal Saadawi. Her …

The criminal character of the seven-year-old US war on Iraq came into the open this week in yet another shameful exposé when the wikileaks website carried an 18-minute secret Pentagon tape. The Swedish based non-profit website that publishes leaked documents regarding government and corporate misconduct got the tape from a Pentagon whistleblower and put it in the public domain on …

About GIH: Guardian Investment House (Pvt.) Limited or GIH is a boutique Islamic investment management and advisory company based in Colombo, Sri Lanka. The company specializes in structuring and managing shariah complaint traditional and alternative investments on a fiduciary basis for individuals and corporate ; as well as engage in financial advisory activities for corporations, governments and/or government related entities …

Most modern coffee-drinkers are probably unaware of coffee’s heritage in the Sufi orders of Southern Arabia. Members of the Shadhiliyya order are said to have spread coffee-drinking throughout the Islamic world sometime between the 13th and 15th centuries CE. A Shadhiliyya shaikh was introduced to coffee-drinking in Ethiopia, where the native highland bush, its fruit and the beverage made from …

Monday’s terror attacks in Moscow and Wednesday’s police station blast in Dagestan show that Russia’s problems in the North Caucasus are far from over. It may lead to the third Chechen war. For it was a similar bombing campaign in 1999 that prompted the then Russian Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin, to send troops again to Chechnya and launch the second …

That human beings are all different cannot be argued. Physically and psychologically no two human beings, however closely related biologically, are exactly the same. In addition to racial and ethnic differences, there are the acquired differences in ideas, knowledge approaches, priorities and judgment, among many other differences, that accrue from the surrounding culture. Religion belongs somewhere between an inherited and …