Mick Hartley

Alan Johnson introduces the Summer 2008 edition of Democratiya. A number of the articles look back at 1968, forty years on. There's also a review of a newly translated book from Sheikh Qarawadi, published for the first time in English and distributed here for British Muslim readers, which makes clear how the great man, and erstwhile chum of Ken Livingstone, views the Israel/Palestine question: not as a political but as an apocalyptic struggle. From the preface:

In this book, the eminent contemporary scholar Yusuf al-Qaradawi gives clear answers to the reasons and removes the ambiguities to whoever seeks the truth and justice concerning the Palestinian issue. These answers acquaint Muslims with the dimensions of the issue with the Zionists who usurped this pearl of ours. The battle between them and us is not a battle of borders but a battle of existence. It is the battle that will end and the Muslims that will be victorious.

Plus an interview with Matthias Küntzel, on Islamists and anti-Semitism. Here he is on the central importance of the subjugation of women in Islamist ideology:

It's very hard to analyse Islamism without resorting to sexual psychology. I talk in my book ["Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11"] about the inability of the Muslim Brotherhood to accept 'the Other' or 'Otherness'. And this refusal always begins with the relationship between men and women. If you do not properly subjugate your wife and women you can't be an Islamist, because in that case you would be accepting the other as an equal. And this is seen as being against the Koran and the holy scriptures.

The Charter of Hamas is most interesting when it comes to the role of women. They say women are important because they are needed to raise Jihad warriors. This is supposed to be their main function. And they add that the West wants to influence Muslim women by printing journals with nasty pictures and whispering wrong ideas. So every Muslim woman who likes modernity is framed as a traitor. The Islamists' perception of the woman – their refusal to deal with otherness as something equal – is at the very core of Islamism and antisemitism.