Syria crushed its Islamic fundamentalists in the Hama uprising of 1983 when an estimated 20,000 were killed in that town. It was the culmination of three years of a vicious circle of fighting and repression. At one stage, fighters from the Muslim Brotherhood invaded a military training college in the northern city of Aleppo and slaughtered dozens of young officers. In retaliation, the government killed hundreds of Islamist prisoners in their cells in a high security prison in the middle of the desert. The regime in Syria is particularly vulnerable to Islamic fundamentalism because it is made up of a minority sect called Alawites - who many Muslims consider not to be Muslim at all - whereas 70 percent of the population are orthodox Sunni Muslims. In 1995, the government released some 1200 political prisoners, including leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood implying that they no longer see at least that generation of leaders as a threat. The leader of the movement, Abdel al-Fattah Abu Ghuddah, returned from exile.

Yemen's Islah, or Reform Party has grown out of nowhere to challenge state authorities neck and neck for power. Founded in 1990, the Islamic party in this very tribal society was at first made up of tribal leaders as well as Islamic ideologues. Its first campaign was to boycott a referendum to revise the constitution on the grounds that Islamic law was only going to be the 'main' and not the 'sole' source for Yemeni law - a battle they eventually won in 1994. In 1993, the party won 62 seats out of 301 in parliamentary elections and gained six cabinet posts. The following year, they got the two prizes they were after - the education and justice ministries. Education minister Abd Ali al-Qubati introduced more Quran at the expense of science teaching in the schools and sacked thousands of teachers suspected of socialist and secularist sympathies. His counterpart in the justice ministry Abd al-Wahhab Lutfi al-Daylami dismissed most of Yemen's few women judges on the grounds that they had no competence in Islamic law.

The Islamists benefitted from Yemen's complex political scene in the past few years: north and south Yemen, both separate countries, united in 1990. Since then, the ruling parties of each section have been in constant struggle. Islah was perceived by the bigger ruling party, the General People's Congress of the north, as being less of a threat than the party of the southerners and so was encouraged at its expense.

Jordan is one of the laboratories for how political Islam can work within a pluralist system. In 1989, the Islamist block won some 34 out of 80 seats in the country's first parliamentary elections for a generation. They lost ground in the 1993 elections, when the Islamic Action Front won just 16 seats but remain a formidable force in Jordanian politics.

They have fiercely opposed King Hussein's policy of pushing through peace with Israel. When the treaty was signed in November 1994 they organised a march of 5,000 people through the centre of the capital Amman and have effectively boycotted all contact with Israel.

The mainstream Islamic Action Front condemns all violence in Jordan but in 1996 the government said that a group called the Islamic Renewal Group had planned attacks. But the Muslim Brotherhood go back 50 years in Jordan and in general a picture is emerging of a group which increasingly flexes its muscles but also knows how to play by the rules of a complex parliamentary democracy.

There is a battle, involving Islamic slogans, raging right now in Bahrain which in the long term is likely to have only one outcome - the removal of the present royal family from power. The country's Shiite majority - traditionally poor and excluded - have been demanding since late 1994 the restoration of a parliament that Sheikh Isa peremptorily dismissed in 1975. But there are deeper problems. The ruling family and the power and money elite are Sunni Muslims and the demonstrations have inevitable taken on a sectarian religious air.

The scale of the problem has been huge for such a small place - the government itself has admitted to holding over 2,000 prisoners at one time in a population of only 400,000. Reports of torture are widespread  and many have been killed. The main opposition group is the Islamic Front for the Liberation of Bahrain, led by Sheikh Abdel Amir al-Jamri.

In many ways, Saudi Arabia is already an Islamic fundamentalist state and has been for the last 200 years. It was in the late 18th century that ibn Saud, a bedouin tribal leader joined forces with an ultra-purist Wahhabi to impose one of the strictest interpretations of Islamic law ever known.

The Quran is officially the constitution of Saudi Arabia. Women are barred by law from driving. Christian and Jewish archaeological sites have been systematically razed to preserve Islam's monopoly on the land where the Prophet Muhammad walked, and there are scores, sometimes hundreds of public executions every year.

And, of course, just to make things more confusing, Saudi Arabia has come under threat in recent years from... Islamic fundamentalists. They planted a bomb which killed 19 US servicemen at al-Khobar in 1996 and vow to bring down the royal family, which they accuse of massive corruption.

Turkey also faces an Islamic fundamentalist movement, albeit a peaceful one, and experienced its first Islamist prime minister in modern times in 1996. Back in the 1920s and 1930s Kemal Ataturk ('the Father of the Turks') did things that no ruler would feel strong enough to do today. In a massive drive to modernise Turkey after the collapse of its Ottoman Empire, he changed the alphabet of the country away from Arabic script to use Latin script, sending grown men and women back to school to learn it. He also banned the fez, the traditional head-dress of Muslim men in Turkey, had policemen rip the veil off women's heads and banished religion from the class-room. It was a social revolution that took deep roots.

Turkey's army see themselves as the inheritors and protectors of this proud drive to become a modern, European country. But for the past few years the Refah Islamic party have been challenging Ataturk's vision of a secular country and are gaining ground. Refah was founded in 1974 and came to prominence in the anarchic days of 1980, when pro-Islamic protests in Turkey resulted in a military coup and the banning of many political parties, including Refah, for many years. They began, as many Islamist movements did, with drains, bus services and litter - municipal politics.

Refah's real coup was in parliamentary elections in December 1995, when they won 21 percent of the vote and gained the most seats of any single party. The other parties conspired to keep them out of government for a few months but in the summer of 1996 Necmettin Erbakan became prime minister of a coalition government led by the Islamists.

This wily old politician, an ex-professor of physics who worked in Germany for many years, lasted just about a year before the military finally managed to remove him. In some ways it was a proxy battle. Erbakan made a public show of turning east and improving relations with Iran and Libya. But he never cast the democratic process into doubt, and eventually agreed to leave power even though it was pressure from the unelected generals that was forcing him to do so.

A war also raged between Muslim Eritrea and Christian Ethiopia.  

Armenia is in conflict with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh. The result of fighting between Muslim Azerbaijans and Christian Armenians was 35,000 casualties. Armenia was shrunk because of territory "gained" by the "breeding-with-a- vengeance" Muslims population.  Serbian Moslems looted Christian treasures, in the process of destroying 107 churches and monasteries, both ancient and modern. 

In the former Soviet Union, breakaway Muslim republics (and their 55 million Muslims)... Chechnya , Daghestan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan... have sparked  insurrection against pro-Russian regimes. 

Islamic fundamentalism rose in Lebanon in the 1970s under a charismatic preacher imported from abroad - Imam Mousa Sadr. As elsewhere, what began as a movement focused on political self-assertion and civic pride quickly developed in this case into Islamic militants who fight Israel along the southern borders of the country.

Radical fundamentalism in Lebanon was largely a Shiite Muslim phenomenon. Shiites had traditionally been the underclass in a Lebanon dominated by wealthy Maronite Christians, coming up from the villages of the south to work as building site labourers, kitchen porters or other menial jobs in the capital Beirut.

Sadr, a tall man with sparking green eyes, came from Iran in the 1950s to campaign for more resources for the Shiite community - schools and hospitals - and began to address their second class political status. He was no ordinary mulla. An urbane chain-smoker with considerable charm, he admired Martin Luther King and gave sermons in Lebanon's Christian churches. He also forged a mosaic of alliances right across the Middle East's bubbling political spectrum. Huge posters of him still adorn Shiite villages and slums in Lebanon, 20 years after he disappeared on a trip to Colonel Gaddafi's Libya. Middle Eastern grapevines still run wild with rumours of what happened to him.

If the movement became radical when Lebanon's civil war started in 1975, it became revolutionary when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 to expel Yasser Arafat's PLO. Sadr had started Amal, a fighting wing, which now resisted the occupation and was joined by Hizbollah ('The Party of God'), a new Shiite guerrilla group sponsored by Iran, then in the heat of its Islamic revolution. That year, they blew up a compound in Beirut where US marines were housed, killing over 200 of them and leading directly to the decision to leave Lebanon.

They started taking hostages from Western countries - partly to get money, partly to get media attention and partly because of a paranoia which led fighters in Lebanon's Islamic groups to blame a faceless West for everything which had happened since the civil war started in 1975. Terry Anderson, Terry Waite, John McCarthy and Brian Keenan were just some of the hostages who were held for years in the dingy, concrete block suburbs of southern Beirut while their captors tried to extort millions to release them.

Hizbollah also captured popular imagination in a grisly way when it started to make videos of its suicide bombers, complete with interviews with the heroes beforehand.
Hizbollah guerrillas launch Katyusha missiles from southern Lebanon - almost at random because of Israeli control of the area - into northern Israel. Hizbollah fighters and the Israeli army are locked in a prolonged duel in which many combatants get killed every year. Israel still occupies a strip of southern Lebanon which it calls its security zone, to prevent Hizbollah fighters reaching the border.

Ten thousand Lebanese Christians were massacred in 1860s, while over 100,000 were killed in the Lebanese civil war of 1975-1990. Thousands of women were raped. That war was provoked by Yasser Arafat's PLO.  Damour was once a thriving Christian Lebanese village until 500 (primarily young boys) were massacred and its population was expelled.  This sort of violence and intolerance symbolizes treatment of Christians by Muslims in the Middle East. 

Uighur Abd Allah Abd Al-Rasheed, the ruler of Xinjiang province, northwest of the country, near borders with Afghanistan has called for an independent Muslim state. The province, home to half of China's 20 million Muslims, is a hotbed of religiously-inspired separatism. Uighur give their region, which is rich with oil on the Afghan borders and the Islamic Central Asian republics the name of Eastern Turkstan. While the separatists once drew inspiration from Iran's Islamic revolution, they have more recently turned to militant forms of Sunni Islam propagated by Afghanistan's Taliban. Most of the aid for the militants comes from Afghanistan. Hundreds of the Chinese Muslims who belong to Uighur, have received military training in camps of Al Qaeda. 

The Phillipines has seen a bloody guerrilla struggle waged for the last 30 years in the name of Islam, on the southern island of Mindanao. It began in the 1970s when the Moro National Liberation Front started fighting the government for regional autonomy in the Muslim areas of the south. As long as Ferdinand Marcos ruled, there was little chance even of negotiations. After he left power in 1986, there were on-off talks throughout the following years and in 1989 a referendum was held on the island of Mindanao following which four provinces were given regional assemblies and the label Muslim Mindanao. But guerrilla conflict continued, carried on now not just as a nationalist struggle as a Jihad, or Holy War, by the MNLF but by breakaway more extreme groups including the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and the Abu Sayyaf group. In 1996, peace was finally concluded with the MNLF whose leader Nur Misuari became a regional governor. The other groups refused to accept the agreement but the level of violence has sharply reduced. It's a complex situation in that there are mosaics of Christian communities all over Mindanao, even in majority Muslim areas and the potential conflict is not just between rebels and the government but between citizen and citizen.

Islam has been a constant theme in Malaysian politics at least since its full independence from Britain in 1957. The Parti sa-Malaysia quickly attracted support in the 1960s and holds a power base in two northern provinces, Kelantan and Trengganu. It caused a furore in 1992 when it tried to impose Sharia law in the state government of Kelantan even over non-Muslims. There is constant friction between Muslims and the minority Chinese and Indian populations.  

Indonesia is the most populous Muslim country in the world - about 97 percent of its 160 million people are Muslims. Islam has crept into politics but in a subtle way. President Suharto, who has run a stern authoritarian government since he rose to the power in the 1960s after a communist uprising was put down at the cost of half a million lives, has put more of an Islamic accent on his government. He performed the pilgrimage to Mecca in 1991 and since then has added Muhammad to his name. The number of Christians in the cabinet has shrunk over the years and in 1993 a plan for a national lottery was stopped because popular feeling among religious Muslims was running high. Two articles in the L.A. Times wrote about Muslims in Indonesia forcing Christians of all denominations to convert to Islam or get their throats slit. Christian churches have almost been wiped out. 

Islamists in the 83 % Muslim country of Bangladesh aspire to establish a true "Islamic Republic" much like Afghanistan under the Taliban. Meanwhile, [according to The Nation magazine] members of minority religions have suffered from ghastly violence, including collective terror. Some Buddhists and Christians were blinded, had fingers cut off or had hands amputated, while others had iron rods nailed through their legs or abdomen. Women and children have been gang-raped, often in front of their fathers or husbands. Pakistani Muslim soldiers raped a quarter of a million Bangali women in 1971 after they massacred 3 million unarmed civilians. This atrocity is not considered a sin in Islam, because the religious leader of the soldiers decreed that Bangladeshis were infidels. In addition, hundreds of temples were desecrated and statues destroyed; thousands of homes and businesses looted or burned. As for Hindus, the human rights organization Freedom House reports they have been subject to "rape, torture and killing and the destruction of their cultural and religious identity at the hands of Muslims." In one indicative step, Islamists sometimes force Hindu women to dress in the Islamist fashion.

Under the revolutionary government, the role of orthodox Islam in Libyan life has become progressively more important. Soon after taking office, the Qadhafi government showed itself to be devoutly fundamentalist by closing bars and nightclubs, banning entertainment deemed provocative or immodest, and making use of the Muslim calendar mandatory. In November 1973, a new legal code was issued that revised the entire Libyan judicial system to conform to the sharia, including the punishment of armed robbery by amputation of a hand and a foot, flogging for individuals breaking the fast of Ramadan and eighty lashes to be administered to both men and women guilty of fornication.

Colonel Qadhafi himself is a devout Muslim and endeavours to impose Islam in the world. His government took a leading role in supporting Islamic institutions and in worldwide proselytizing on behalf of Islam. The Jihad Fund, supported by a payroll tax, was established in 1970 to aid the Palestinians in their struggle with Israel. The Faculty of Islamic Studies and Arabic at the University of Benghazi was charged with training Muslim intellectual leaders for the entire Islamic world, and the Islamic Mission Society used public funds for the construction and repair of mosques and Islamic educational centers in cities as widely separated as Vienna and Bangkok. Muslims in the Philippines are given funds for their guirrella warfare. The Islamic Call Society (Ad Dawah) was organized with government support to propagate Islam abroad and to provide funds to Muslims everywhere.

Chad

Colonel Khaddafy and his Libyan army have carried out numerous military excursions into neighboring Chad. There is fighting going on in Chad between Libyan-supported insurgents and the government. Also confrontation between Islam and Christianity is splitting the society, villages and families.

Egypt saw the earliest rise of an Islamic fundamentalist movement, in 1928, when Hassan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood. This group, preaching a return to Islamic values which included such precepts as 'Don't laugh too much', grew to be a mass movement in the 1940s when it embarked on a series of political assassinations. Banna himself was shot dead in the street. After Egypt's Nationalist revolution of 1952, there was a brief honeymoon with the new regime of the charismatic Colonel Gamal Abdel-Nasser of Suez fame.

But in 1954, bullets flew in the air near where Nasser was speaking to a crowd in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria and hundreds of Muslim Brothers were arrested. The movement was crushed for another 20 years. Then Nasser's successor Anwar Sadat let the leaders out of prison in the early 1970s and allowed them freedom to operate as a ruse to weaken the leftist opposition which he feared more at the time. It was a Pandora's Box. On October 6, 1981, a young army officer, Khaled Islambouli, led a group of soldiers who assassinated Sadat as he watced a fly-past of the Egyptian air force. Islamic groups were repressed again. But throughout the 1980s they slowly regained strength in the poor villages and slums of Egypt.

In the early 1990s two organisations, Jihad and the Islamic Group, made attempts at assassinating four ministers and President Hosni Mubarak. Over 1,000 people have died in political violence since. In a country where parliamentary political life is largely dead and Islamic fundamentalists were banned from taking part in elections, Islamists took control of many powerful trade unions and professional associations. They set up numerous charities, enjoy the support of a wide network of businesses, and established a social network of schools and hospitals to attract more support.

But the government gradually gained the upper hand in security and most violence was restricted to one province, Minya, in the south, where there are complicated local reasons for the strength of fundamentalists. New laws were introduced to reverse Islamist electoral gains in the unions and the government now keeps a tight watch on all charitable institutions.

In October 1997, two brothers attacked a bus load of German tourists in the middle of Cairo, killing eight of them. The government insisted that Saber Farahat, who had killed three foreigners in 1991 and then been assigned to a lunatic asylum, and his brother acted alone and had no connection to Islamist groups. But the two men themselves used Islamic slogans both during and after their attack. In November, a group of Islamist gunmen attacked Japanese tourists at Luxor, one of Egypt's major tourist attractions on the Nile.

Iran put political Islam on the map with its Islamic revolution of 1979. A year of street protests and bloody clashes led to the downfall of the Shah, a hereditary monarch, and installed a regime run by the religious hierarchy from the Holy City of Qom.

Across the world Iran came to represent what radical Islam stood for with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as its archetypal leader. This 80-year-old theologian had dogged the Shah for almost two decades with brooding religious rhetoric. Expelled from Iran, he launched his revolution from a suburb on the outskirts of Paris through good international telephone lines and cassettes of his speeches, which were smuggled into Iran, copied and listened to around the country. Although an ayatollah, the highest rank attainable in Shi'ite Islam's strict hierarchy, he also regarded himself as a mystic poet. He was reputed to look at the ground whenever he was travelling by car to avoid seeing the evil in the streets around him.

The new regime launched into its task with revolutionary fervour. Officers of the Shah were executed by the hundred, along with prostitutes and 'profiteers'. Students took the American embassy hostage and held US diplomats and their families for over a year - one factor in the defeat of Jimmy Carter in the 1980 US presidential elections. Alcohol was banned, women were forced to wear the veil, and 'hadd' punishments such as execution for adultery were carried out in public as Islamic law was introduced.

The United States, which had supported the Shah to the max, was denounced as 'the Great Satan' leading an immoral West.

After only 18 months, the Islamic Republic found itself involved in the longest conventional war this century when Saddam Hussein's Iraq invaded. Over the next eight years, about a million lives were lost on both sides.

Again, Iran provided what was to become the stereotype of an Islamic country at war. Boys as young as 10 signed up for the front, where they were used as human minesweepers. Iran often sent battalions of volunteers over the top to use what were euphemistically known as 'human wave' tactics.

Abroad, Iran was not averse to using its oil money to fund terrorist groups in the Middle East who carried out bombings and hijackings. It effectively sponsored the birth of the Hizbollah group in south Lebanon which is still fighting Israel. Its links to these groups led the United States to put it on a list of countries which support terrorism.

But by the time the war ended in 1988, the revolution was already cooling. Businessmen were tired of being isolated from the West and people were more concerned about bread and butter issues than the grand rhetoric of world Islamic revolution. The following year, Hashemi Rafsanjani, a 'pragmatist', was elected as president.

In the last few years Iranian rulers have constantly made overtures to the West, particularly the United States. Relations with Iran remain a touchy subject for Washington, scarred by the memory of the hostage crisis - and the Irangate scandal of the 1980s. Others such as Germany, Italy and Japan did billions of dollars of business with Iran but have been badly burnt recently by more practical considerations - Iran has not paid her bills.

Iran right now is in transition. There is no question of overthrowing the Islamic political system, but on the other hand a lot of the white hot fever of revolution has gone. Those teenage students who held the US embassy hostage are mostly either dead or hold fat, comfortable jobs somewhere in the bureaucracy. In the last presidential elections, the people voted overwhelmingly for Mohammad Khatami, the outsider who challenges the religious establishment that has ruled the country since 1979 - and its worth remembering that Iran is one of the few countries in the Middle East where free elections are held for the job of head of state.

Iran's relationship with Islam, in fact, has always been an ambiguous one. It was already a grand old civilisation in the seventh century AD when the Arabs conquered it in the name of what was then the new religion. Humiliated by wild tribesmen, Persians immediately fanned the flames of schism within it by joining the Shi'ite offshoot branch. Throughout its history since, it has swung between two identities, that of Grand Persia with its courts and kings and high culture, and that of Islam, which it embraced with all the fervour of a convert. Some say that the Islamic revolution is simply the latest swing of the pendulum and that, over the long term, it will inevitably swing back.

The ten-year Iran-Iraq War resulting in  the deaths of over one million deserving Muslims was said to have been fought over a land dispute.  This is not entirely true for the underlying hatred between two conflicting views of Islam was the major spark that ignited this conflict.  

The horrible crimes committed by Islamic terrorists against the Assyrian nation is a well documented fact. Between 1980 and 1988 the Iraqi regime exiled thousands of Iraqi citizens to Iran on the charges that they were of Persian ancestry. Many
Assyrians were targeted in this illegal and barbarous act. During this bloody war, it is estimated that up to 10,000 Assyrian men from Iraq were killed. The most disturbing aspect of this tragedy is that many of these Assyrians were killed in cold blood by their own Arab countrymen, just for being Assyrians. Ever since the invasion of their homelands by barbaric Muslims, the Assyrians have been fighting for their rights. The persecution of Assyrian Christians by the Islamic terrorists has brought them to the
brink of extinction!

The U.S.- Canadian border is 4,000 miles long. Nearly all of this runs along territory which can never be fortified! Those seeking to sneak into the United States can do so by simply crossing waist high streams or forested areas. Geographically, Canada is the largest nation on earth [nearly 6.2 million square miles] yet her population is but a puny 28 million. The earliest record of a Muslim presence in Canada dates back to 1871 when the Canadian census recorded just 13 Muslim residents! One hundred and ten years later in 1981 there were 98,165 Muslims. And now, just 20 years after that last census, there are 400,000 Muslims in Canada! There are more than 80 mosques in Canada, four of which are located in Ottawa alone. In addition to mosques there are numerous locations in most major cities where space (known as musallah) is set aside for prayer purposes. In fact, Muslims now outnumber the Canadian-Jewish population and Islam is now the fastest-growing faith in Canada. One out of every fifty Canadians is a Muslim!