Free Republic

The relations between Russia and the Shiite's religious leadership in Lebanon started to develop in the beginning of the seventies. The spiritual leader of the Lebanese Shia community, Imam Moussa Al-Sadr, visited Moscow in 1972 and asked Soviet authorities to issue humanitarian aid to his people. At the same time cooperation between the Marxist factions of the PLO that were active in Lebanon and Soviet military intelligence – GRU, intensified greatly. Several soviet officers (speaking fluent Arabic) even visited Palestinian terrorist training camps in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon between 1972-1975. Using their connections in PLO they managed to establish...

It must be a sign of the times that while the latest diatribe from the fugitive terrorist Ayman al-Zawahiri gets top media billing, the passing away of one of contemporary Islam’s most enlightened scholars receives virtually no mention. And, yet, Nurcholis Madjid, is certain to have a more lasting impact on the development of Islamic thought than either al-Zawahiri or his fellow fugitive Osama bin Laden. Madjid, who died last Monday aged 66, was one of Indonesia’s most daring Islamic thinkers and in large part responsible for the defeat of extremist and obscurantist currents that have emerged there in the...