IT’S OFFICIAL – George W Bush is a war criminal. In what is the first ever conviction of its kind anywhere in the world, the former US President and seven key members of his administration were yesterday (Friday) found guilty of war crimes. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their legal advisers Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, William Haynes, Jay Bybee and John Yoo were tried in absentia in Malaysia.

The trial held in Kuala Lumpur heard harrowing accounts from victims of torture who suffered at the hands of US soldiers and contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. They included testimony from Briton Moazzam Begg, an ex-Guantanamo detainee, and Iraqi woman Jameelah Abbas Hameedi, who was tortured in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison.

At the end of the week-long hearing, the five-panel tribunal delivered unanimous “guilty” verdicts against Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, as well as their key legal advisors. All were convicted as war criminals on charges of committing torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment. Full transcripts of the charges, witness statements and other relevant material will now be sent to the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, as well as the United Nations and the UN Security Council.

The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission is also asking for the names of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, Yoo, Bybee, Addington and Haynes to be entered and included in the Commission’s Register of War Criminals for public record.

The tribunal was an initiative of the ex-Prime Minister of Malaysia, Dr Mahathir Mohamad, who was a staunch opponent of the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. He sat through the entire hearing as it took personal statements and testimonies of three witnesses namely Abbas Abid, Moazzam Begg and Jameelah Hameedi. The tribunal also heard two other Statutory Declarations of Iraqi citizen Ali Shalal and Rahul Ahmed, another British citizen. After the guilty verdict reached by five senior judges was delivered, Dr Mohamad said, “Powerful countries are getting away with murder.”

War crimes expert and lawyer Francis Boyle, professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law in America, was a member of the prosecution team. After the verdicts were delivered he said, “This is the first conviction of these people anywhere in the world.”

While the tribunal is regarded by some as being purely symbolic, human rights activist Boyle said that he was hopeful that Bush and Co could soon find themselves facing similar trials elsewhere in the world. “We tried three times to get Bush in Canada but were thwarted by the Canadian Government; then we scared Bush out of going to Switzerland. The Spanish attempt failed because of the government there and the same happened in Germany.”

Boyle then made reference to the Nuremberg Charter which was used as the format for the tribunal when asked about the credibility of the initiative in Malaysia. Quoting directly from the Charter he said, “Leaders, organisers, instigators and accomplices participating in the formulation or execution of a common plan or conspiracy to commit war crimes are responsible for all acts performed by any person in execution of such a plan.”

The US is subject to customary international law and to the Principles of the Nuremberg Charter, said Boyle, who also believes that the week-long trial was “almost certainly” being monitored closely by Pentagon and White House officials.

Professor Gurdial Singh Nijar, who headed the prosecution team, pointed out that the tribunal “was very careful to adhere scrupulously to the regulations drawn up by the Nuremberg courts and the International Criminal Courts”. He added that he was optimistic about the tribunal being followed-up elsewhere in the world where “countries have a duty to try war criminals”; he cited as an example the case of the former Chilean dictator Augustine Pinochet who was arrested in Britain to be extradited to Spain on charges of war crimes. “Pinochet was only eight years out of his presidency when that happened.”

The Pinochet case was the first time that several European judges applied the principle of universal jurisdiction, declaring themselves competent to judge crimes committed by former heads of state, despite local amnesty laws.

Throughout the week, the tribunal was packed with legal experts and law students as witnesses gave testimony and then faced cross-examination by defence lawyers led by Jason Kay Kit Leon.

The tribunal heard how

• Abbas Abid, a 48-year-old engineer from Fallujah in Iraq had his fingernails removed by pliers.
• Ali Shalal had bare electrical wires attached to his body and was electrocuted and hanged from a wall.
• Moazzam Begg was beaten, hooded and put in solitary confinement.
• Jameelah was stripped and humiliated, and was used as a human shield whilst being transported by helicopter.

The witnesses also explained that even now they have residual injuries. Moazzam Begg, now working as the director of the London-based human rights group Cageprisoners, said that he was delighted with the verdict, but cautioned, “When people talk about Nuremberg you have to remember that those who were tried were all prosecuted after the war. Right now Guantanamo is still open, people are still being held there and are still being tortured there.”

In response to questions about the difference between the Bush and Obama Administrations, he added: “If President Bush was the President of extra-judicial torture then US President Barak Obama is the President of extra-judicial killing through drone strikes. Our work has only just begun.”

The prosecution case rested on proving how the decision-makers at the highest level -President Bush, Vice-President Cheney, Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld, aided and abetted by lawyers and other commanders and CIA officials – all acted in concert. Torture was applied systematically and became an accepted norm.

According to the prosecution, the testimony of all the witnesses exposed a sustained regime of brutal, barbaric, cruel and dehumanising conduct against them. These criminal acts were applied cumulatively to inflict the worst possible pain and suffering, said lawyers.

The president of the tribunal, Tan Sri Dato Lamin bin Haji Mohd Yunus Lamin, found that the prosecution had established beyond “reasonable doubt” that the accused persons, former President George Bush and his co-conspirators, “engaged in a web of instructions, memos, directives, legal advice and action that established a common plan and purpose, joint enterprise and/or conspiracy to commit the crimes of Torture and War Crimes, including and not limited to a common plan and purpose to commit the following crimes in relation to the ‘War on Terror’ and the wars launched by the US and others in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

President Lamin told a packed courtroom: “As a tribunal of conscience, the Tribunal is fully aware that its verdict is merely declaratory in nature. The tribunal has no power of enforcement, no power to impose any custodial sentence on any one or more of the 8 convicted persons. What we can do, under Article 31 of Chapter VI of Part 2 of the Charter, is to recommend to the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission to submit this finding of conviction by the Tribunal, together with a record of these proceedings, to the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, as well as the United Nations and the Security Council.

“The Tribunal also recommends to the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission that the names of all the 8 convicted persons be entered and included in the Commission’s Register of War Criminals and be publicised accordingly.

“The Tribunal recommends to the War Crimes Commission to give the widest international publicity to this conviction and grant of reparations, as these are universal crimes for which there is a responsibility upon nations to institute prosecutions if any of these Accused persons may enter their jurisdictions”.

British journalist Yvonne Ridley is also a patron of Cageprisoners

And while David Cameron’s government is willing to condemn the existence of this boil on the face of human rights in occupied Cuba, it remains silent about those being held in Wiltshire’s Long Lartin prison.

Most of them are fighting extradition to the US—a fight that has become even more urgent now that we have all seen US justice in action in recent days.

US justice means extrajudicial killings, targeted assassinations, and doing away with the need for a fair trial, or any trial for that matter.

I would hope, and expect, all of their legal teams now, as a matter of urgency, submit new appeals on behalf of their clients to stop extradition immediately to a country that simply cannot deal justly with those it suspects of terrorism.

Can anyone really give guarantees these men will not be put up against a wall and shot in the back of the head the moment they arrive on US soil?

Some of the men I’m talking about have been held since before 9/11 and one includes Saudi-born Khalid al-Fawwaz who has endured this legal limbo now for more than 12 years.

US intelligence says he is accused of conspiring with Osama bin Laden in the bombings of two US embassies. This may be true; I don’t know and neither do any of us until he is put through a fair trial. One thing is for sure—a key witness is now lying at the bottom of the ocean in a weighted-down body bag.

Prosecutors in New York have now charged Fawwaz with helping al-Qaida to orchestrate the 1998 car bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed 224 people.

A letter from a lawyer seeking to be appointed as Fawwaz’s US defence counsel said: “He [Fawwaz] anticipates extradition from the United Kingdom to the United States within the next few months to face these charges.”

The lawyer, David Kirby, told Reuters that he had been in touch with Fawwaz’s UK lawyers, who he said had told him they had exhausted all efforts to fight his extradition, and he could arrive in the US in the next few weeks.

In a move regarded as sinister by some, Kirby’s request to be appointed as Fawwaz’s US defence lawyer has been denied by New York Judge Lewis Kaplan of Manhattan federal court. He told him to reapply once Fawwaz arrives—so, no guarantees Fawwaz is going to even get legal representation!

If Fawwaz is already being denied a lawyer before he arrives to the US, does this mean they’re going to fast track him Osama-style to execution?

As I say, I’ve no idea if Fawwaz is guilty or not—that should be determined in a fair trial, but the reality is such things do not exist in the current incendiary climate of America.

What I do know is that he was arrested in 1998, after moving to London in the 1990s from Kenya with his family. In the UK, he is alleged to have established an organization called the Advice and Reformation Committee, a political group supposedly headed by Bin Laden that was said to be campaigning for peaceful reform in Saudi Arabia.

US intelligence says Bin Laden, through Fawwaz, published several threats against the US in the 1990s for keeping troops in the Kingdom.

Fawwaz has always denied any involvement with Bin Laden and rejected allegations that the committee was a British arm of al-Qaida.

Now that US Navy Seals have assassinated a potential key witness—on the orders of their Commander in Chief Barack Obama—the defense has been denied amajor opportunity.

Evidence supplied by other witnesses has been done so under torture and is therefore unreliable and inadmissible in most courts of law around the world.

Ahmed Ghailani, a former bodyguard for Bin Laden, was sentenced to life in prison in January over the embassy bombings, following a six-week trial in Manhattan. He was the first former Guantánamo Bay detainee to face a civilian trial in the US and had undoubtedly endured torture en route to the dock.

Of course, before he had his trial, he was captured in 2004 in Pakistan after a battle with government troops and then sold like a commodity to US intelligence to be tortured. Unsurprisingly, he was later found guilty of being part of the plot in which hundreds of were killed in twin bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

Four co-defendants of Ghailani were convicted of all charges, including joining an al-Qaida conspiracy to kill US nationals, during a 2001 trial in New York. All of this during a period when the use of torture was sanctioned and signed off by the then US President George W Bush and his cabal of neocons like Donald Rumsfeld.

It is worth remembering that both of these remnants of the US Administration, that launched the now discredited War on Terror, have to be careful where theytravel for fear they could end up in a court of law to answer for their sanctioning of torture and crimes against humanity.

In the light of recent events in Abbottabad, Pakistan every civilized country in the world must now suspend extradition proceedings with the USA and look for an alternative—maybe even The Hague.

Britain’s controversial extradition treaty with the US was brokered by a slavish Tony Blair Government and is deeply unpopular with British people, certainly no other country in the world signed such a deal which threatened sovereignty—it now needs to be scrapped by Cameron’s government soonest.

I don’t know the details of the evidence against the men in Long Lartin, men like Khalid al Fawwaz, but I do know every one of them would welcome his day in court—an open court where justice is seen to be done and where they have a right to a defense.

If we start handing over UK citizens and foreign nationals to a country that has no respect for international law, the Geneva and Vienna Conventions, and calls targeted assassination “justice” then we too become lawless by association.

And while I’m quite sure she and her friends registered their approval over the demise of Al Qaida chief Osama bin Laden, they must be wondering why the America Administration continues to make such a fuss.

Osama was, after all, no Hitler, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Stalin or Caligula – he headed no country nor ruled over a state; and in fact the last few years of his life have proven to be extremely reclusive, secluded and isolated.

Yet one week on and we’re being bombarded with dramatic headlines, videotapes and other insignificant, contradictory details of the raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

I know a presidential election is around the corner but Obama really does need to get a grip and a sense of proportion here.
Journalist Brendan O’Neill, editor of Spiked Online nailed it when he said: “The killing of the head of al-Qaeda has been treated as if it were a momentous occasion on a par with the Allies’ defeat of Germany and Japan in the Second World War.”

Raining on the US President’s parade he added: “..all that really happened in Pakistan is that a small group of American soldiers shot and killed an ageing, sickly man in a mansion, who was the nominal head of a small and increasingly fractured terrorist organization..”

I couldn’t have said it better myself but I’m often accused of being anti-American (totally untrue, by the way) because I say things that sadly Uncle Sam’s best friends won’t. The reality is the OBL news was a great day for Obama’s election campaign but equally a bad day for international justice.

What the Commander in Chief really did was order the summary execution of an unarmed and frail man whose body was then disposed of by being dumped in the sea, without the legal requirement of a post mortem examination. It was almost as though they were afraid of the corpse.
This actually made the most powerful nation in the world look incredibly weak and cowardly; too afraid to put OBL on trial as was done with Second World War Nazi leader Adolf Otto Eichmann.

For those who don’t know or want a reminder, Eichmann was captured, drugged and kidnapped in Argentina by Mossad agents in 1960 after fleeing Germany and living in hiding after the Second World War.

Eichmann was one of the chief architects of the Holocaust which involved the slaughter of millions of Jewish people, the genocide of the Romani and other minority groups including homosexuals, political dissidents and trade unionists.
The trial caused huge international controversy, as well as an international sensation but it was broadcast live with few restrictions so the whole world could see justice being done.

Eichmann was hanged on May 31, 1962, at a prison in Ramla before his body was cremated and his ashes scattered in the Mediterranean’s international waters to ensure no country would serve as his final resting place.

Importantly, the trial gave closure for many Holocaust survivors and the world was able to witness justice in action just as it had been in 1945 during the Nuremberg trials for the likes of Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess and Martin Bormann.
On a scale measuring pure evil, OBL was a mere pygmy compared to Eichmann and Hitler’s close circle.

But it was Western governments led by the US that fed, developed and nurtured Osama’s reputation for being the most feared, most wanted and most evil man alive. OBL himself must have been delighted, he couldn’t have done a better job than if he’d hired Hill and Knowlton or Saatchi & Saatchi.

His very name was deliberately used to panic ordinary Americans and so, I guess, it was hardly surprising that high school kids and frat boys in New York responded with undiluted hysteria and took to the streets on hearing Obama declare he was dead.
What a missed opportunity.

The Eichmann trial was a victory for justice and most people approved although the Argentinians who had their sovereignty breached were still miffed by the audacious kidnap, drugging and removal of the war criminal by Mossad.

Anyone who knows me and why work know I loathe the Zionist State and what it stands for, and that includes its intelligence agency Mossad but give credit where it’s due … there is good reason why Mossad shines above most agencies for its work and that is because its hallmarks, on the whole, are secrecy and discretion (we can revisit the blunders made by Mossad’s assassination squad in Dubai another time).

Similar reputations are enjoyed by the CIA’s nemesis Pakistan’s ISI which rarely responds to criticism or comment of its work, as well as Britain’s SIS, China’s feared MSS and Russia’s FSB.

At the other end of the scale is the Central Intelligence Agency who has been briefing the world’s media non-stop since the Abbottabad fiasco. Instead of remaining in the shadows the CIA team dissecting the intelligence data are singing like canaries on crack.
Well they do say that empty vessels make the loudest noise.

And just like George W Bush did on that horrific day way back in 2001, US President Barack Obama unashamedly wallowed in a flag-waving, nationalistic wave of emotion, crowing about national unity and everyone pulling together as he revealed the manhunt for the world’s most wanted man had finally been concluded.

It mattered not the al-Qaida leader was unarmed – that detail was kept back as hugely distorted stories zoomed around the globe about how the evil Arab used his wife as a human shield while firing off rounds at the heroic soldiers who risked their all for Uncle Sam.

The naked display of uncontrollable gung-ho emotion was bad enough but then a smug-looking Obama began sounding like Glenn Ford in a scene from High Noon as he lectured the world about “justice being done”.

To quote my favourite journalist Gary Younge: “This was not justice, it was an extra-judicial execution. If you shoot a man twice in the head you do not find him guilty. You find him dead. This was revenge. And it was served very cold indeed.”

Mercifully, in this sea of madness another sane voice in America also drowned out the hate-filled chorus and it came from an unlikely source – 9/11 survivor Harry Waizer.

If anyone had a right to jump up and down like a lunatic at the show of a full moon it was him, but instead of adding to the hatefest he said: “I just can’t find it in me to be glad one more person is dead, even if it is Osama Bin Laden.”

I hope now that America’s Number One Bogeyman is no more the USA returns to some semblance of normality that has been absent from its landscape since the now discredited War on Terror began.

And I hope that the US Administration will stop using the politics of fear on its own people who have been ruthlessly hyped up in to a state of advanced paranoia at every opportunity. High days and holidays have been blighted by accelerated levels of terror alerts while the latest airport scares and the latest suspect parcels have brought major cities and their transport networks to a halt.

While it is always dangerous to generalize the American people appear to have been kept suspended in fear ever since 9/11 – the reality is ordinary citizens have more chance of being shot in their backyard than be killed by a terrorist.

30,000 innocents die every year in gun-related crime – that’s a 9/11 multiplied by ten – but the close relationship with deadly weapons shows no sign of abating in trigger-happy America.

In terms of a violent society and armed citizens, the US is in a league of its own and sadly the state of disregard for the law and justice filters all the way down from The White House.

That the most powerful man in the world can stare straight into the cameras and say: “Justice was done” over Bin Laden’s murder borders on absurdity; it’s almost Pythonesque.

Real justice would have involved an arrest, a trial by jury and a sentence in an international court should the thought of holding him on USA soil prove too frightening.

Real justice would not have involved shooting an unarmed man in front of his wife and children – there were no bodyguards in the house in Abbottabad in Pakistan.

Real justice would not have involved charging into someone else’s country with armed forces unannounced, if indeed that was really the case in Pakistan.

I’m surprised David Cameron, the British Prime Minister and other political leaders went into congratulatory mode in the House of Commons over the whole saga.

Had it not occurred to them that if OBL had chosen to hide out in Didsbury, Tooting or Chipping Norton then US Special Forces would have come into the UK all guns blazing?

I wonder would Cameron have gushed forth with undiluted praise then?

We don’t know who America’s next Bogeyman is going to be, but what if he does live in Britain or chooses to hide in the UK? What then? Do we sit back and allow America to breach our sovereignty in the name of US justice?

Are there any real guarantees that we won’t have US Navy Seals bursting into our neighbourhoods anytime soon?

OK, it’s highly unlikely but not impossible. This is what happens when there’s total disregard for international law, Vienna and Geneva conventions et al.

Distinguished QC Geoffrey Robertson is a man I’d like to lock in the Oval Office with the Commander in Chief for maybe 30 minutes. A renowned international human rights lawyer, he is not at all impressed by Obama’s interpretation of justice.

Writing about the OBL killing he said the law “permits criminals to be shot in self-defence. They should, if possible, be given the opportunity to surrender, but even if they do not come out with their hands up, they must be taken alive, if that can be achieved without risk. Exactly how Bin Laden came to be shot (especially if it was in the back of the head, execution-style) therefore requires explanation. Why the hasty “burial at sea” without a post-mortem, as the law requires?”

Why indeed? The trouble is various US Administrations have lied to the world – lied about the reasons for going to war in Iraq, lied about the existence of WMD, lied about Saddam being in league with al-Qaida.

And the problem with serial liars is that when they do tell the truth no one believes them.

Once again America has managed to shoot itself in the foot in the name of justice – a justice that has earned the admiration and praise of the chairman of the Israeli parliamentary Committee for Foreign Affairs and Security.

Shaul Mofaz of the right wing Kadima is now urging the Zionist Government to assassinate Palestinian leaders like the “US did with Osama bin Laden”.

He seems to have overlooked the fact that Israel has been “doing an Obama” for years as the leadership of Hamas can testify.

Nevertheless, it seems that even though international law prohibits the use of extra judicial assassination policies, various states of terror may now starting “Doing an Obama”.

After bringing an end to the biggest manhunt in US history, the US President has managed to snatch a defeat from the jaws of victory.

Faces of young men stared back at me from family portraits proudly hung in the central square Benghazi and what struck me was how young they were.

Just a few weeks ago I stood on a public platform and vigorously slammed proposals for Western military intervention in Libya.

The hasty scramble by the Americans, French and Brits lacked strategy and a clear goal.

To me it appeared to be yet another oil-fuelled, reckless act by gung-ho leaders who would end up being sucked in to a long military campaign as futile as the Bush-Blair adventures into Iraq and Afghanistan that we are still paying for in terms of wasted lives.

“Here we go again,” I said. “Another imperialistic adventure with the long-term aim of getting our grubby hands on other peoples’ oil.”

To those few Libyans present, I warned they would live to regret this pact with the West that I likened to jumping into bed with the Devil.

Being very conscious of the fact I’m not a Libyan and desperate at not wanting to be seen as another opinionated Westerner sticking my nose into matters I didn’t understand, I sought the views of many Libyan friends and contacts.

Their reaction was mixed, but more often than not I was told that without outside help the Libyan people would be slaughtered by Gaddafi who himself described those who opposed him as cockroaches that needed to be crushed.

To justify my stand I reasoned that all revolutions are bloody and that the heroic people of Tunisia and Egypt had paid the blood price in their hundreds to win freedom.

I even recounted Malcolm X telling people that if they were not prepared to die for it they should remove the word freedom from their vocabulary.

Of course making grand statements from platforms in central London is one thing but going to see for myself what was happening on the ground was something else.

My few days in Libya proved to be extremely humbling, illuminating and provided me with a reality check.

I was wrong about opposing military intervention. No if, buts or maybe – I was wrong, wrong, wrong.

The people of Libya would have been brutally crushed without mercy if the West had not responded to their cries for help.

Perhaps the greatest shame is that Arab leaders stood by emotionless as the Libyan people begged everyone and anyone for help to bring down Gaddafi.

Some of those Arab leaders had no such hesitation in answering cries for help from the oppressive royal regime in Bahrain … obviously the Saudis and rest of the GCC cabal felt uncomfortable helping to bring down an evil, brutal, dictator who routinely abused and oppressed his people while happily propping up another.

It could have been an opportunity for the rising regional power Turkey to step in to the breach but to the massive disappointment of the Libyan people Recep Tayyip Erdogan refused to become embroiled.

So in the end the West did intervene and although the blood of innocents is still flowing in the streets at least it is not a torrent.

And maybe this is a war led by no one, with no particular aim but the enforcement of the No Fly Zone has prevented a massacre.

That is the view held by one of Libya’s spiritual leaders Sheikh Mohammed Bosidra who told me: “We had no choice. It was either make a pact with NATO or be crushed. It was a matter of survival, as simple as that.”

However many have already paid the ultimate blood price. Each town and city has a special place for its martyrs, and there are many. Faces of young men stared back at me from family portraits proudly hung in the central square Benghazi and what struck me was how young they were.

In Derna, more portraits of the sons of Omar Al-Mukhtar hung in the town centre and some of the bodies have been buried in a cemetery next to the tombs of three Sahaba and 70 other martyrs who fought against Roman and Byzantine forces in 692AD.

“We have a very fine tradition of producing martyrs in Derna and that is why Gaddafi hates the people of Derna more than anywhere else in Libya,” one woman told me.

And then she pointed to a French Tricolore and a Union Jack whispering: “Thankyou, we will never forget what you have done for us.”

I admit I felt uncomfortable, even a fraud, on several different levels by accepting her thanks. Usually I end up apologizing for the deeds of various British governments and Empire so this was something new for me.

We are still not clear what is the endgame of the NATO-led force, but the Libyan people are crystal clear in one thing: Gaddafi must go.

Only then can they begin to work out the next move, and it won’t be easy.

The Transitional National Council, says it is committed to liberate every part of Libya from Aamsaad in the east to Raas Ajdair in the west, and from Sirte in the north to Gatrun in the south.

But from what I could see the mission is unstable and unpredictable, chaotic, disorganised and confused.

However, what is undeniable is the bravery and courage of the Libyan people who we in the media routinely refer to as rebels … these people are not rebels. They are shopkeepers, students, doctors, businessmen and mechanics who have never owned a gun or wanted to pick one up in anger, until now.

And yet there they are, tens of thousands, prepared to die for freedoms and liberties they’ve never known in Gaddafi’s 41-year rule.

I was moved to tears by a regiment of young men who marched, rallied and chanted demanding to be sent to the front lines in Misrata to help their brothers in arms.

Their personally-delivered message in Benghazi was to the members of the interim government and they were extremely critical of some elements of the TNC who they said were more interested in parading around with bodyguards intoxicated with the little power they had than making real decisions.

The criticism of the leadership was stinging but reassuring that these young men were not blind to the shortcomings of their own. Too often in the Middle East people are blind and unquestioning in their loyalty to their leaders.

It is clear to me that once Gaddafi is gone – and he will go – that the Libyan people will not replace him with another tyrant or a Western puppet. Whatever government and constitution they choose will be one of their own making.

But first we in the West must give them all the help and support they need to accomplish the removal of Gaddafi until it is time for NATO to go in a dignified exit.

And who knows, for once, Western intervention might just be regarded as a force for good.

* British journalist Yvonne Ridley is European President of the International Muslim Women’s Union.

Welcome to Tora Land, declares the headline on a magazine rack which caught my eye as I was swept along in the rush hour inside Cairo’s chaotic train station.

The bold declaration on the glossy front page confirms two things. The first is that Egyptians have a great sense of humour and the second is that the Peoples’ Revolution continues to have a seismic impact on the country’s political landscape.

Tora is the name for a notorious prison complex on the outskirts of Cairo and since most of the former government – including Hosni Mubarak’s two sons – are now resident there you can begin to understand the tongue-in-cheek headline.

Everyday there are new arrests, new charges among the corrupt elite and it seems no one is immune from the Egyptian prosecutors.

This has, for many, turned in to a revolving door revolution as those once in prison for daring to stand up to Mubarak and his iron rule are now on the outside while their tormentors are replacing them behind bars.

It is indeed poetic justice … but sadly not for all; it seems there are some buried so deep inside the brutal prison system that they’ve been all but forgotten.

As the Egyptian Revolution hurtles breathlessly towards its 100th day there is still a group of prisoners who appear to have been abandoned in all of the excitement heralded by the arrival of the Arab Spring.

The forgotten few number just over 100 residents of Al’aqrab that, an Arab word which means the Scorpion.

It’s an apt name for a prison buried away in the desert sands that once concealed the treasures of Tutankhamun. Now those grains hide even more secrets that mask the real depth of wickedness and depravity plumbed by Egypt’s Last Pharaoh Hosni Mubarak.

The Scorpion Prison is a hellish institution that former prisoners told me became the blueprint for Guantanamo, the world’s most notorious jail.

In fact this is Egypt’s own version of Guantanamo.

The high security super max is two kilometres from the main entrance to the official Tora cluster of prisons where former government ministers now reside in comparative comfort.

Some of the monsters who served Mubarak will even have signed off on the torture endured by the Scorpion inmates whose day-to-day existence is quite different to those which house the Mubarak sons.

Many of the detainees have been held for years without trial or charge for simply expressing an opinion vocally or in written articles critical of Mubarak’s regime. Other were convicted of trying to overthrow Mubarak … the irony is that they did far less than those who rallied bravely in Tahrir Square just a few weeks back.

But while the revolutionaries are rewarded for heroic deeds and derring do with hard won freedoms and liberties, the 100 or so languishing behind the high walls of The Scorpion fear the have been completely forgotten.

Their voices remain unheard in the forboding complex hidden behind an imposing seven metre high wall that is protected by heavily fortified, armour-plated gates.

According to the Ikhwan website Al’aqrab was the brainchild of a group of officers who spent five years training in the US under  the FBI.

On their return the Scorpion and its H blocks were built and opened by May 30 in 1993.

Prison staff have the power to cut off water, light and electricity and close individual windows at the flick of a switch as punishment. Twenty other cells are used purely for solitary confinement.

It seems the ‘American idea’ worked so well that the Scorpion model was replicated in the spring of 2002 at the US military base Guantanamo Bay in Occupied Cuba.

As I relayed the description of its interior to Moazzam Begg, Director of the London-based NGO Cageprisoners, he winced in recognition. The layout was, indeed, familiar to the former ex-Guantanamo detainee who spent three years in the American version of The Scorpion.

Mubarak’s Ministry of Interior moved detainees from Liman, Istekbal Tora and Abu Zaabal to the new supermax jail and it is thought at one point around 20,000 so-called enemies of the state were being held without trial or charge.

But there could be other political prisoners held elsewhere in the prison system in Egypt – at this stage, we simply don’t know.

But rumours abound of what has gone on behind the high walls of The Scorpion even today and include harrowing tales of torture, abuse and years of solitary confinement without sunlight.

While all of the Muslim Brotherhood’s political prisoners have now been released from across Egypt the agony continues for the inmates of The Scorpion Prison that is so well hidden from the nearby Cairo-Alexandria desert highway and is about 20 kilometres south of the Egyptian capital.

Most of the men belong to the now defunct group Talae al-Fatah, Jihad, al-Gama’h Al Islamia and other Islamic groups and although the majority signed so-called “adoption of repentance papers” years ago they are still held with little or no  prospect of a trial.

Some have gone years without family visits, whipping, flogging and electric shock treatments as well as collective punishment has defined the “Scorpion Experience”. Of the 20,000 or so who have passed through its gates around 15 per cent are believed to have died.

The secretive and sinister Ministry of Interior has succeeded in hiding these men from the outside world in all that time but even today it seems justice is as elusive as ever.  Let’s hope they will soon be able to join in and enjoy the Arab Spring and celebrate the 100th day of the Egyptian Peoples’ Revolution – if justice is going to be one of the cornerstones then the sooner these men are set free or put on trial the better.

* British journalist Yvonne Ridley is a patron of Cageprisoners – it’s website is http://www.cageprisoners.com

I was standing next to a woman, and, with tears in her eyes she revealed she had been inside the embassy that morning to get passports for herself and her family. Her face looked vaguely familiar but I could not remember where we had met previously.

Just a few weeks ago she would not have been allowed to put one foot over the threshold but this time she was welcomed like a long lost daughter and given the red carpet treatment by the embassy staff – one even asked if she wanted to meet the Ambassador.

The more she talked the more I knew that we had met previously, but where?

Then we began speculating about the deposed dictator Zine el Abidine Ben Ali and his truly awful wife Leila who, we now know thanks to Wikileaks, fancied her chances of becoming the next leader of Tunisia when her ageing husband either stood down or expired.

We both laughed at the irony of the location of their current bolt-hole … Saudi Arabia, The Land of the Two Holy Mosques and wondered how Ben Ali and Leila Trabelsi were coping with hearing the athan, or call to prayer, five times a day.

They had banned the athan from being played on state television, shunned fasting during Ramadahn and dismissed the hijab as being a foreign import and not part of the Tunisian culture.

Let’s just say they made it up as they went along and if they wanted fatwas they would wheel out their tame and obliging $cholars for Dollars.

Ben Ali, a brute of a man who made words and phrases like torture, detention without trial, political and religious persecution commonplace in Tunisia, is also credited with ripping off the hijabs from the heads of Muslim women. He banned them from wearing their scarves in schools, hospitals and universities and other public places.

He saw that the Holy Quran was banned and desecrated in the cages and dungeons where prisoners of conscience are beaten if they dared to pray outside of allotted times.

His brutal regime brought in happy clappy clerics whose narcotic-style preachings in praise of Ben Ali and his corrupt government certainly had the desired effect … it drove God-fearing worshippers out of the mosques.

No wonder the Muslim youth no longer clamoured to get into masjids on Fridays to listen to these khateebs who spent half the khutbah praising the President and his followers.

To our Christian friends, put it this way – can you imagine sitting in a church pew listening to some vicar or priest urging you to thank God for Tony Blair, George W Bush or Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheyney? Exactly!

My sister and I both wondered how Leila would view having to wear a black abaya, all enveloping cloak and veil, every time she steps outside her new home in Jeddah. I’m sure the Saudi religious police will be on hand to give the former hairdresser some encouragement.

Of all the places in the world those two had probably expected to end up I think it’s a fair bet Saudi was no where near the top of their list as they boarded the flight from Tunisia.

In fact what wouldn’t I have given to see the expressions on their faces as the pilot delivered the bad news. Sorry, we can’t get clearance for London, Paris, New York, Monaco or Geneva but how does Jeddah sound?

It was Ben Ali’s barbaric actions and abuse of the most basic human rights which prompted me to first go and stand outside the Tunisian Embassy in London way back in November 2006 and protest in defence of our Tunisian sisters … and their right to practice Islam.

This man and his godless wife despised the religion of their birth so much and everything it represented that they did their best to turn the country in to a secular state.

Did they do it to please themselves or the western powers which courted them and pretended to be their best ever friends?

I remember in February 2009 driving through Tunisia with the Viva Palestina convoy encountering literally hundreds of Ben Ali’s henchmen who did everything in their power to stop us from praying and attending Friday prayers.

The horrified expressions on their faces when we stopped our vehicles in the middle of the road and prayed in the street is something I will remember for ever.

I recounted the tale to the sister outside the embassy and again we both laughed at the ultimate irony Ben Ali and the light-fingered Leila (she is reported to have looted 1.5 tons of gold as she fled) were now languishing in Saudi.

How poignant, having been shunned by their fickle friends in the West,  it was Muslims who came to their rescue. Forgiveness is a major element in Islam and while it is far too early for Tunisians to even begin to think about that F-word, the ex-president and his wife should be grateful that some Muslims are prepared to show them the sort of mercy Ben Ali and Leila could never show their own people.

Now that he, in particular, has time to reflect on the brutalisation of hijab-wearing sisters, practising brothers and human rights campaigners, I wonder if he will discover the beauty of real Islam and not the distorted, diluted version he tried to force on his people?

I turned to the woman outside the embassy and wondered out loud if Leila will ever discover the beauty of the hijab. The words were barely out of my mouth when I suddenly recognized this woman.

We had first met in 2006, outside the Tunisian Embassy in London, at a protest. She had told me at the time in graphic detail of her own detention, abuse and torture at the hands of Ben Ali’s thugs.

I will never forget her dramatic words back then as she said in a shakey voice: “I came to London with my hijab still in my pocket.” I remember being moved to tears by her story.

And now she is planning to return but with her head held high and wearing her hijab with pride.

Like birds in a guilded cage, they are languishing in a palace in one of the most exclusive districts of Jeddah but the truth is Ben Ali and his equally odious and corrupt family have no where else to hide.

It should signal a warning to all the other despots and dictators in the region – Egypt in particular – that no matter how close you think you are to the West, in times of trouble they will drop you faster than a burning coal.

As one of the cruellest oppressors on the planet scrambled to board a plane to escape what some may consider a well deserved lynching, the truth is he had no idea where he was going.

So fast was his demise.

We were told he was heading for Malta, then France and Dubai and half a dozen other countries but the truth is no one wanted the 74-year-old.

A desperate man, he finally found a bolthole in the Red Sea port city of Jeddah on Friday, arriving around midnight after one-time close ally President Nicholas Sarkozy rejected a request for his plane to land on French soil.

Meanwhile frantic calls to the White House hotline and to Obama rang unanswered.

Once again America has proved itself to be a fickle friend just as the late Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi discovered when he went in to exile after his repressive regime in Iran was overthrown in the Islamic Revolution of 1979. The former Shah spent his exile in Egypt, totally isolated and shunned by the very same leaders in the West who had once supported him.

The Saudi government refuses to say how long he will be their guest but I like to think the many soldiers posted outside the palace’s half dozen or so gates are not there for Ben Ali’s protection but there to ensure he remains within the high sided walls.

Quite how this secular leader will settle in the land of the Two Holy Mosques is beyond me. Ben Ali despised Islam to such an extent he made sure his brutal enforcers abused and punished those God-fearing Tunisians who wore hijabs and grew beards.

For instance, the Ministers of Foreign Affairs and the Interior and the Secretary-General of Tunisia’s ruling political party, the Constitutional Democratic Rally, stated several years ago that they were so concerned about rise in the use of the hijab by women and girls and beards and the qamis (knee-level shirts) by men, that they called for a strict implementation of decree 108 of 1985 of the Ministry of Education banning the hijab at educational institutions and when working in government.

Police ordered women to remove their head scarfs before entering schools, universities or work places and others were made to remove them in the street. Amnesty International reported at the time that some women were being arrested and taken to police stations where they were forced to sign written commitment to stop wearing the hijab.

Perhaps someone should remind the Saudis about that and have him charged under Shari’a law just for starters.

Ben Ali’s hatred and fear of Islam can also be witnessed in Egypt where Hosni Mubarak rules with an iron fist. The prisons and dungeons of Egypt are jammed full of members of the Muslim Brotherhood and other dissenting voices and political opponents who are rounded up everytime an election is in the offing.

Mubarak’s betrayal of the Palestinian people and his irrational fear of Hamas speaks volumes also about his secular outlook and lifestyle which is at odds with Islam.

I was asked to leave Cairo in December 2009 by his Foreign Ministry after writing an article in which I said Mubarak had turned Egypt into America’s rent boy in the Middle East because of the huge sums of money he willingly took from the US in return for oppressing the people of Gaza and supporting Israel.

But now he must be wondering if bending over a barrel for Uncle Sam is really a price worth paying.

After all, no one grovelled more to America than Ben Ali. In 2005 he was even ordered to extend the hand of friendship to the Zionist State, a country which had bombed his own when Yasser Arafat’s PLO was headquartered in Tunis in 1986.

Did he object? No, in fact Ben Ali went one step further and invited the war criminal Ariel Sharon to visit Tunisia. Well, where has all that craven behaviour got him?

Just like the previous Tunisian tyrant, he happily kissed the rump of Zionists while belly-dancing in front of Western leaders who claimed to be among his closest allies.

Well, just where are his friends now?

He’s friendless, homeless and humiliated.

The first one is that men should stay well clear of becoming embroiled in expressing opinions on women’s clothes, unless of course you happen to be called Lacroix, Gaultier, Lagerfeld or Ghesquiere.

This was a lesson learned the hard way by former British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw who was pilloried when he questioned the nikab after asking a female constituent to lift her veil so he could see her face.

Could you imagine him making the same request of any female members of the Saudi royal household during one of his galloping missions to the Middle East?

Foolishly Scotsmen Gordon Brown and John Reid, hailing from a country where men wear pleated skirts and paint their faces blue, then waded in with the grace of a couple of dancing bears.

Even the Bishop of Rochester – a man who wears a pointy hat and a purple dress – chipped in his dislike of the nikab, full face veil or burka.

Of course they were all despatched very quickly by Muslim women in Britain who proved themselves to be anything but oppressed, subjugated creatures. And just to show there’’s real solidarity across women of faith and no faith, quite a few western feminists expressed their disdain at Straw and co while standing shoulder to shoulder with their Muslim sisters.

The second lesson is try and be sincere if you are taking up a cause. Sarkozy feigned his utmost respect for women by saying he felt the burka represented the unacceptable symbol of women’’s enslavement – today I can unveil him to be a purveyor of weasel words.

If he really cared about the subjugation of women he would seriously tackle the appalling levels of domestic violence French women suffer at the hands of French men – two million are victims of bullying, violent partners … a staggering 400 are murdered by their spouse.

So how many women in France actually wear the burka? The answer is a very tiny minority – so much so that when the BBC’’s Emma Jane Kirby went to interview a burka-wearing woman in Paris she couldn’t find a single one!

The former BBC’’s Europe correspondent went to the Muslim quarter in the capital but all she could find were lots of women of North African origin wearing hijabs. She was given blank expressions and shrugs of the shoulder when she asked if any of them knew women who wore burkas – and the local Islamic dress shops didn’t stock any.

As pointed out by one Islamic observer: ‘“The irony is that many Muslim women would say the current headscarf ban in France has created exactly this situation for them”’.

Well the real reason had nothing to do with the burka and everything to do with Sarkozy putting pressure on the Liberal Left, throwing a few cheap shots at the expense of Muslim women while trying to pick up a few votes at their expense as well.

Sarkozy, like many male politicians, is pretty gutless so in a pathetic attempt to disguise his real motivations in wanting to pick up votes, he invents a proposed ban of the burka as a defence of women’s rights. This, he knows will go down well with the French electorate who see veiled women as a threat to their liberal self esteem.

Using women to win votes is a common political ploy – I remember when Tony Blair and George W Bush claimed their invasion in Afghanistan was in defence of women’s rights and designed to liberate Afghan women.

Those two even used and pushed their own doting wives to stand in front of the world’’s media to justify their husband’’s invasion of the country – on a recent visit I can tell you there are few career women emerging from the rubble of Kabul.

So next time a politician tries to drive through any form of controversial measure or make a spectacular announcement, please don’t fall for the mealy-mouthed excuse that they’’re doing it for the liberation of women and/or ethnic minority groups.

Reading the weekend newspaper opinion pages and columnists, I was amazed at how many supposedly intelligent, feministas fell for the Sarkozy bull. But they did – hook, line and sinker exhibiting an astonishing shallowness in their writing.

I genuinely have a feeling Sarkozy is one of these weak-kneed, lily-livered men who trembles at the thought of empowered women. And I think the sight of a woman in a burka makes him feel inferior.

Could it be that because his wife – as beautiful as she is – has bared all for every man on the planet to ogle, that the very sight of a burka-clad female makes him feel insecure in his own relationship?

As any European schoolboy can testify from the pictures Blu-tacked to his ceiling, to the crumpled, sticky torn out, somewhat crusty pages of last year’’s GQ hidden under their bed, France’’s First Lady is the stuff of male fantasies.

I suppose there must be some men around who might get a kick out of the thought of pre-pubescent boys fumbling over pictures of their wife in the buff … or even dirty old, syphilitic men playing with themselves, but I wonder if the pocket-sized French Leader (a mere 5ft 5ins tall) is secure and confident in his marriage to a much younger woman?

Consider this, if a woman chooses to be veiled rather than show her face to a man, is she doing so to protect her husband’s feelings, in which case she could be seen as being compliant and servile, or – more importantly – is she doing so to protect her own face from the violation of a man’s eyes?

Could it be that some of these women, when peering out of their burkas at the French leader, feel so special that they do not want the likes of him staring at all of their features?

And this, I believe, is what disturbs Sarkozy because if burka-clad women don’t want to be peered or leered at by men like him then this would be seen not as a show of subjugation but a sense of female superiority.

Could it be that because every bloke on the planet who wants to, can study in detail every curve and crevice of his naked young wife, that the very sight of a burka-clad female makes him feel uncomfortable in his own relationship?

After all Mrs Sarkozy can be viewed in all her naked glory by anyone who can access the internet or a copy of last year’s GQ.

And then someone paid $91,000 for a naked portrait at a Christie’s auction in New York.

On top of that it appears someone stole hundreds of “highly intimate” images of France’s First Lady and an ex-lover a couple of months ago.

Fascinating stuff, but let’s not dwell too long on this subject, I’’ve yet to raise the third lesson Sarkozy needs to learn and that is: People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

A quick scratch beneath the thin veneer of public office reveals the French leader to be a sauteur.*

And the source of this information is non other than the long-suffering Cecilia Sarkozy, who had to put up with 18 years of being married to a man with behavioural problems including being mean, cold and a serial womaniser.

In the book Cecilia, published by Flammarion in January 2008, she said of her husband: “He has a ridiculous side. He is undignified. Nicolas doesn’t come over like a president. He has a real behaviour problem … He needs someone to point it out to him. I did it for 18 years and I can’t do it any more. I am the last person who can do it.”

These, and other, extracts incensed Sarkozy and his estranged wife’’s lawyers sought an injunction to prevent publication on the grounds that the book had invaded the former first lady’s privacy – not that it was inaccurate. The former French first lady Cécilia Sarkozy, divorced in October 2007, is quoted as criticising her ex-husband’s morals, his parenting skills and his fitness to be president.

That must have been extremely crushing and hurtful for France’s little emperor’. But no more hurtful than attacking and scapegoating harmless Muslim women. I wonder if he feels as though they are judging him from behind their veils?

Well we’’re all judging France’’s ‘Little Emperor’ now and the verdict isn’t a good one.

*Sauteur: A vulgar term for a serial womaniser

I don’t suppose you could imagine two more different images than soccer-mad, binge-drinking Westerners and the revolutionary PLO chief who turned the Palestinian keffiyah into a worldwide symbol of heroic resistance.

The reason why I remember the Palestinian issue quite so vividly is because the country’s capital Tunis was bombed by the Israel Air Force killing more than 70 people in April, 1986. It was a sledgehammer-nut act of pure revenge from the Israeli Government after three of their Mossad agents had been executed by PLO fighters.

Two Arabs and an Englishman had boarded a yacht in the touristy Cypriot port of Larnaca, and carried out the execution in cold blood. The Englishman, Ian Davison, came from my birthplace Tyneside and his part in the gunning down of the three spies caused quite a stir back home, as you might imagine.

I flew out to Cyprus to interview Davison in prison, it was a scoop which earned me an industry award but more importantly, it was one of those defining moments: a-road-to-Damascus-vision, which led to me gaining a true insight into the injustices against the Palestinians.

Now the reason images of drunken holidaymakers comes to mind follows an incident in which the husband of a friend of mine disgraced himself by getting horribly drunk on his first night at a Tunisian resort. He fell into the company of some local Arabs who managed to persuade the inebriated idiot to buy a camel for the bargain price of $500 dollars.

Threatened with having to spend his entire vacation selling camel rides on the beach, by his furious wife, he managed to persuade the locals to buy back the camel for a mere $200 dollars … the depreciation value of camels taken into account.

Of course, it appears, the present government in Tunisia would rather play host to a bunch of drunken fools and kiddy fiddlers from the West these days. Obviously the memory of the murderous Israeli blitz 30 years ago has completely faded now that the government has found a cash cow in the wallets and purses of soused westerners and European paedophiles who see the North African country as their playground. (German paedophiles in particular).

If you need proof of the fickle nature of the Tunisian president let me remind you that last year Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali suffered a huge dose of political amnesia when he invited the war criminal Ariel Sharon to visit his country. Has the man no shame? Apparently not.

Just like the previous Tunisian tyrant, he would rather kiss the rump of Zionists while getting on his knees to Western leaders than stand tall infront of his own people.

In fact thanks to the brutal rule of Ben Ali, I now think of something else whenever the name of Tunisia is mentioned. I think of torture, detention without trial, political and religious persecution.

Recently I joined a group of brothers and sisters at a rally outside the Tunisian Embassy in London, there were similar demonstrations held at Tunisian embassy buildings around the world.

It now seems Ben Ali is ripping the hijab off the heads of our sisters and abusing the most basic human rights and so we were protesting in defence of our Tunisian sisters … and Islam.

I know Jacques Chirac did the same in France, but France is a secular country in the West, not an Arab Muslims country in North Africa.

Curtains began twitching on the third floor as the protest outside the Tunisian Embassy in London grew to a few score. I was told someone was filming the protestors and, if any were recognised, their families would be visited back home.

This sort of intimidation is disgusting. One minute Ben Ali is trying to be more West than Westerners by talking of civilisation, modernism and human rights but all the time he is quietly sanctioning the brutalisation of our hijab-wearing sisters, practising brothers and campaigners for justice.

One courageous sister told me how she fled Tunisia a few years ago fearing for her life, and she recalled how she arrived in Britain with her hijab in her pocket.

Well it is high time Ben Ali and his revolting crew of craven ministers and hyprocrites are exposed and so I hope this column is copied and published elsewhere.

It is important that Westerners learn about the cruelty and brutality of this leader. Perhaps they will think twice about heading out to the North African country to holiday now that they know not far from the postcard images there is real misery and torture.

The Holy Quran has been banned and desecrated in the cages and dungeons where prisoners of conscience are beaten if they dare to pray outside of allotted times.

Of course those pathetic, cringing, lick-spittling toadies who support this despicable Tunisian government will try and tell me about the president’s approval rating of 95pc. No one seriously believes that statistic … not even Ben Ali.

The man is as popular as a packet of pork scratchings at a Muslim wedding.

If he really thought he had 95pc of Tunisians supporting him he wouldn’t need to rule with a rod of iron and surround himself with huge security and thugs for bodyguards.

Like every dictator, his time will come and the sooner the better.

If he seriously wants the support of his people, their respect and a long term future as leader then he has to seriously change his style of government.

The first thing he can do is empty the prisons of political prisoners which accounts for around 30,000 of the 10 million population and start working alongside his political opponents, instead of trying to silence them.

As a priority I would also call on him to apologise to all of my Tunisian sisters and return their veils so they can wear them once again without fear in schools, universities, offices and factories.

I find it difficult to believe this man could hate the hijab so much that he even ripped it off the heads of pregnant women. I was astounded to learn that no one wearing a hijab is allowed into a maternity ward or hospital.

His deliberate plotting against Islam will come back to haunt him either through revolution on the streets of Tunisia or in the Hereafter. Personally speaking, I prefer revolution – bring it on!

Albert Einstein once said: “Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it.” Well he was born in Germany and not brought up in Tunisia.

However, I do salute the heroic resistance of the Tunisian brothers and sisters who are risking their very lives to protect Islam in defiance of the State.

Just as Ben Ali will receive his just desserts in the next life they shall also receive their reward, insh’Allah. Someone should tell the Tunisian tyrant that eternity is one hell of a lot longer than three score years and ten.

* To learn more about the struggle please read: Tunisia: Injured Islam by Sheikh Mohamed Al Hadi Al Zamzami