BRUSSELS , May 5: The President of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, underlined here Monday that Islam is part and parcel of Europe and he also condemned the concept of clash of civilisations.

"Islam today is part of Europe. It is important to understand this.One should not see Islam as outside Europe. We already have an important presence of Islam and Muslims among our citizens," Barroso told a press conference this afternoon after an informal dialogue between EU leaders and around twenty high-level representatives of Christianity, Judaism and Islam in Europe.

"We can be a European citizen being a Christian, being Jewish or Muslim or having no religion," he noted.

By Khabrein.info Correspondent,

New Delhi, May 2: Time magazine has once against put Sonia Gandhi in the list of 100 most powerful people in the world. The other two Indians who feature in the list are PepsiCo CEO Indra Yooyi and Tata group chairman Ratan Tata.

Sonia Gandhi, the Congress president and the chairperson of India’s ruling alliance United Progressive Alliance (UPA) is seen as the real power center in the country. It is another matter that she never gives any sign of her being the power center.

Muslims in Indian economy Part III

By M. Burhanuddin Qasmi

Haji Ajmal Ali was born in a marginal farmer family of Haji Abdul Majid in 1923. It was in the 1950s that Haji Ajmal Ali ventured into a new world, far from his native place, Assam, and started selling agar wood to a friend in Mumbai, who used it to make perfume. Soon, he joined his friend and set up his first shop-- Al-Hafiz Traders at Nagdevi Street, across Mumbai's famous Muhammad Ali Road and Crawford Market. There has been no looking back since that early beginning.

The 85-year-old Haji Ajmal Ali, whose five sons expanded his original business in herbal perfumes into a global network with over 500 outlets, hails from a small hamlet near Hojai in Nagaon district of central Assam. They now commute between Mumbai, Dubai, Jeddah and Hojai, where the Ajmals have their regional business headquarters.