How to enable the rewrite feature in nginx 1.0.5?

I recently installed nginx 1.0.5 with php fpm, php apc and postgres. I just want to play around with nginx and learn how to configure the basic stuff. For extended testing I decided to install PHPBB3 (went well) to see if PHP + Postgres access work.

Now I want to learn how rewriting URLs works and already found out that the rewriting stuff should be written down in a location section in the nginx config.

But unfortunately nginx seems to ignore every rewriting rule I place in the config. So I am wondering if I have to somehow switch on the rewriting feature first?

nginx -V |grep rewrite shows nothing, furthermore installing nginx-extras didn't help. I just hoped that nginx-extras contained something like a rewriting module, but unfortunately this is not the case.

Searching serverfault.com and google did not help. So - what do I have to do? :\ Any help is highly appreciated.

PS: All packages were installed with apt-get install in Debian 6.

Edit: An excerpt of my nginx vhost config below:

server {
            listen 80;
            server_name domain.org www.domain.org;

            access_log /var/log/nginx/domain.access_log;
            error_log /var/log/nginx/domain.error_log;
            rewrite_log on;
            events {
                     debug_connection  <my ip>;
            }
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