Word: abdelal
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...family's wealth came from the Saudi bin Laden Group, built by Osama's father Mohamed, who had four wives and 52 children. Mohamed had had the good luck of befriending the country's founder, Abdel Aziz al Saud. That relationship led to important government contracts such as refurbishing the shrines at Mecca and Medina, Islam's holiest places, projects that moved young Osama deeply. Today the company, with 35,000 employees worldwide, is worth $5 billion. Osama got his share at 13 when his father died, leaving him $80 million, a fortune the son subsequently expanded to an estimated...
...King Abdel Aziz University in Jidda, bin Laden, according to associates, was greatly influenced by one of his teachers, Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian who was a major figure in the Muslim Brotherhood, a group that has played a large role in the resurgence of Islamic religiosity. Bin Laden, who like most Saudis is a member of the puritanical Wahhabi sect of Sunni Islam, had been pious from childhood, but his encounter with Azzam seemed to deepen his faith. What's more, through Azzam he became steeped not in the then popular ideology of pan-Arabism, which stresses the unity...
...last four years of his life, Salim, a popular teacher of religion at an Islamic school, never left Nablus. Colleagues on the National and Islamic Committee, a collection of Palestinian factions that organizes protest marches and rallies, say he was open to compromise. "He was flexible and tolerant," says Abdel Sattar Kassem, a professor at Nablus' an-Najah University and a friend of Salim's. But he never attempted to hide his beliefs; Salim told TIME that the peace process had failed to restore Palestinian rights and deserved to be overwhelmed by violence. "Islam is a very merciful religion...
...from the Gulf region and overthrow a royal family he denounced as corrupt apostates, he turned his fire increasingly against America. The World Trade Center bombers may have been motivated by similar concerns - and they may have been inspired by some of the same militant teachings of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman - but the two don't appear to have been directly linked...
Washington's mistakes are sometimes so basic that its rivals can't believe they're really mistakes, and instead react as if they're part of a master plan. That observation by former Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser may hold true for the Bush administration's China policy. Beijing reacted furiously Thursday to President Bush's vow to "do whatever it takes" - including weighing the use of force - to defend Taiwan in the event of a confrontation, warning that Washington was "heading down a dangerous road." And President Bush's own backpedaling on those comments by repeatedly emphasizing the continuity...