Word: arabian
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Wahhab was born in a small central Arabian town in 1703 as the Ottoman Empire, which had dominated Islam's majority Sunni branch for centuries, was in its long, final decline. His seminal text, The Book of Unity, attempted to recover what he saw as the original, pristine state of Islam by pruning out "innovations" that had polluted its essential monotheism. Wahhab's list of corruptions was sweeping; it included Shi'ism, the faith's minority strain, and Sufism, its mystical tradition. He discarded most of the interpretations of Islam's four great legal schools in favor of an exceedingly...
...BRIEF HISTORY How one tribe eventually conquered and united most of the Arabian Peninsula...
...Hughes was also a flamboyant and gifted Hollywood figure. At 21 he produced a movie (Two Arabian Knights) that won an Oscar at the first Academy Awards ceremony. Before he was 25, he had directed and supervised the thrilling dogfights in the World War I fly-boy spectacle Hell's Angels, the flick that made Jean Harlow a star. Two years later, Hughes produced the best and most brutal of the early gangster dramas, Scarface. After a decade-long vacation from films, he made The Outlaw, a notorious Western whose main point of interest was Jane Russell's bosom...
...when he discovered the source of East Africa's Awash River, something several men before him perished trying to do. He later became the first Westerner to twice cross Saudi Arabia's vast, uncharted Empty Quarter. The punishing expeditions were chronicled in his best-selling book Arabian Sands. Subsequent years spent living in southern Iraq led to his second acclaimed book, Marsh Arabs. Thesiger continued to risk his life exploring the Middle East, Africa and Asia until he was 70, when he retired to live in a house without running water or electricity in Maralal, Kenya. His credo...
...while U.S. agencies are singled out for criticism, some foreign governments get a day pass. A hefty 28-page chunk critical of the Saudi Arabian government will be blacked out, say U.S. officials who have seen advance copies. The officials tell TIME that congressional investigators have compiled what they consider compelling evidence of Saudi indifference to the violent jihad movement, which includes many Saudi nationals. White House national-security officials and the CIA argued against releasing the findings on the ground that they would damage relations with a key ally in the Middle East. --By Michael Duffy and Michael Weisskopf