Word: azhar
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...control. It was to this latter cause that Jaish-e-Muhammad was devoted. Official tolerance of these groups, and in some cases assistance to them, continued after Musharraf took power in a 1999 coup. The President was especially supportive of Jaish-e-Muhammad's leader, warrior-cleric Maulana Masood Azhar. When Azhar was released from an Indian jail in a prisoner exchange in December 2000, he was permitted to stage a huge rally in Karachi attended by gun-toting followers. In 2001 Musharraf even tried unsuccessfully to persuade the various Kashmiri guerrilla groups to unite under Azhar...
...crack down on extremist groups that in the past fed fighters to the Kashmir cause, carried out sectarian killings and attacked Westerners. In January 2002, at the insistence of the U.S., Musharraf banned five such groups. Yet the government has allowed them to resurface under new names. Abdul Rauf Azhar, formerly of Jaish-e-Muhammad, says, "We are still doing our work...
...Azhar is not just any militant. Indian police suspect him of organizing the 1999 hijacking of an Indian Airlines flight to secure the release of his brother Maulana Masood Azhar, among other prisoners, from an Indian jail. The two Azhar brothers top India's wanted-terrorist list, but Pakistan brought no charges against Abdul Rauf. Musharraf did vow to keep Masood under house arrest, but staff members at his ornate mansion in Bahawalpur say he is free to travel, give incendiary sermons against the U.S. and collect donations for the Kashmiri insurgency...
...looting and burning of the National Library and the Awqaf Library, which was the repository for material from private and mosque libraries throughout Iraq, are spiritual blows as well. Between them, the two libraries made Baghdad the largest, most valuable repository of Arabic books outside Cairo's al-Azhar Library. The National Library's prized collection included royal court records and thousands of documents from the earliest Islamic periods, along with thousands of books (many handwritten, some of them one of a kind) on Islamic law and practice. In the Awqaf Library, attached to the Ministry of Religious Endowments...
...Sudanese government executed a theologian named Mahmoud Muhammad Taha for daring to question the Koran. The sages at Al-Azhar University in Egypt had found Taha guilty of apostasy for a thesis he developed in his book, The Second Mission of Islam. Taha argued that the Koran contains two categories of verses: those that the prophet Muhammad recited in Mecca and those recited in Medina. For Taha, the Medina verses, with their emphasis on legal rules, were written in a historical context that no longer exists, so Islam should instead focus on the spiritual and ethical message revealed in Mecca...