Word: cleric
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Taliban acknowledged only 70 arrests for looting and defended their actions as necessary to transform Afghanistan into a devout Islamic state. But it is still a shadowy one. Last week the Taliban's leader, Maulana Mohammad Omar, a one-eyed former cleric who is also known as Commander of the Faithful, had yet to make an appearance, running the capital from his base 300 miles to the south in Kandahar. And the Taliban aren't finished fighting. The forces of ousted President Burhanuddin Rabbani, led by former Army Chief Ahmad Shah Massoud, are holed up 31 miles north of Kabul...
...country where the two tribes are hell-bent on destroying each other, where more than 150,000 people have been killed since 1993, where in July the last elected President had to flee for his life into the U.S. embassy, where he remains to this day. The Roman Catholic cleric would give no quarter to the murderers, either to the Hutu, who make up the majority of the country, or to his fellow Tutsi, who control the military. At a memorial for massacre victims last July, he declared, "Let me warn the killers and those who sent them: your crimes...
...army shelled a United Nations compound in the Lebanese village of Qana last April, killing more than 100 civilians. Threats have also come from Egypt's Islamic Group, which has pledged to strike at the U.S. for imprisoning its spiritual leader, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman. Rahman, a blind Egyptian cleric, was convicted last year of plotting to blow up the U.N. and several other New York landmarks. He is serving a life sentence in Springfield, Missouri. Speculation also surrounds the hard-line Palestinian group Hamas, which has vowed to attack the U.S. for agreeing to extradite Musa Abu Marzouk...
...murder of a young and idealistic clergyman--seem inevitable. As Smith tells it, the town of Wigan is a place of impacted resentments on the part of the miners and supercilious contempt on the part of the clan that owns the mine workings, ruled by a righteous and merciless cleric, Bishop Hannay. Into this nexus of bitterness and coal dust comes Jonathan Blair, a penniless, malarial and more than slightly gin-sodden African explorer. Blair, who was born in Wigan, would rather be anywhere else, but the wealthy bishop, whose hobby is African exploration--this is the era of Burton...
...escape the notice of a modern reader that this overabundance of plot is appropriate to a Victorian novel, not merely to a tale set in Victorian times. So is the central puzzle, which involves not only the story of the naive young cleric but also the distinctly unusual relationship between snobbish Charlotte, the bishop's chilly daughter, and Rose, a lusty "pit girl," or woman miner. It should not be overlooked that Rose is the novel's title figure. Smith's ending is not quite a hanky dampener, but it does bend a hard tale of murder and mine disaster...