Word: cleric
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...miss out on the action. As Iraq convulsed in sectarian violence last week, al-Sadr was stuck in Beirut, on the final leg of a grand tour of Middle Eastern capitals. He was being feted by heads of state across the region, a remarkable achievement for a politician-cleric who has neither been elected to any office nor completed his religious education. After hearing news of the destruction of the Shi'ite shrine in Samarra, al-Sadr cut his trip short to return to Iraq to marshal his Mahdi Army, a militia of bristling young Shi'ites who had swarmed...
...Iraq, and their Sunni allies in the insurgency. Shi?ite reactions were swift and violent. Mobs from the predominantly Shi'ite Shu'lah neighborhood in western Baghdad attacked Sunni mosques in Ghazaliya, a nearby Sunni area. Gunmen were out on the streets of Sadr City, home base for rebel cleric-and parliamentary power broker-Moqtada al-Sadr. In Basra, there were reports of heavy street fighting between Sunni and Shi'ite gunmen. Elsewhere, Sunni political party offices were attacked...
...HAVE BEEN GREAT TO DO FIVE OR 10 YEARS AGO, BUT NOW YOU'VE GOT IRAQ AND A GENERAL PERCEPTION THAT AMERICA IS NOT A FRIEND TO MUSLIMS AROUND THE WORLD. I recognized going in that this is the work of decades, not of months or weeks. Bringing a cleric or a coach who perhaps was very anti-American to America, having them go home with perhaps a different view--that's not going to show up in a public-opinion poll in the next year. I told my staff this morning, "Sometimes I feel like I'm nibbling around...
...place--media outlets in France, Germany and Spain ran some of the drawings in a defense of press freedom. Many Muslims say the republications exacerbated their belief that the cartoons' sole purpose was to humiliate them. Meanwhile, the most violent reactions in the Arab world came after a Copenhagen cleric appeared on al-Jazeera in late January and mentioned rumors that Danes planned to burn copies of the Koran in Copenhagen's City Hall Square. No copies were burned. In early February, almost three months after refusing to meet with the 11 Muslim ambassadors, Rasmussen summoned the entire foreign diplomatic...
...democracy helps relieve extremism in the long run, because the prosaic work of governing tends to make ideological politicians more pragmatic. "Elections are just the start in his view," says a senior Administration official. It's encouraging, U.S. officials say, that powerful Muslim figures--including Iraq's most influential cleric, Grand Ayatullah Ali Husaini Sistani, and even some leaders of Hamas--have tried to quell the unrest over the Danish cartoons out of fear of a collapse in law and order. But even if that tames the passions unleashed over the past month, there's every reason to expect...