Word: clericalism
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...Chaman border, tribal leader Achakzai listens to a village cleric oozing messianic praise of the Taliban. When the mullah gathers his robes and exits from the dark, carpeted room into a courtyard of flies and the blinding white light of the desert, Achakzai says with a grin: "Once the Taliban falls, that mullah will be cheering the return of Zahir Shah." Loyalty is something the Taliban can no longer count on among all its fellow tribesmen...
...Like many young Afghans, Omar was forced to trade education for a warrior's life when the Soviet Union invaded the country in December 1979. In Omar's case, he left a seminary in Kandahar; his poverty-stricken parents had enrolled him there to become a cleric. Fellow mujahedin fighters remember him as a good marksman who disabled many Russian tanks with his RPG-7 rockets. He suffered several injuries in the war, including the loss of his right...
...approaching stability at home. Musharraf's acquiescence was, of course, a disappointment to long-standing rival India, which is anxious to portray Pakistan as a hotbed of extremism and worried about signs of budding fanaticism within its own 150 million-strong Muslim population. On Friday, India's main Islamic cleric, Syed Ahmad Bukhari, said that if the "ulema announce jihad, it is obligatory for each and every Muslim to support...
When bin Laden began to write treatises against the Saudi regime, King Fahd had him confined to Jidda. So bin Laden fled the country, winding up in Sudan. That country was by then under the control of radical Muslims headed by Hassan al-Turabi, a cleric bin Laden had met in Afghanistan who had impressed him with the need to overthrow the secular regimes in the Arab world and install purely Islamic governments. Bin Laden would go on to marry al-Turabi's niece. Eventually the Saudis, troubled by bin Laden's growing extremism, revoked his citizenship. His family renounced...
...Today's well-educated extremist, who keeps in touch with his brethren in Algeria or Indonesia through the Internet, doesn't employ the fire and brimstone of the village cleric to justify terrorist acts. Instead, he sees the conspiracy against Islam in geopolitical omens: foreign debt, IMF restrictions, wars against Muslims in Chechnya and Bosnia, and the Palestinians versus Israel. But often this cool rhetoric masks a hair-trigger emotionalism, an angry hurt. As one senior Pakistani police counterterrorism expert, Muhammed Shoaib Suddle, remarked: "What drives people to this madness? It has nothing to do with reality but with...