Word: clericalization
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Many of the madrasahs, or Islamic schools, in Pakistan that produced Taliban extremists and affiliated Pakistani radicals are Saudi funded. So are some of the more strident Islamic schools in Indonesia called pesantren, after a strain of Islam close to Wahhabi thinking. Abu Nida, a cleric in Piyungan, Indonesia, says Saudi funding--he won't say from which group--enabled him to start his Bin Baaz Islamic Center. "The first prerequisite is that you have to be a Salafi pesantren to receive the money," he says...
They are now. That was evident last week when Indonesian judges sentenced Abubakar Ba'asyir, a conservative cleric who started Pondok Ngruki, an Islamist boarding school in Solo, and, according to several foreign governments, allegedly co-founded Jemaah Islamiah in the early '90s, to four years in prison for treason and immigration violations. But he was acquitted of charges that he ran the radical group and planned a series of Indonesian bombings (He has consistently denied involvement in terrorist activities, and is suing TIME for a 2002 article that links him to terrorism.) Only slowly are the citizens of Solo...
...heart of Najaf. Assuming that al-Hakim was still inside, many had thought he would have been protected from the explosion by the shrine's massive western wall and its huge door, the Bab-e-Kibbleh, which remained standing. But when the bomb went off, the 64-year-old cleric was outside the shrine and about to get into his car. He was killed instantly...
...cleric suggested they be taken to the Americans. The mob was disappointed at being denied a lynching, but in Najaf, nobody disobeys a cleric. At first the soldiers refused to accept the prisoners. As the cleric negotiated with the Americans, the mob began to think again about the "Wahhabis." One man pulled out a pocketknife and headed for the two men, who claimed to have come from Basra to visit the grave of a relative. "Kill the Wahhabis!" the crowd shouted. "Slit their throats!" Finally, the Americans took charge. A group of soldiers quickly bundled the two men into...
People in Najaf and other Shi'ite towns in southern Iraq think they know exactly what al-Sadr is capable of. In the days after Saddam's fall, his bodyguards were accused of knifing to death--at the gates of the mosque where al-Hakim was killed--the moderate cleric Abdul-Majid al-Khoei, who had just returned from exile in London. (At the time, al-Sadr told TIME that the bodyguards involved had been dismissed before the assassination and that he had nothing to do with the killing of al-Khoei.) In April, al-Sadr's supporters surrounded...