Word: clericism
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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President Ahmadinejad has the advantage of looking like a poet, sounding like a lunatic and not caring whether the West likes him. But Iran has multiple power centers. There's an election next month, for example, in which a reformist former President is challenging a fundamentalist cleric to join the Assembly of Experts that oversees Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei. About 70% of the population is under 30, and there are at least 70,000 active blogs expressing all sorts of aspirations of a diverse people, including ones by the President (ahmadinejad.ir) and Supreme Leader (khamenei.ir...
...stop the bombers, generally believed to be Sunni jihadis. After all, American soldiers had recently been raiding the giant Baghdad slum, attacking Shi'ite militias that enjoy a great deal of popular support there. Inevitably, some Shi'ites put two and two together - and got 22: On Saturday a cleric representing Moqtada al-Sadr, who enjoys demigod status in Sadr City, accused the U.S. of ganging up with Sunni insurgents and jihadis against the Shi'ites...
...Sunnis do not have a single dominant cleric in the way that the Shi'ites have in the person of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. Al-Dari may head the AMS, which claims to include the imams of over 3,000 mosques, but unlike Sistani, he has never been able to mobilize the Sunni street. Despite the AMS's call for a boycott of the general election last December, Sunnis voted in large numbers. And even though al-Dari has heaped condemnation on the Iraqi Islamic Party (IIP), it has emerged as an important force in Sunni politics. An IIP leader...
...rallying to al-Dari. Many feel victimized by the Shi'ite political establishment and now see al-Dari as the personification of their community's predicament. On Sunni TV channels, newspapers and Internet bulletin boards, there is an outpouring of vitriol against the government and support for the cleric. A typical message reads: "We are your swords, O Lion Sheikh - From the people of Adhamiya." (Adhamiya is a Sunni-dominated neighborhood of Baghdad.) Several Sunni groups - insurgent, political and social - have paid "homage" to him, which is akin to naming him their spiritual leader...
...Despite his harsh anti-American rhetoric, U.S. officials have made at least two clandestine attempts to negotiate with Harith al-Dari; the talks never got very far because the cleric could never trust the Americans, and they believed he was actively involved in the insurgency. The U.S. was also never fully convinced that al-Dari would be able to rally the entire Sunni community behind...