Word: faithful
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Shari'a laws has come not by diktat from Jakarta but from the grassroots. A series of reforms implemented since 2001 has made Indonesia's regions more autonomous, giving local leaders unprecedented power in what, under Suharto, had been a deeply centralized nation. The bottom-up emergence of the faith-based laws lends legitimacy to those who say they represent a Muslim majority that was never well served by the capital's secularized-and often corrupt-political ?lite. "People in Jakarta may not understand this, but Shari'a is the aspiration of the people, because it makes everyone, even government...
...Salafi Islam is attractive because it says that if you are not rewarded in this lifetime, you will be rewarded in the next," says Jakarta scholar Anwar, who as a student leader around the time of the Iranian revolution considered himself radical, then later gravitated toward a more moderate faith. "It's hard to compete against that ideology. Being moderate is more subtle and complex. It's harder to sell...
...They could not. For the next two decades Ghana was wracked by instability and economic mismanagement. A revolving cast of military leaders left people with little faith in their government and no chance to change things. It was a cancer eating the entire continent: beginning with the first successful coup in sub-Saharan Africa in Togo in 1963, there were at least 200 attempts to seize power in Africa over the following four decades, 80 or so successful. Bitter civil wars erupted, some of them tribal struggles for natural resources, some of them fueled by foreign powers...
...adviser to the Saudi government warned that if the U.S. withdrew its troops, the monarchy would arm Sunni insurgents. Saudi clerics have stepped up their denunciation of Shi'ites as heretics. And King Abdullah has endorsed toxic rumors that Shi'ites are trying to convert Sunnis to their faith...
...repression and prejudice and frequently reinforced by bloodshed. The hatred is not principally about religion. Sunnis and Shi'ites may disagree on some matters of dogma and some details of Islam's early history, but these differences are small--they agree on most of the important tenets of the faith, like the infallibility of the Koran, and they venerate the Prophet Muhammad. Despite the claims by some Arab commentators, there is no evidence that Iraq's Shi'ite extremists are trying to convert Sunnis, or vice versa. For Iraqi fighters on both sides, "their sect is nothing more than...