Word: hafiz
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...Lebanon may not be identical to Hizballah's, but they're just as vital. You have to go back to 1982 to understand what's at stake for Syria. On February 2 the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood seized Hama, one of the country's largest cities. Then Syrian President Hafiz al-Assad (the current president's father), convinced his regime was about to fall to the Islamic opposition, ordered his Special Forces to level Hama. Some 35,000 people were killed, most of them hostages. In the aftermath, what surprised and shook Assad was his discovery that Yasir Arafat...
...Saudi office comprised a secretary and two agents--Wilfred Rattigan and his lieutenant, Egyptian-American Gamal Abdel-Hafiz. They also oversaw six nearby countries. The FBI sent reinforcements within two weeks of 9/11, but it appears that the bureau's team never got on top of the thousands of leads flowing in from the U.S. and Saudi governments. In a June 6 letter to FBI Director Robert Mueller, the Senate Judiciary Committee renewed a request for information about allegations that the FBI's Riyadh office was "delinquent in pursuing thousands of leads" related to 9/11...
...Judiciary Committee letter, signed by chairman Arlen Specter and members Charles Grassley and Patrick Leahy, mentioned an allegation that Rattigan and Abdel-Hafiz at one point could not be contacted by the FBI and "may have surrendered their FBI cell phones to Saudi nationals." That charge possibly arose from a working trip that the agents' colleagues say the two made to Mecca during the Muslim pilgrimage season. The pair were required to give up their FBI-provided cell phones just as an FBI official in the U.S. was trying to get in touch with them. When the U.S.-based...
Rattigan and Abdel-Hafiz have left Saudi Arabia, but both still work as FBI agents. Rattigan is suing the FBI, claiming that it discriminated against him on the basis of his race, religion and national origin. (He is an African American of Jamaican descent who converted to Islam in Saudi Arabia in the months after 9/11.) Rattigan at times wore Arab headgear and robes on work assignments in Saudi Arabia, as did Abdel-Hafiz, also a Muslim, which did not go down well with some FBI managers in Washington. Rattigan claims that among the ways the FBI thwarted...
...gold and indigo?of the Uzbek Emperor Tamerlane, whose dominions once stretched from Baghdad to Bengal. There are 500-year-old Sanskrit scriptures inscribed on palm leaves, Korans 25 mm wide (written so the verses form the shapes of animals) and, in the margins of verses by the poet Hafiz, annotations by the Mughal Emperors Humayun and Jahangir. There are even jottings by Byron?two verses added by the English poet to his "Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte." With so few visitors, director Imtiaz Ahmad will dig out his most precious pieces for you to peruse over chai and spicy chips...