Word: ikhwan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Women, explained the elegantly dressed Indonesian cleric, are like jewels. TIME's Indonesia stringer, Tatap Loebis, and I smiled. We are both women. Being compared to jewels is nice. Muhamad Ikhwan, who runs a conservative Wahhabi-style Islamic boarding school in the eastern Indonesian city of Makassar, continued. "Westerners treat women like flowers. They bloom, and everyone can see they are beautiful. But then they fade quickly and die." The Wahhabi treatment was different: "Women are like precious jewels," Ikhwan repeated. "They should be kept in a box, where only a special few can see them and cherish them. Then...
...they give us." A Dubai-based Islamic militant leader even suggests that SIMI is part of a loose terror alliance that includes the Pakistani Lashkar-e-Toiba and Jaish-e-Mohammmad, as well as Palestinian and other Middle Eastern groups. He says operatives have named themselves Ikhwan (brothers) and are sworn to avenge atrocities or injustices against Muslims in India, Israel and even Europe...
...pussyfoot with terrorists. Osama bin Laden has made plain that the Saudi regime is his ultimate target. Saudi rulers know all about Islamic militancy. They have been dealing with it--rather effectively and rarely with kid gloves--since Ibn Saud's forces slaughtered the religious zealots of the Ikhwan in the 1920s...
...Laden is not the first to challenge the al Sauds' right to rule. Fanatical Ikhwan, once allies of the al Sauds, rebelled in 1929, objecting to foreign influences such as the introduction of radio broadcasts, forcing Ibn Saud to crush them with loyalist tribesmen. In 1979 King Khalid harshly put down a fanatical group that seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca, in a violent two-week clash that left 127 Saudi troops and 117 insurgents dead. The message of all these groups has been the same: pure Islam has been corrupted by the al Saud rule...
While embracing modernity, the government has assiduously eschewed its usual counterpart, Westernization. The House of Saud has clung tenaciously to Wahhabism, the puritanical strain of Sunni Islam that was the driving force of Abdul Aziz's victorious Ikhwan (brethren) movement. The royal family, as well as most Saudis, believe Wahhabi fervor unifies the kingdom's diverse tribes. Though King Fahd is known not to relish meeting his subjects, he devotes an entire day each week, Monday, to conferring with the ulama, the country's religious scholars...