Word: islam
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...chanting grows more frenzied, and as the seated men raise their voices to join in with shouts of "Ya Hussein!" (Oh Hussein!) and "Islam Zindabad!" (Long Live Islam!), a few move to the middle of the circles, chain flails gripped in both hands. The chest pounding grows stronger, quicker and louder. Following the rhythm, the men in the middle crouch down, spring from the ground and use the full force of acceleration to slam the flails down on their exposed backs. Bruises bloom, dark and malevolent, but their faces register no pain, only grief, or an almost otherworldly conviction...
...with blood. "Their presence gives us power." Indeed, the presence of an audience appears to egg on the penitents. The strikes are harder in the presence of video cameras and camera phones. Still, he says that he feels no pain. "Our imam was killed, his blood was shed for Islam, so we shed our blood for Islam. The pride eclipses the pain...
...also ruled itself out as a source of stability with two AC-130 gunship attacks this month on the remnants of the former ruling Islamic Courts Union (I.C.U.), holed up in deep forest on southern Somalia's border with Kenya. The targets of the U.S. attack were three al-Qaeda agents suspected of blowing up the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 with the loss of more than 200 lives. In its pursuit of its own narrow - if understandable and perhaps laudable - goals, the U.S. has ignored the radicalizing effect that its actions will have on Somalis. Somalis...
...speed and level of chaos in Iraq is picking up fast. An apocalyptic cult came uncomfortably close to taking Najaf, one of Shi'a Islam's most holy cities, and murdering Grand Ayatollah Sistani. Sistani is the neo-cons' favorite quietist Shi'a cleric, the man who was supposed to keep Iraq's Shi'a in line while we went about nation building. And then, on Sunday, Iran's ambassador to Baghdad told the New York Times that Iran is in Iraq to stay, whether the Bush Administration likes...
...information emerges it seems more and more likely that the enemy in the orchards outside Najaf was a cult-like offshoot of Shi'a Islam - men and women who believed the violence in Iraq was not just cataclysmic but apocalyptic. Iraqi officials say they rallied around a man who claimed to be the Mahdi - in Shi'a Islam, a spiritual leader who vanished in the late 9th century and whose return presages a final battle between good and evil. (Sunni Muslims have a quite different conception of the Mahdi, a redemptive figure who will walk the earth to establish peace...