Word: islam
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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This breed of Muslim activists, most of them educated and from the middle and upper classes, aggressively embraced a stricter - and increasingly violent - version of Islam. The young Nigerians rebelled against the existing order of their rich and politically well-connected parents in northern Nigeria. "They abhor the stupendous wealth their parents have accumulated and they don't want to have anything to do with them," says Abdulmumin Sa'ad, a professor of sociology at the University of Maiduguri. (See the Nigeria connection of the Detroit terror suspect...
...letter, posted on the jihadist Shumukh al-Islam Network, really let loose its rage on the American people: "Receive the tidings about what will happen to you. Since we are coming to you with slaughter and we have prepared for you men who love death as much as [you love life], and God willing will come to you with something for which you are not prepared, and as you are killing [so] will you be killed." (Does the Flight 253 incident fit al-Qaeda's pattern...
Meanwhile, the Sana'a government is in the middle of another ferocious war, against its Houthi minority, Yemeni followers of the Zaydi sect of Shi'ite Islam. That introduces the shadow - both real and imagined - of the primary Shi'a power in the region, Iran, which is happy to take credit even if its actual influence may still be negligible. When Iran is mentioned, however, both the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, the predominant Sunni power in the region, start quaking. And al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, no friend to any of the parties, is happy to sow destabilization...
...timing: That the attack took place on Christmas Day is especially suggestive, says Georgetown University terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman. "It's worrisome because it fits into the jihadist vision of a war between Islam and Christianity," he says...
...TIME's Alex Perry wrote in July 2009, over the past few years, young Nigerian Muslim activists, most of them educated and from the middle class, have aggressively embraced a stricter version of Islam, rejecting anything Western and Christian. In the middle of 2009, the government cracked down hard on one group nicknamed the Nigerian Taliban - officially called Boko Haram - killing its leader and scores of his followers. Boko Haram had begun life in 2001 as a peaceful group focused on the study of the Koran, according to Abdulmumin Sa'ad, a Muslim scholar and professor of sociology...