Word: islamics
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...Today's bombing took place on the eve of Muharram, the Islamic month of mourning, and it could augur a new series of such attacks. Muharram has historically been associated with increased violence between the country's Sunni Muslims and its Shi'ite minority. While Muharram is important to both sects, it is particularly revered by Shias who stage elaborate processions mourning the death of the prophet Mohammad's grandson in battle - the very event that eventually led to the central schism of Islam. In 2005 a bomb in a Shi'ite shrine in southwestern Pakistan killed 50. Already sectarian...
Western commentators tend to see political Islam as an antiliberal and irrational form of "Islamo-fascism." Yet much of the Islamists' success in Pakistan and elsewhere comes from their ability to portray themselves as champions of social justice, fighting Westernized élites--like Benazir Bhutto. Her reputation for corruption was gold dust to these Islamic revolutionaries, just as the excesses of the Shah were to his opponents in Iran 30 years earlier. During Bhutto's government, Pakistan was declared one of the most corrupt nations in the world, and she and her husband Asif Ali Zardari were charged with jointly...
...doesn't take much insight to see the dangers of that outcome. Failure to keep the sole Muslim nuclear power stable, whole and democratic might be catastrophic not just for the war on terrorism and the stability of South Asia but also for the future of Islam and the relations between Islamic states and the West. Yet Bhutto's assassination has exposed how little influence the U.S. - or any other outside power - has on the nation that was bloodily carved out of India when the British left 60 years ago, and which has been bedeviled by violence and venal politics...
...Modern Pakistan has been strained to its breaking point by three opposing forces: feudal dynastic politicians who have only a casual acquaintance with democracy; a corrupt, ineffective army; and religious extremists, who at least know what they want, even if the vast majority of Pakistanis find their vision of Islam unpalatable. All three have played their parts in undermining Pakistan's foundational promise as a modern, democratic Muslim nation. But they have had plenty of outside help. A succession of administrations in Washington have backed a series of wrong horses in Islamabad: military dictators like Musharraf or feudal aristocrats like...
...group accused in Bhutto's killing, Lashkar-i-Jhangvi, was also among the alphabet soup of militant groups that were spawned by the Afghan war.One of the most vicious of these groups called itself Sipah-e-Sahaba and used religious justifications for jihad from an austere sect of Islam called Deobandi, similar to the ideology of the Taliban. Sipah-e-Sahaba and similar groups believe that one obligation of "true Muslims" is to kill so-called apostates like Shi'ites. In the early 1990s, these veterans from the Afghan wars, with no more war to fight, launched a bloody sectarian...