Word: islamics
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...altering the voter roll before leaving office, removing the names of its supporters while entering the names of BNP voters multiple times. The BNP concedes there are problems with the roll but denies manipulating it. "They cannot really establish it, number one," says BNP joint secretary general Nazrul Islam Khan of the Awami League's allegations. "Number...
...then in 2006, there was an unmistakable pause, a moment of self-examination, even the hint of a great humbling. The most absolutist visionaries found a limit to their certitude. Benedict XVI went in a matter of months from proclaiming an irreducible gulf between Christianity and Islam to visiting a mosque in Turkey with white slippers on his feet. He publicly called for Turkey, a secular state but a Muslim country, to be integrated into the European Union. In the U.S., the religious right saw its most enthusiastic repre sentative in the Senate, Rick Santorum, go down to defeat...
...Within Islam, something also very profound occurred in 2006. Until earlier this year, Islam had found itself represented by essentially one faction in global politics and propaganda: the anti-Western vision of al-Qaeda's Wahhabist ideology. The power of its ability to marshall Arab and Muslim resentment against the West - and against non-Muslims more generally - drowned out milder, more moderate forms of Islam and masked deep divisions within Islam itself...
...civilizational clash, the turning point was the bombing of the Samarra mosque, a site sacred to Shi'ite Muslims. From that horrifying moment onward, what had been a mainly Sunni insurgency against occupying infidel troops became a civil war between Shi'ite and Sunni Muslims. The dynamic within Islam in the Middle East shifted from one that pitted Islam against the West to one that pitted Islam against itself. Evidence emerged of Iranian support for Shi'ite militias, alongside Saudi financing of Sunni terror. Suddenly, the monolith was over - and the old divisions within Islam became as important as Islam...
...There has always been a political dimension to the Sunni-Shi'ite split, which originated in a seventh century dispute over who would succeed the Prophet Muhammad as the leader of Islam's faithful. Over time, the two sects developed their own distinct conception of Islamic teachings and practice, much as Catholicism and Protestantism did in the centuries following their split. Shiites are a minority of 10%-15% of the global Muslim community, but in the geographic arc that runs from Lebanon to Pakistan, they are around half of the Muslim population - some 150 million people in all. They account...