Word: islamics
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...annals as the great modernizer, a staunch U.S. ally who built hospitals and highways and spent billions upgrading the Saudi armed forces. To minimize friction with Muslim leaders, however, he constantly channeled some of the kingdom's vast oil wealth into religious causes. He carved out a place in Islamic history by supervising a $25 billion expansion of the holy shrines in Mecca and Medina. The King also poured cash into scores of new Islamic universities, which began churning out thousands of fresh religious activists. "But something unexpected happened," notes a former Western diplomat in Riyadh. "Instead of this wonderful...
...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...
...Laden's ambitions in the short run are plain. His first goal is to compel the U.S. to withdraw its military forces (today numbering 6,000) from his native Saudi Arabia. The presence of foreign troops in the cradle of Islam is, for him, "the latest and the greatest" of all infidel aggressions against the religion in its 14-century history. By their very presence, he believes, the U.S. forces defile the Muslim holy land. "Now infidels walk everywhere on the land where Muhammad was born and where the Koran was revealed to him," he lamented to TIME...
After the infidels have been expelled from the land of Islam, bin Laden, like other Islamic radicals, foresees the overthrow of current regimes across the Muslim world and the establishment of one united government strictly enforcing Shari'a, or Islamic law. This vision harks back to the age of the caliphs, the successors to Muhammad who ruled Islam's domain from the 7th century to the 13th. What might a caliphate look like today? In bin Laden's view, it would look something like the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, which he has praised as "among the keenest to fulfill [Allah...
...Laden, the game is not as simple as taking Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Says Daniel Benjamin, a former National Security Council staff member now writing a book on religious terror: "He is looking for a world in which Islam regains the dominant role, and naturally that would include oil and nukes. But to say it's about oil and nukes suggests it's not a metaphysical struggle, which it is for him. He thinks this is a big moral battle in which he's got Allah's sanction to attack the West." In a 1996 proclamation, bin Laden asked...