Word: islamists
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...winner on election day was the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), a mostly Shiite list assembled under the auspices of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and led by moderate Islamist parties with historic ties to Iran. The UIA, which has nominated Dr. Ibrahim al-Jaafari as prime minister, won 140 of the 275 seats in the Assembly, giving it the simple majority required to pass legislation, but not the two-thirds required under the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL), the interim constitution bequeathed by former U.S. administrator J. Paul Bremer, to choose a government. That means the Shiites have to negotiate a deal...
...also pushing to make Islamic Sharia law the basis of personal-status law in the new Iraq, governing issues such as marriage, divorce and inheritance - a proposal that would leave the legal status of women far inferior to what it had been under Saddam Hussein. But the more Islamist leaders in the UIA may not be able to count on the support of many of their more moderate and secularist colleagues, let alone their coalition partners...
...While the U.S. brands Hizballah a terrorist organization, Tuesday's turnout signaled the depth of its roots in the Lebanese mainstream. The Iran-backed Islamist organization, which maintains a militia that would likely be more than a match for the Lebanese national army in the event of a showdown, currently holds more seats than any other single party in Lebanon's parliament. The party is the major voice in the Shiite community, which today may be around 40 percent of Lebanon's population...
...doctrine for presuming to destabilize the region in pursuit of some democratic chimera? They opposed the Bush doctrine precisely because they preferred stability. They warned us darkly that the alternative to the status quo was the seething Arab street--an unruly mob, anarchic, anti-American, pan-Arabist or perhaps Islamist, ignorant of all liberal traditions and ready to rise up against America should it disturb the perfect order of things by "imposing democracy...
SAUDI ARABIA Nowhere are the stakes higher and the risk of chaos greater than in the famously closed kingdom that controls a quarter of the world's known oil reserves and was home to 15 of the 19 Islamist hijackers who launched the attacks of 9/11. Since then, the House of Saud has found itself ever more threatened by extremists bent on seizing power. The regime's surprising answer to save itself: the sight last month of Saudi men in white robes and kaffiyehs leaning into cardboard voting booths to cast ballots...