Word: muhammad
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...proliferating across the 17,000-island archipelago. Many are funded by Middle Eastern groups that see Indonesia as fertile ground for spiritual purification. Clerics at these religious institutions preach the Salafi strain of Islam, which advocates a return to the religion as practiced in the era of the Prophet Muhammad. (Wahhabism, Saudi Arabia's strict form of the faith, is considered an offshoot of Salafi Islam.) By contrast, most Indonesians, like other Southeast Asian Muslims, had for centuries practiced a far less orthodox faith, incorporating the Hindu, Buddhist and animist traditions that had flourished before Islam arrived in the archipelago...
...principally about religion. Sunnis and Shi'ites may disagree on some matters of dogma and some details of Islam's early history, but these differences are small--they agree on most of the important tenets of the faith, like the infallibility of the Koran, and they venerate the Prophet Muhammad. Despite the claims by some Arab commentators, there is no evidence that Iraq's Shi'ite extremists are trying to convert Sunnis, or vice versa. For Iraqi fighters on both sides, "their sect is nothing more than a uniform, a convenient way to tell friend from enemy," says Ghanim Hashem...
DIED. Ahmed Abu Laban, 60, prominent religious leader in Denmark who last year galvanized fellow Muslims around the world to protest newspaper cartoons featuring the Prophet Muhammad; of lung cancer; in Copenhagen. Saying he was humiliated by the cartoons--one of which showed Muhammad with a bomb in his turban--Laban helped fuel rage that many Danes blamed for sparking anti-Danish violence in the Middle East...
...contest pits the Grand Mosque of Paris and the Union of Islamic Organizations of France against the editors of the satirical weekly magazine Charlie Hebdo, in a lawsuit citing anti-racism laws over the magazine's February 2006 publication of those Danish caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad that caused a global uproar. The complaint describes the decision to reprint the drawings as "born of a simplistic Islamophobia and purely commercial interests"; as having "insulted people on the basis of religion"; and as a "provocation aimed against the Islamic community...
...Dalil Boubakeur, rector of the Paris Mosque, counters that French and European Muslims have no problem with social and even religious ribbing, but that the caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, considered blasphemous by Muslims, were then exacerbated by associating him with terrorism. "This is an affair about caricatures that incite racism," Boubakeur argues. That's a valid point if one ignores past caricatures by Charlie Hebdo and others satirically linking other religions with violent, murderous, or simply intolerant acts...