Word: muhammad
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Imam Ali Hussein died 1327 years ago, but for the Shi'ite Muslim faithful in Kabul - and everywhere else - it might as well have been yesterday. There is a vivid intensity to their mourning of the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad with black banners, dirges, funereal marches and somber sermons in mosques - and also by ritual bloodletting and physical mortification. Every year, during the festival of Ashura, Shi'ites symbolically punish themselves for their failure to rally to their imam at the Battle of Karbala and save him from his enemies in a conflict that marked the beginning...
...earn enough for early retirement. A coup, with soldiers taking the reigns of power, would end that because the U.N. doesn't like to use troops from a military dictatorship. Many newspapers and civil-society groups have called for a new party to be formed by local hero Muhammad Yunus, who recently won the Nobel Peace Prize for his pioneering work in microcredit. But though the affable economist has occasionally commented on his country's crisis-it is important that parties field "clean candidates," he said in December-he seems reluctant to enter politics...
...spectators at the gallows, the taunts of "Muqtada, Muqtada" by guards evidently loyal to Shi'ite leader Muqtada al-Sadr--were undignified even by Saddam's standards. As if to block out the barbs, Saddam loudly intoned his final prayer, the traditional Islamic invocation to God and the Prophet Muhammad. But that too was cut short: without warning, the hangman opened the trapdoor beneath his feet, and the tyrant was silenced forever...
...Just as consequential, for Sunnis and anyone else who knows Iraqi history, Saddam's executioners shouted the name of Ayatollah Sayyid Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, Muqtada's father-in-law. Ayatollah Sadr, whom Saddam executed in 1980, is perhaps as responsible as Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini for modern, resurgent Shi'a Islam. Sadr founded the Da'wa Party, a violent, secretive organization committed to the creation of an Iraqi Shi'a Islamic republic - and today a political party that counts none other than Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki as a member...
...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...