Word: mullah
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...some cases, previous attempts to impose fundamentalist law have taken bizarre forms. When a mullah named Maulana Sufi Mohammed decided to enforce strict Shari'a law in his mountain valley near the Afghan border, he prohibited driving on the left side of the road because the left hand is deemed unclean. Numerous car crashes failed to deter him. Inspired by the Taliban's medieval puritanism, mullahs in northwest Pakistan are destroying TVs and setting up roadblocks to stop cars and rip out music cassettes...
...saber rattling began with an exchange of insults. The Taliban fighters were "uneducated idiots," sneered Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei, the hard-line mullah who also serves as commander in chief of the armed forces. Soon after, the Taliban's leader, a charismatic, one-eyed village clergyman named Mullah Mohammed Omar, retorted that the Shi'ites were ranked somewhere "between infidels and true Muslims." Khamenei had already sent thousands of Revolutionary 4Guards to stage showy war games along the border. Now, he warned, "I have so far prevented the lighting of a fire in this region which would...
...base there. But the Taliban, the Islamist rulers of most of Afghanistan, have not cracked down on him. In July the head of Saudi intelligence, Prince Turki al Faisal, flew to Kandahar and asked the black-turbaned Taliban leaders to keep bin Laden quiet. After the prince left, Mullah Mohammed Omar, the cleric who founded the Taliban movement, had a chat with bin Laden. "We told him," the mullah told TIME, "that as a guest he shouldn't involve himself in activities that create problems for us." Anyway, he added, "how can he do these bomb explosions when...
...that America could expect retaliation for last week's cruise missile attacks on his camps, Afghanistan's Islamic leaders had a few quiet words with him. "I am angry because Osama is making anti-American statements from our soil and I stressed on him not to do so," said Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban militia's supreme leader. Bin Laden had agreed to "obey" the instructions and lie low, Omar added...
...uptight Iran is changing. Slowly, for sure, but certainly faster than anyone could have imagined just one year ago. Since the surprise 1997 election of Mohammed Khatami, who in Iranian terms is a moderate, a fierce internal battle has begun, with the stakes being the future of the mullah-led theocracy...