Word: sectarianism
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...Sunnis and the Shi'ites. Could the book's passionate following in a predominantly Christian America express a secret, even unconscious sympathetic identification with Islam? Or a repressed desire for Christianity to have a less boring, more Islamic history - richer, darker, riven at its root by an exciting sectarian war? (See the 100 best novels of all time...
...border town of Zahedan. Iran and Pakistan have also been at loggerheads over Afghanistan - Tehran has backed the Karzai government, and Pakistan is seen as continuing to covertly support the Taliban - and over the perception that Pakistan is not doing much to stem anti-Shi'ite sectarian terrorism by extremist groups on its own soil...
...fear is that Iran has the means to make life exceedingly unpleasant for Pakistan should it side with Tehran's enemies. Already struggling with a militant campaign that has ravaged the northwest and the tribal areas and terrorized major cities, Pakistan, analysts say, can ill-afford a revival of sectarian violence that plagued the country during the 1980s, when Saudi-backed Sunni militant groups clashed with Iranian-backed Shi'ite ones as part of a regional proxy war. Says Ayesha Siddiqa, an independent security analyst: "It isn't just Iraq, Lebanon and Afghanistan where Iran can create trouble...
Lebanon is an eternal exception to the maxim that all politics is local. With so many foreign powers meddling in the country's perennially sectarian struggle for control, Lebanon functions as a kind of political barometer of the Middle East. And that's why the news Thursday, Sept. 10, that Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri had given up trying to form a consensus government three months after his ruling coalition won the country's parliamentary elections is a sign of a more general unease in the region: Lebanon's political crisis - and the broader Middle East cold war of which...
...John Hume, a Nobel Peace laureate and former leader of the nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party. For Hume, a key part of ending the conflict in Northern Ireland was persuading hard-line Irish-American groups that had donated money to the IRA during the Troubles - the period of sectarian violence that claimed more than 3,600 lives between the '60s and '80s - to support the fledgling peace process. Kennedy soon became the main cheerleader for Hume's cause in Washington...