Word: sectarianism
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...point here is that the modern history of the subcontinent is marked by bloody outbursts of sectarian and religious violence, driven by a complex mingling of historical, religious, regional, and national circumstances and forces. The attacks in Mumbai must be contextualized as another chapter in the fraught, complex history between the two nations, paying full attention to conflation of religious and national identity. To dumb down and repackage this struggle as one between radical Islamic terrorists and the peace-loving citizens of “the world’s largest democracy” is to deny this complex history...
...mosques, shops and homes and using guns and machetes to slaughter their enemies. Though the casualties represented Nigeria's worst death toll in several years, the "middle belt" of Africa's most populous nation--the intersection of its mostly Muslim north and predominantly Christian south--has been racked by sectarian violence before. Religious and ethnic riots in Jos killed about 1,000 people in 2001, and hundreds more died in a nearby city...
Will it strut or stumble? When U.S. forces began to pull out of Baghdad and into suburban bases in 2005, the vacuum was filled by al-Qaeda bombers and armed Shi'ite and Sunni militants, who fought a two-year civil war. Now, however, the main vectors of sectarian violence have been turned back, weakened or co-opted. Although there has been no meaningful political or social reconciliation between the sects, their representatives in parliament have learned to form expedient alliances, which will doubtless continue as the parties jockey for power in post-occupation Iraq...
...wants to haul the Prime Minister into federal court, an unprecedented and blistering public slap. The cause: moves to set up councils of tribesmen loyal to Maliki in majority Shi'ite and Kurdish areas where the Prime Minister does not naturally hold sway. Talabani and the Kurds - with sympathetic sectarian nods from others - want Maliki to keep the hands of the central government off their patrimony...
Ridha Mohammed is an exception, however: he trained as an engineer at Baghdad University and owns a flourishing plumbing business. He lives just outside Sadr City, Baghdad's giant Shi'ite slum, where preachers at several mosques routinely assure their congregants that Obama is a fellow sectarian. "When Obama won," says Mohammed, "it was a big day in Sadr City. Many people felt, Now we have a brother in the White House." (Sadr City - estimated pop. 2 million - is a bastion of anti-Americanism, where the radical Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his militia, the Mahdi Army, hold...