Word: secte
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...West recognized the depth of either the Shi'a anger at the Saddam regime or the Sunni rage born of loss of power. There is a strong sense of Iraqi identity among both Shi'as and Sunnis, but as strong allegiance to sect and ethnicity in every election has shown, a shared notion of what Iraqi identity means and how each community sees the future of Iraq is fast disappearing. As happened in Bosnia, in Iraq mixed marriages and shared memory of coexistence will not be enough to stop internecine violence...
Iraqi Muslims have not all along been severely divided by religious sect. There have been many instances of strong cooperation between Sunnis and Shi'ites. Other social divides have led to mob violence in the past, but Iraqis have overcome them to re-establish national unity. It remains to be seen whether they can accomplish this feat again...
Indeed, what makes the rise of sectarian violence so chilling is precisely the difficulty involved in carrying it out. Some Shi'ite mobs last week stopped people in the street and demanded to see their ID cards, looking for Sunni names. Each sect regards some names as taboo, usually because they are associated with hated figures from history. But that too is imprecise: the vast majority of Muslim names are used by both sects. In the end, as is often the case in sectarian wars, many of the victims of last week's violence were simply fingered by their neighbors...
...With an opera reveling in artifice, audiences may have trouble distinguishing the two at first. But Mozart's final and most popular work - in which Egyptian prince Tamino (Kim) is enlisted by the Queen of the Night (Farrugia) to rescue her daughter Pamina (Matthews) from a secret sect - is also about how appearances can be deceiving. And amidst all the stage pyrotechnics of the new production, Freeman's main focus has been on the singers. "If you don't change the quality of the central performances," he says, "you change nothing...
...museum has set up an altar for members of a Hindu sect wishing to venerate one of the manuscripts on display. James Allan, director of the Ashmolean Inter-Faith Exhibition Service, which organized the show, welcomed their visits: "The tradition [of pilgrimage] becomes alive, not just theoretical." tel: (44-1865) 278000; www.ashmol.ox.ac.uk