Word: sects
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...trial in a Swiss federal criminal court last week, wearing a faded orange-pink robe and sandals, was a slender Indian who called himself Swami Omkarananda, a self-proclaimed teacher of mankind and head guru of a "Hindu-Christian" sect known as the Divine Light Center. The charges against the 49-year-old swami and what the prosecution called the hard core of his 80 followers ranged from theft and trespassing to attempted murder and grievous bodily harm. But most serious of all, the cultists had disturbed the peace of Winterthur...
...mechanic and part owner of a gas station in Seminole, Texas (pop. 7,000), is an illegal alien from Mexico. But he is different from the hundreds of thousands of Mexicans who annually sneak across the border. Klassen is a Mennonite, one of 650 members of the reclusive religious sect who settled in the dusty plains country in the spring of 1977. Through a combination of bad advice and their own gullibility, the law-abiding Mennonites have since found themselves stranded on the wrong side...
...companion, Valentinus, travels to Lucifer to regain the memory of his past life, that of a second-century seer of the Gnostic sect. Valentinus is equally faceless, and takes no interest in the fate of his friend. The two travel from world to world courtesy of Olam--an Aeon, one of the super-natural beings of the Gnostic mythos. Curiously, Olam is the most well-characterized of the three, revealing touches of peevishness that are the only human moments in the book...
Turkey. Islam is still a potent force in secular Turkey, and religious violence between the dominant Sunni Muslims and the Alevis, a Shi'ite sect, has recently injected a dangerous new element into the country's chronic political instability. Ancient rivalries between the two groups are being exploited by both right-and left-wing extremists. Last December Sunni gangs massacred a hundred Alevis in the southern Turkish town of Maras. But unlike the Shah's Iran, Turkey has a functioning democratic system, and no single issue or popular figure unites the opposition. The government is fearful, however, that "political opportunists...
...with him through meditation and ritual. Sufism is considered suspect by fundamentalist Muslims like the puritanical Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia, because it allows for the veneration of awliya-roughly the equivalent of Christianity's saints. Islam also has spawned a number of heretical offshoots. One is the Alawi sect, a Shi'ite minority group to which most of Syria's leaders belong. The Alawis believe in the transmigration of souls and a kind of trinity in which 'Ali is Allah incarnate. Another is the secretive Druze sect of Israel, Lebanon and Syria, which split away from...