Word: sects
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...road, gunfire and death. This time, however, the victim was not a hapless villager caught in the middle of sectarian strife. He was Kamal Jumblatt, 59, leader of Lebanon's Muslim left and feudal landlord whose power base was rooted among the 150,000 members of the Druze sect. His assassination last week threatened to reopen the bloody civil war in Lebanon, which since November has been living under a "peace" enforced by three divisions of Syrian troops...
Edythe Kreshower, 47, a twice-divorced housewife in Queens, N. Y., was appalled when her daughter Merylee suddenly decided five years ago to join the Hare Krishna sect. Merylee had been finishing her second year at Queens College and hoped to become a teacher. But she took the Hindu name of Murti Vanya, became a nun in the sect's New York City temple, donned a saffron sari and joined her fellow devotees in chanting in the streets.* Convinced that Merylee, 24, had been brainwashed, her mother hired a private detective, Galen Kelly, to rescue...
When the charge went before the grand jury, however, Queens Prosecutor Michael Schwed accused not the deprogrammers but the Hare Krishnas themselves. The grand jury indicted two leaders of the sect, Angus Murphy and Harold Conley, for "unlawful imprisonment" of Merylee, on the theory that she had lost her free will due to Hare Krishna "mind control." For good measure, the two leaders were also accused of brainwashing another convert, Ed Shapiro, 22, and of getting him to try to extort a $20,000 family trust fund from his father. Young Shapiro had once been worked on by Ted Patrick...
...Hare Krishnas-also notable for shaving their heads except for one hank of hair by which they can be yanked into heaven-follow a centuries-old tradition of bhakti (devotion) to Krishna, one of the major Hindu gods. The sect was founded in the U.S. in 1966 by an Indian guru, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, and numbers 2,500 core members; missionaries back to India have gained few converts...
...separatism, which also ran counter to orthodox Islam. Elijah Muhammad had demanded a piece of the U.S. for a separate black nation, and taught that Allah would destroy the white devils and their civilization by the end of this century. Wallace Muhammad, who has opened membership in the sect to all races, told Survival Day worshipers, "We know there is no superiority in any color." He has also abolished the group's muscular police force, the "Fruit of Islam...