Word: shia
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...What Iraq needed were Arabists and Foreign Service officers who understood the country's tribal allegiances, or who at least knew a Sunni from a Shia. What CPA seemed to be getting were people anxious to set up a Baghdad stock exchange, try out a flat-tax system, and impose other elements of a lab-school democratic- capitalist social structure. One of my officers returned from a trip to Iraq a month or two after CPA had taken over and told me, "Boss, that place runs like a graduate school seminar, none of them speaks Arabic, almost nobody's ever...
...moves the U.S. government was making were driving a wedge between the various factions in Iraq. [Longtime US weapons inspector] Charles Duelfer was told by an Iraqi friend that, in the past, Iraqis were not accustomed to thinking of themselves primarily as Shia or Sunni. But the way we implemented democracy had led people to believe that they deserved a piece of the pie based on their membership in a certain group. So the whole dynamic was to pull away from the center. The decisions we made tended to fracture Iraq, not to bring it together...
...ARRIVING: SHIA LABEOUF...
...what happens when the state's definition of Islam differs from its citizens'? The Islamic Development Department, which governs Muslim practices on a federal level, deems Shia and Baha'i interpretations of Islam deviant faiths worthy of forced "rehabilitation." Controversy also surrounds Malays who wish to convert to another religion, thus defying the constitutional clause specifying that all Malays must be Muslims. That issue is being tested by the case of Lina Joy, a Malay who has been barred from converting to Christianity by Shari'a courts. Malik Imtiaz Sarwar, a lawyer who has received death threats for representing...
...quickly turn into political uprisings. (Ashura was banned during most of Saddam Hussein's rule and resumed only after his downfall in 2003.) "For Shi'ites, Sunni rule has been like living under apartheid," says Vali Nasr, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of The Shia Revival: How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape the Future...