Word: shying
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...problem, says Dr. Imam Ali Saleh, a Najaf-born Shi'ite scholar and religious leader, is that not even the most moderate Sunnis can stomach seeing Shi'ites in power. "A Sunni believes that the Shi'ite is inferior," he says...
Young Fatima Mussam is scornful of the Shi'ites. The 16-year-old left Mosul in 2002 because her family anticipated the war. She refers to her Shi'ite classmates in Dublin as "acquaintances," not friends. "I won't be deliberately rude to them but I don't like them," she says. Mussam blames the sectarian violence in Iraq on the Shi'ites. "They started...
...Sunnis gather each week for Friday prayers, stands the Ahlul-Beyt Islamic Center, the only Shiite house of worship in Ireland. There, Imam Dr. Saleh and Ahmed Ali flip through Arabic satellite channels and drink tea, recounting tales of fleeing from Iraq to escape Saddam Hussein's persecution of Shi'ites. Although Ali, 39, came to Dublin in 1999. At that time, there was peaceful co-existence between Shi'ites and Sunnis. He says one could even crack Shi'ite-Sunni jokes in mixed company. That is no longer true. "They cannot handle it anymore," he says of Sunnis...
Zahra Rahim, the wife of Imam Saleh, says she has no problem with moderate Sunnis, but fears a rise in Wahhabism, a fundamentalist stream of Sunni Islam that rejects Shi'ite practice as heretical. Rahim, who wears a hijab headscarf, associates Wahhabism with the fully-veiled women she sees on the street who often refuse to return the greetings of Shi'ites. Two years ago, she says, her son Jafar came home from the Sunni-run Muslim National School and told her that his classmates had called him kafir, meaning infidel. Jafar, she says, was also taunted whenever a bomb...
...original version of this story contained a quote from Tareq Sammaree that said Shi'ites worshiped people. Sammaree spoke in English, which is not his first language, and garbled his intention, which was to explain that, apart from worshiping God, the Shi'ites also venerate the Imams. The quote has been emended to reflect that...