Word: sunni
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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While embracing modernity, the government has assiduously eschewed its usual counterpart, Westernization. The House of Saud has clung tenaciously to Wahhabism, the puritanical strain of Sunni Islam that was the driving force of Abdul Aziz's victorious Ikhwan (brethren) movement. The royal family, as well as most Saudis, believe Wahhabi fervor unifies the kingdom's diverse tribes. Though King Fahd is known not to relish meeting his subjects, he devotes an entire day each week, Monday, to conferring with the ulama, the country's religious scholars...
...ites of Arabia's east coast have for decades met with cultural and religious intolerance from the dominant Wahhabi (Sunni fundamentalist) authorities. Among young Shi'ite men, the unemployment rate is 30%, and would be far higher but for Aramco...
...ruin when he attacked Iran. He had once given refuge to the Ayatullah Khomeini, then, under pressure from the Shah, expelled him. Not only did Saddam want disputed territory, but he was also provoked when Khomeini began calling for the overthrow of Saddam's "blasphemous" regime. He is a Sunni Muslim, though most Iraqis belong to the rival Shi'ite branch, as did Khomeini. Saddam responded by invading, confident that his powerful, Soviet-equipped army could easily smash the Ayatullah's ragtag militia, but the Iranians fought back. When the going got especially rough, Saddam turned to poison...
...mosques sprang up across the Asian republics, where Muslim believers practiced their religion without official imprimatur. In Uzbekistan an undetermined number of Muslims have joined mystical Sufi sects. In Uzbekistan and Tadzhikistan authorities have recently become concerned about the spread of groups espousing Wahhabism, the puritanical sect of the Sunni branch of Islam that first emerged in Saudi Arabia in the 18th century...
...these friends of Israel unaware of the manner in which Arab regimes deal with dissent and difference--whether non-Arab, like the Kurds in Iraq (more poison gas), or Arab, like the Sunni Muslims in Homs, Syria (was it 30,000 dead or 40,000?) and the people of Kuwait. And they quite reasonably draw the inference that if the Arabs are ready to treat their own that way, how much worse would they do to the enemy Jews, whom they define to one another (though no longer for sensitive Western ears and eyes) as intruders to be driven into...