Word: sunni
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...study published by researchers at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) last month found that the Hajj, the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, makes pilgrims more peaceful and tolerant rather than fostering feelings of self-isolation. After reviewing data from a 2006 survey to 1,600 Sunni pilgrims from Pakistan, researchers Asim Ijaz Khwaja of HKS, Michael R. Kremer of the Department of Economics, and David Clingingsmith of Case Western Reserve University, concluded that participation in the Hajj bolsters pilgrims’ observance of Islamic practices, including the five daily prayers and fasting, while decreasing their adherence to local customs, like...
...That the Alevi are such a large group - anywhere from 15% to 30% of Turkey's population, depending on who's counting - makes it all the more confounding that the Sunni-led AK Party doesn't even recognize them as a religion. The Alevi are also up against secular Turkey's greatest irony - the Religious Affairs Directorate, a massive state-run bureaucracy whose billion-dollar budget employs 88,500 people and funds mosques, churches and synagogues, but refuses to recognize Alevi cemevi meeting halls as places of worship. To do so, argues Directorate head Ali Bardakoglu, would be heresy. Last...
...Aykan Erdemir, assistant professor of sociology at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, argues that the treatment of the Alevi is a crucial litmus test that Turkey is failing. "The [Alevi] are not only offering an alternative, more Western-ready version of Islam," he says. "They also show that Sunni conservatives in power in Turkey are in fact extremely bigoted and spreading hate language...
...disdain of Turkey's Sunni authorities may explain why many Alevi venerate the country's secularist founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. In his separation of mosque and state, they finally found freedom from discrimination. But that eroded under subsequent governments, often violently. As recently as 1993, a group of 33 prominent Alevi poets, writers and musicians were burned to death by a fundamentalist Sunni mob in a hotel in eastern Turkey...
...centuries, the Alevi response to persecution has been to worship in secret, while trying to pass as Sunni. Amid the political liberalization that has accompanied Turkey's efforts to join the European Union, however, many Alevi have begun emerging from the shadows. At the Karacaahmet Sultan shrine on the Asian side of the Bosphorus, the cemevi runs entirely on donations to the tune of $159,000 a year. Volunteers teach traditional Alevi music and dance, while the group's pro bono lawyers fight for Alevi rights in court. Last year, an Alevi parent, angered by compulsory religion classes his teenage...