Word: sunnis
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...determine how Muslim to be. Unlike Indonesia, which is governed by a secular constitution, Malaysia already counts Islam as its official faith-although the constitution also guarantees freedom of religion. Each state has a fatwa committee that makes religious decrees applicable to Malaysian Muslims, most of whom are Sunni. In Kelantan state, Muslim women must wear headscarves in public, while several states have made forsaking Islam a crime that can result in prison time. "We should not limit Islam to a few rituals," says Sulaiman Abdullah, former president of the Malaysian Bar Council. "Malaysia would be better served...
Rice may see the new divide in the Middle East as pitting responsible governments against extremist ones, but in Riyadh, that means Sunnis vs. Shi'ites. According to the Iraq Study Group, individual Saudis have been funding the Sunni insurgency in Iraq. Last November an adviser to the Saudi government warned that if the U.S. withdrew its troops, the monarchy would arm Sunni insurgents. Saudi clerics have stepped up their denunciation of Shi'ites as heretics. And King Abdullah has endorsed toxic rumors that Shi'ites are trying to convert Sunnis to their faith...
...burned. In the 1980s, Riyadh served as proxy in our struggle against the Soviet Union. And in the process, it funded the network that became al-Qaeda. Today it is serving as our proxy against Iran, but in the process it may pour kerosene on the Sunni-Shi'ite war that has consumed Iraq, threatens to erupt in Lebanon and could spread to Pakistan and the gulf. The U.S. can't completely distance itself from the Saudis--in our weakened position, we need their help. But neither should we let them enmesh us in a Middle Eastern cold war, fought...
...toxic, it contaminates even the memory of a shining moment of goodwill. On Aug. 31, 2005, a stampede among Shi'ite pilgrims on a bridge over the Tigris River in Baghdad led to hundreds jumping into the water in panic. Several young men in Adhamiya, the Sunni neighborhood on the eastern bank, dived in to help. One of them, Othman al-Obeidi, 25, rescued six people before his limbs gave out from exhaustion and he himself drowned. Nearly 1,000 pilgrims died that afternoon, but community leaders in the Shi'ite district of Khadamiya, on the western bank, lauded...
...bridge connecting the two neighborhoods is now closed for security reasons--just as well, since the chasm between them is too wide for any man-made span. Mortars fired from the cemetery behind Abu Hanifa, a Sunni shrine in Adhamiya, have caused carnage in the bustling markets of the western bank. There are more mortars going in the opposite direction; on a recent afternoon, the sound of an explosion on the Sunni side of the river is greeted with cheers by worshippers at a Shi'ite shrine in Khadamiya...