Word: muhammad
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Tehran. In the holy city of Qum, south of the capital, Ahmadinejad has offended the grand ayatullahs, who act as the country's spiritual leaders. Most irritating have been his frequent allusions to his connection to the Hidden Imam, the last in a line of descendants of the Prophet Muhammad, who Shi'ites believe will return at the end of the world to bring absolute justice to mankind. "Not only does he not talk about the sort of things a President is supposed to talk about," says Atrianfar, "but he talks about religious beliefs, a subject for which...
Nicknamed "banker to the poor," Muhammad Yunus will enter politics under the auspices of his new party in the next Bangladesh election. In 2006 he won the Peace Prize for inventing microcredit...
...proliferating across the 17,000-island archipelago. Many are funded by Middle Eastern groups that see Indonesia as fertile ground for spiritual purification. Clerics at these religious institutions preach the Salafi strain of Islam, which advocates a return to the religion as practiced in the era of the Prophet Muhammad. (Wahhabism, Saudi Arabia's strict form of the faith, is considered an offshoot of Salafi Islam.) By contrast, most Indonesians, like other Southeast Asian Muslims, had for centuries practiced a far less orthodox faith, incorporating the Hindu, Buddhist and animist traditions that had flourished before Islam arrived in the archipelago...
...principally about religion. Sunnis and Shi'ites may disagree on some matters of dogma and some details of Islam's early history, but these differences are small--they agree on most of the important tenets of the faith, like the infallibility of the Koran, and they venerate the Prophet Muhammad. Despite the claims by some Arab commentators, there is no evidence that Iraq's Shi'ite extremists are trying to convert Sunnis, or vice versa. For Iraqi fighters on both sides, "their sect is nothing more than a uniform, a convenient way to tell friend from enemy," says Ghanim Hashem...
ISLAM'S SCHISM BEGAN IN A.D. 632, immediately after the Prophet Muhammad died without naming a successor as leader of the new Muslim flock. Some of his followers believed the role of Caliph, or viceroy of God, should be passed down Muhammad's bloodline, starting with his cousin and son-in-law, Ali ibn Abi Talib. But the majority backed the Prophet's friend Abu Bakr, who duly became Caliph. Ali would eventually become the fourth Caliph before being murdered in A.D. 661 by a heretic near Kufa, now in Iraq. The succession was once again disputed, and this time...