Fundamentalists

Religion, Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka says, is the 21st century's defining issue -- just as W.E.B. Du Bois predicted race would be for the 20th century. On one level, he says, spiritual practices can enrich humankind. But religious fundamentalism is the greatest threat to peace and democracy in the world today, according to Soyinka,the Nigerian writer who won the 1986 Nobel Prize for literature.

The change came several years ago for Maryam Arrakal. Her husband brought a black, all-covering \o7abaya\f7 back to this steamy, subtropical town from the desert sands of Saudi Arabia. It contrasted starkly with the pastel saris she normally wore. But in the 12 years that her husband, Kunchava, had been running a Saudi fabric shop, he had become detached from this melting pot of Muslims, Hindus and Christians, and more drawn to the Saudis' strict version of Islam.

Re "Judas' deal, 2,000 years later," editorial, April 13 Re Attacking antiquities dealer Frieda Nussberger-Tchacos and her alleged lack of legality in dealing with the Gospel of Judas: I suggest that you wake up. The "shady world of illegal antiquities dealing" and its "unsavory market" are a reality, regardless of your apparently wishful thinking to the contrary. Just how many great revelations about actual history would you suppress because the revealer lacks the characteristics of an angel?

Re "Heeding a call to duty, Jews move to Israel," Dec. 26 Thank you for the article discussing Yonatan Cooper, an American who is emigrating to Israel. We frequently hear about Muslim and Christian fundamentalists, but it is not often that we encounter reporting on Jewish fundamentalism, and can explore how different their values are from those of mainstream Americans, and how this type of fundamentalism affects the situation in the Middle East. The Times tells us that Cooper's decision was "grounded in a deep passion for his ancestral land," a concept that is alien to me since I harbor no passion whatsoever to whatever lands my ancestors called home.

Re "The politics of resentment," Opinion, Feb. 4 Ian Buruma's analysis of tolerance and Islamic fundamentalism suffers from two fatal flaws. First, the elites that he supports in their tolerance agenda do not separate the ideology from the population. Hatred toward Germans as a group may be despicable; the argument that not all Germans were Nazis may be a noble position, but it does not logically preclude someone from being a rabid anti-Nazi. Second, even the 12th century Jewish sage Maimonides, a contemporary of Islam's golden age of enlightenment, incurred the wrath of his contemporaries by concluding that the Karaites (the Jewish fundamentalists of his day)

After two shootouts in the last month that left eight suspected militants and four police officers dead, government officials have launched a crackdown on Islamic extremists and begun enforcing a regulation muzzling clerics who spread anti-government and anti-Western views. Several suspects in the shootings were arrested Tuesday, and a suspected militant leader who had used a mosque as a base died in police custody last week.

A bomb rips through a women's hair salon, shattering wall-length mirrors and shredding posters of coiffures. In another neighborhood, gunmen fire wildly into a busy barbershop, killing the owner and three teenage boys waiting for haircuts. At yet another shop, a masked visitor presses a note into the palm of a horrified haircutter. The message: "Our swords are thriving for the neck of barbers."

"Made-in-America Wahhabism" (Commentary, March 8) is irresponsible journalism. When Christian fundamentalists begin killing people in the name of God in order to overthrow governments and institute theocracy, then it will be fine to make the comparison. When, as a whole, they think it is right and good to murder thousands, then they will be like Middle East fundamentalists. Until then, please hold back this kind of hate. Let's argue about policy, or whether religious values should be separated from politics, but this kind of name-calling is immature and irresponsible.

Employees set up clandestine prayer areas on the grounds of the Euro Disney resort. Workers for a cargo firm at Charles de Gaulle airport praise the Sept. 11 attacks. A Brinks technician is charged with pulling off a million-dollar heist for a Moroccan terrorist group allegedly led by his brother. Female converts to Islam operate a day-care center that authorities eventually shut down because of its religious radicalism.

The first female European Muslim convert to commit a suicide bombing in Iraq was a former bakery worker from a middle-class Belgian family who joined her husband in an extremist network that sent them to fight and die, authorities said Thursday.