Islam

During the last days of Ramadan, Ahmad Chaudhry Nuruddin shut himself inside a small cubicle at the Bait ul Hameed Mosque with only a mattress, a chair and a few religious books. The slightly stooped 79-year-old strung a white sheet over the entrance to perfect his isolation. For the next few days, Nuruddin would follow the Islamic custom of I'tikaf, in which believers become virtual hermits, secluding themselves from the world to focus on the divine. "You spend your time remembering that God Almighty has created the world for the benefit of its people," he said.

It is a clear day along the coast, but in a bungalow off the beach, Maher El Gohary sits behind a locked door with an open Bible and a crystal cross, suspicious of every voice and sandal scraping past outside. He and his daughter, Dina, live like refugees, switching apartments every few months, not wanting to get close to neighbors. Gohary's life has been threatened, his dogs have been killed, and it's been suggested that he's insane or possessed by spirits. He is a man this Muslim nation cannot fathom: a convert to Christianity.

Police arrested 14 suspected Islamic militants early Saturday, amid fears that the men were plotting a terrorist attack in Barcelona, the interior minister said. The suspects, 12 Pakistanis and two Indians, were arrested less than two months before national elections. The country's last vote in March 2004 was held just after the Madrid train bombings, which killed 191 people and injured nearly 2,000 in Europe's worst Islamic-linked terrorist attack.

Followed by a gaggle of children, Julius Salik walks a muddy dirt track in one of this city's squalid Christian slums, past open sewers and ramshackle homes with stick roofs. With a weary sigh, he motions to a row of neat brick apartment buildings just a few hundred yards away. "Muslims live there," says the 60-year-old social worker and former federal minister. "Good construction. Big houses. Big cars." Pakistan, he says, is a place of extremes.

As Britain reels under unprecedented levels of immigration that have challenged the small island nation's traditions, the Archbishop of Canterbury entered the fray this week by declaring it is probably "unavoidable" that some limited form of Islamic law will have to be accepted in Britain. The archbishop, Rowan Williams, is the spiritual leader of the Church of England, and his pronouncement, aimed at building greater inclusiveness for Britain's 1.

If there is a post-Cold War Berlin, it may well be this agricultural town straddling a river between Iran and Azerbaijan, a former Soviet republic that has become an important ally in Washington's declared war on Islamic extremism.

The archbishop of Canterbury on Monday defended himself against a firestorm of recent criticism, telling fellow Anglicans his statement last week that Britain would have to accept some limited form of Islamic law had been misunderstood. Speaking to a gathering of elected representatives from the Church of England, Archbishop Rowan Williams said he took full responsibility "for any unclarity . . . and for any misleading choice of words that has helped cause distress or misunderstanding."

Family members describe Sayed Parwez Kaambakhsh as a frightened young man, sitting in a cramped Afghan prison cell alongside 30 hard-core criminals, hoping an apology will save him from execution for blasphemy. But to the outside world, the 23-year-old student and journalist has become a cause: a symbol of Afghanistan's clashing constitutional commitments to freedom of expression yet also to Islamic law that allows apostasy to be punished by death.

World Muslim leaders on Friday condemned extremism and terrorism as incompatible with Islam and proposed a high-level international meeting to promote a "dialogue of civilizations" with Christians. Leaders of the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference, which represents 1.5 billion Muslims across the Middle East, Africa and Asia, made the "Dakar Declaration" after a two-day summit in Senegal.

cairo -- It was a boyhood of miniskirts and stern-faced imams. As Ahmed abu Haiba grew into a man, he felt a kinship with the clerics who recited the Koran in badly lighted television studios, but he feared they didn't stand a chance against the new Western temptations of pop divas pouting about carnal pleasures and broken hearts.