Islam

Census-takers will soon fan out across Sudan's vast and famously inhospitable terrain in the first nationwide head count in 25 years. But the checklist of questions won't include two hot issues that lie at the heart of this nation's recent history of conflict: religion and ethnicity. The government, led by President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, has decided not to tally numbers for Muslims, Christians and other faiths, nor will it gather data about tribe or ethnic origin.

It's a profanity uttered countless times a day around the globe, but a barber in Saudi Arabia faces beheading for the crime of using God's name in vain. Sabri Bogday, a Turk who cuts hair in this Saudi port city, is awaiting appeal on his sentence. Press reports say Bogday cursed during an argument with a neighbor, who later complained to police.

The censors didn't quite know what to do with Lina Khoury's play about sex, rape, menopause and a visit to the gynecologist, but Islamic hard-liners were pretty specific: One wanted to stone the 32-year-old writer; others accused her of being an Israeli agent planting immoral ideas in the Arab world. The characters in "Women's Talk" share secrets only uttered when men aren't around.

It was a clear case of irreconcilable differences. The wife said there was no love left in the marriage, she wanted a divorce. The husband insisted that she had been put under the influence of a taweez, a talisman, that had erased her affections for him. He refused to divorce.

Unmarried and pregnant, Ranya gathered up her courage and confided to a friend that she was considering a drastic step: an illegal abortion. She braced for criticism. But to her surprise, her friend disclosed that she had had one too. Ranya asked another friend, who also said she'd had an abortion. And another gave her the phone number of a doctor in Beirut who would perform the procedure on the sly. The doctor used no anesthetic.

Newspaper subscribers are accustomed to the sample-size boxes of laundry detergent or aspirin bottles that sometimes arrive packaged with their morning paper, courtesy of advertisers. But readers in battleground states are getting a different kind of freebie: the DVD of a controversial documentary on Islam.

His voice, throaty and full, is as known and intimate to this neighborhood as a mother hurrying her children home. It slices from the minaret, spreading over alleys, piercing the sounds of snapping sheets, whispering schoolgirls, scraping shovels and the bargaining pleas of the broom seller: "God is great. I testify there is no god but God. . . . Make haste toward prayers."

The Islamic preacher slipped on a pair of shorts and talked about the Koran while playing beach volleyball, eating barbecue and joking about hot cars and palaces in paradise. If the West were to dream up its version of an ideal imam, he might look and sound like Mostafa Hosni, a 30-year-old former Nestle accountant who's comfortable in argyle sweaters and hip to self-help.

Desperately unhappy, 21-year-old Sahe Fidan left the husband she despised and sought refuge in her parents' home. They refused to take her in. A married woman can leave her husband only in a coffin, they told her. Fidan returned to the husband, and she left him in a coffin. A few weeks ago, she was found hanged in the bathroom, her infant son strapped to her back with a sheet. Her corpse was discovered when the baby, unharmed, began to cry. Fidan had committed suicide. Or had she?

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.