Islam

They killed two of her three brothers and her mother, a pious 55-year-old who made her living packing eggs into cartons. Now, the killers want Houria Zaidat too. The death threat came signed in blood. The message, scrawled in pencil, explained why the 23-year-old woman from Algiers' working-class suburb of Harraga, barely 5-foot-3 but the country's female judo champion since 1992, could no longer be allowed to live. "Death to those women who do not wear the veil," it said.

The television, radio and newspaper reporters huddle around Hakeem Olajuwon after a shoot-around on the day the Rockets, the defending National Basketball Assn. champions, are scheduled to meet the Chicago Bulls. All strain to hear the answer to one reporter's question: "Are you or Michael Jordan the best basketball player in the world?" Olajuwon diplomatically says it is hard to say who the best player is.

Oasis International Equity Fund, which invests according to Islamic law, won't invest in shares of companies involved in peddling alcohol, gambling or pornography. Banks and financial services are out as well, since the fund is aimed at Islamic investors, for whom earning interest is an unacceptable way of generating profit.

Holding hands as they strolled through a crowded fairground on a brilliant day beneath snow-covered peaks, looking for bargains for the upcoming Persian New Year, Mariam and Reza were feeling less than sunny. "Four times we have been checked: 'Who are you? What is your relationship to each other?' " said Mariam, 20, looking at Reza, whose 17-year-old face bore the first wisp of a mustache. "I am his aunt," she said with irritation.

A Taliban leader said restrictions on women that have prompted international condemnation could be lifted once the Islamic group has consolidated its hold over Kabul, the Afghan capital. The Taliban militia seized Kabul on Sept. 27, ousting the government in a campaign to install strict Islamic rule. The militia closed girls' schools and banned women from working. But the pledges to ease restrictions contrast with the Taliban's record elsewhere.

Shamaila and Wamiq fell in love and decided to wed despite her parents' objections. One hot day in May, she and her sweetheart signed the formal contract that is the centerpiece of the Muslim ritual of marriage. It should have been the beginning of a happy union between the 19-year-old Lahore student of nursing and the accountant eight years her senior. But it wasn't.

The white banner, proclaiming that there is no god but Allah, floats now atop the clock tower of this nation's presidential palace, heralding what is shaping up as one of the poorest and most fundamentalist of the world's Islamic states. In recent days, women who have ventured onto Kabul's dusty streets without cloaking themselves from head to toe in opaque, suffocating gowns have been lashed with whips or fan belts.

In this paradise of conspiracy theory, a country that has been the plaything of great powers for more than a century, a new rumor is making the rounds: The United States is behind the stunning rise of the fundamentalist Taliban. From the halls of the Foreign Ministry to offices of internationally funded charities, among U.N. officials and the clientele of Kabul's bazaars, many are sure that the Clinton administration is covertly supporting the Taliban, the victorious Islamic militia.

The thinned ranks of female nurses toil in 24-hour shifts. Surgeons have been forbidden to operate on members of the opposite sex. To conform to Afghanistan's new order of things, many of the male employees have stopped shaving. "How I am supposed to operate with a beard down to here?" a doctor at Karte Se Surgical Hospital in western Kabul asked indignantly, chopping with his hand halfway down his chest.

At their front line in the rocky, wind-swept Hindu Kush mountains, Taliban militiamen vowed Wednesday to spread their doctrine of Islamic fundamentalism right up to the border of the former Soviet Union. In a military blitzkrieg, the Talibs scored their most dazzling success with the capture of Kabul, the capital, six days ago.