Muslim

I met him at a Persian New Year celebration in Irvine four years ago. His goatee lay perfectly around his lips, as if it had been painted by an artist. His eyes were kind. There was a story behind them I wanted to know. But I could glance at him only when he wasn't looking. I felt shy - unusual for me, but the feeling persisted even as time went by. He's Persian. I'm Egyptian. Persian men don't usually go for Arab girls. I didn't really think he would be that shallow, but I was aware of the possibility, and I wasn't about to risk finding out. I admired him from afar.

CAIRO - A mechanic hammered a fender and boys wandered amid tin and rust as Adham Bishr, his opinions flaring on an agitated afternoon along the Nile, said Egypt's next president should give him a job, not tell him how to worship God. Men gathered around Bishr in a scrap of shade, arguing over inflation and politics before disappearing into the grit and anger of a neighborhood at Cairo's edge. The men, mostly unemployed drivers, mill hands and laborers, want work; their sons, college students with dim prospects, wonder whether the future will bring enough money to take a wife.

In the article "I Won't Be Home for Christmas" (Dec. 23), The Times' writer Kim Murphy describes a Christmas Eve she spent in Cairo with an "occasionally devout Muslim" named Khalid. Well, she must have caught him during one of his least devout periods. He not only spent time alone with her in her apartment (they being neither in a state of blood relationship or marriage), but he drank champagne, possessed a good luck charm and sang "Silent Night" with her. If Kim Murphy thinks that these are the actions of an "occasionally devout Muslim," I think The Times would be best served by transferring her to another area of the world having a culture she understands.

LONDON — Bosnian Serb Gen. Ratko Mladic confronted the accusations against him at the opening of his war crimes trial in The Hague on Wednesday with contemptuous gestures to the court and the victims who had come to see him face justice for atrocities during the 1992-95 Bosnian war. Slowed by age and the hardships of 15 years on the run from the indictment by the United Nations tribunal, Mladic still mustered a hint of his trademark swagger as...

The Good Muslim A Novel Tahmima Anam Harper: 297 pp., $25.99 Maya Haque is one of the century's most interesting characters: prickly, passionate, tender, selfless, headstrong, devoted, belligerent, idealistic, naive, wise. "The Good Muslim" is Maya's story, rooted in her devotion to nation and family and particularly to her brother, the tormented Sohail Haque. What is it about Bengali anthropologists? First we have feted novelist Amitav Ghosh from West Bengal and now Tahmima Anam from East Bengal.

After years of battling false claims and viral e-mails alleging that he is a Muslim, President Obama hasn't gotten far among Republican voters in Alabama and Mississippi - about half still believe he is Muslim and about one in four believe his parents' interracial marriage should have been illegal, a new poll shows. The automated survey by Public Policy Polling, conducted over the weekend in advance of Tuesday's GOP primaries in both states, showed Republicans Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich locked in a fierce, three-way battle for votes.

Mansoor Ijaz (Commentary, April 20) argues that we need to get Muslims in Western Europe and the U.S. on our side in the war on terrorism by reaching out to them and including them in Neighborhood Watch programs, improving community outreach and appointing them to "sensitive defense, intelligence and foreign affairs postings." They aren't with us because they don't feel "included." Pobrecitos! Sounds decent and humane, but under the circumstances, when virtually all the terror in our world is being perpetrated by radical Muslims of various nationalities, isn't that like putting the cart before the horse?

The letters TLC, regarding the cable network of that name, originally stood for the Learning Channel but now seem to represent, or seem to want to be seen to represent, something closer to the old Tender Loving Care. The network has made something of a specialty of series that focus on unusual families — that is to say, different from the families of most of the people who watch TLC. Maybe there are more wives than usual; often there are many more children. Little people, big people: The message is that we're all the same, but different, but the same.

Disneyland has agreed to allow an intern to wear a company-designed head covering at work, according to a Muslim rights group that intervened after the woman was told she would have to work in the stockroom. The Chicago woman was hired as a vacation planner after a phone interview, but when she arrived at Disney for her internship orientation, company representatives asked her why she had not mentioned her hijab, according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations. The woman was told she would have to take a position with less guest interaction, working in the stockroom until a "customized uniform" could be made, according to the group.

Melvin Bledsoe, speaking in his deep Tennessee accent at a long-awaited House Homeland Security Committee hearing on the domestic radicalization of U.S. Muslims, said his son Carlos "was captured by people best described as hunters" after he converted to Islam. "He was manipulated and lied to," Bledsoe said, recalling the events that preceded his son's arrest in an attack on an Army recruiting station and the death of a soldier. His testimony that his son was radicalized by Muslims in Tennessee bolstered assertions by committee Chairman Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.

WASHINGTON — In his final months padding around the dark third-floor room in his cinder-block Pakistan hide-out, the world's most notorious terrorist mastermind spent a lot of time in his own head. He fretted about his public image and the legacy of his organization. He wondered whether he had misnamed it Al Qaeda. He fired off orders, handed out promotions, denied requests for help from the battlefield and sought to direct publicity for the looming 10th anniversary of the Sept.

CAIRO - Osama Abdel Hadi was born into the Muslim Brotherhood. His father, a history professor, was respected within the Islamic movement and Hadi grew up steeped in piety and resistance to Hosni Mubarak's secular police state. He prayed in Cairo's ancient mosques and knew the names of Brotherhood members held in Egypt's jails. The group was his spiritual and intellectual buttress, and, amid the failings of other parties and opposition ideologies, he carried the Brotherhood's precepts as he entered university to study political science.

The Oslo courtroom where confessed mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik is on trial offers a look at a tragic outcome of anti-Islamic hostility. The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, years of war and repeated calls for violence against the West stirred worldwide fears of Muslim extremism, but many human rights analysts say they find it difficult to explain a recent surge in anti-Islamic hate crimes other than political manipulation and fears that displays of Islamic faith herald new threats from radicals.

A string of bank robberies, carried out by people disguised in traditional Islamic woman's garb, has prompted concerns among religious, government and law enforcement officials in the Philadelphia area. The robberies, at least five since December, were carried out by people wearing full-length robes and veils to hide the hair and part of the face, according to some surveillance tapes broadcast by local stations in Philadelphia. Muslim leaders fear use of the disguises could put Muslim women in danger or make them objects of scrutiny.

JACOBABAD, Pakistan — Rachna Kumari, 16, was shopping for dresses in this city's dust-choked bazaar when it happened. The man who her family says abducted her was not a street thug. He was a police officer. Nor was he a stranger. Rachna's family knew and trusted him. He guarded the Hindu temple run by her father, an important duty in a society where Hindus are often terrorized by Muslim extremists, and he had helped Rachna cram for her ninth-grade final exams. After she disappeared from the market, he did not demand a ransom.

CAIRO - The well-tailored spy and the dueling Islamists are out. Egypt's election commission Tuesday upheld its decision to disqualify three key presidential candidates: Omar Suleiman, former intelligence chief and vice president; Khairat Shater, onetime political prisoner and Muslim Brotherhood financier; and Hazem Salah abu Ismail, an anti-Western ultraconservative preacher. The outcome was largely expected after the candidates appealed the commission's Saturday ruling.

Re "My Fight Against American Phantoms," Commentary, Dec. 21: Tariq Ramadan, a Muslim scholar with outstanding academic credentials, should understand America's predicament that many Muslim scholars have not rejected the 7th century ideologues of jihad, holy war and martyrdom. He claims that he believes in pluralism and equality, but he has failed to condemn the sayings of the holy text that there is no god but Allah, women are half of men, and friendship with non-Muslims is forbidden.

Re "A suicidal epidemic," editorial, Feb. 10 I don't find myself saying this too often, but The Times makes an excellent point, albeit a week late. Two mentally disabled women were strapped with explosives and sent into a crowded market, and you correctly ask, where is the outpouring of disgust from the Muslim world? Perhaps we'd see that outrage if, instead of killing and maiming dozens of innocent Iraqis, the women with Down syndrome had picked up a crayon and drawn a cartoon of the prophet Muhammad.

Fourteen months after the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak, a new Egypt is still a work in progress -- or possibly regress. The opposition that swelled Cairo's Tahrir Square has fractured into Islamist and secular factions. The Islamist-dominated parliament continues to compete for influence with the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. And last week a presidential election scheduled for May was thrown into confusion. First an administrative court suspended the work of a 100-member assembly charged with writing a new constitution, raising the possibility that a president will be elected before the nature of the new Egyptian state is defined.

CAIRO - The men gathering outside the yellow mosque agreed: Adulterers should be stoned to death, the hands of thieves cut off. "But not now," said Kareem Atta, waiting in a cool breeze for the sheik's car to roll up next to the Koran sellers. " Sharia law must be gradually put into place so it doesn't shock the system. You can't cut people's hands off if you first don't give them financial justice. " The young students, engineers and laborers are followers of Hazem Salah abu Ismail, a lawyer and holy man whose poetic blend of populism and ultraconservative Salafi Islam has turned him into a leading presidential candidate.