Religious Discrimination

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.

Jesus Suarez, a Santeria priest, had slit the throat of one goat that June afternoon. He had three more goats, two sheep and 44 chickens to go. But before he could finish the ritual sacrifice, Coral Gables police swarmed the house where he and some 20 other followers of the Afro-Cuban religion had gathered to worship. The officers, Suarez recalls, pointed their guns at the devotees and screamed at them to freeze. Suarez could hear a couple of worshipers in the front yard yelling, "No dispare!"

A Muslim candidate for the Irvine City Council said Thursday that a councilman's comment linking an Islamic civil rights group to terrorism has led to a death threat against him. Police said they are investigating. Attorney Todd Gallinger, a Muslim convert, said a man called his office Tuesday, about three weeks after Councilman Steven Choi spoke at a forum and urged voters not to support a candidate who worked for the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

THE Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem once remarked that in the Jewish hamlets of his native Ukraine there were only two people who really were serious about God. One was the local rabbi and the other was the village atheist. These days, American public life often seems awash in cheap piety and religious sentiment -- things quite distinct from genuine conviction.

A former executive of an Irvine car wax manufacturer alleges in a lawsuit that the company fired him because he had not pursued "a Christian lifestyle" and wasn't "on fire for Jesus." Atticus O. Firey, 34, of Newport Beach contends Meguiar's Inc. committed religious discrimination when it fired him in July after nearly 10 years with the company.

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 mystery of how and why a government wiretap summary falsely attributed anti-Jewish slurs to officials of a Muslim charity remained unanswered Tuesday as federal prosecutors pledged to look into the matter. In court papers filed late Monday, the U.S.

Yusman Roy, a former boxer and a convert to Islam, is serving two years in prison because he believes that Muslims should pray in a language they can understand. Roy, who led bilingual prayer sessions at his small East Java boarding school, is seen as a heretic by conservative Muslims here. They believe true prayer can be conducted only in Arabic. Roy's desire to pray in Indonesian has sparked such an outrage that he was convicted last year in criminal court of "spreading hatred."

A Los Angeles federal judge has issued a tentative ruling to allow a Christian school in Riverside County and six of its students to proceed with a discrimination lawsuit against the University of California over its admissions policies.

HOTAN, CHINA -- Mullah Masude, 63, removes his shoes and gingerly navigates an expanse of cheap carpeting in the Jaman mosque's main worship area before climbing a set of rickety steps to the roof. Powered by a good set of lungs and lots of practice, the cleric belts out the afternoon call to prayer. Despite his best efforts, the chant is all but drowned out by the din of a single-stroke tractor engine and a passing bus.