FIFA controversially awarded the 2022 World Cup to Qatar. But the tiny Gulf state's bid was just another step in its ambitious push to become a global hub. In the capital Doha with only a morning to spare? Here are the essentials. ONE HOUR Hail a taxi and head toward Doha's seafront centerpiece: the Museum of Islamic Art, tel: 4422 4444. This I.M. Pei — designed cluster of cubes houses a collection spanning more than a ...

Which is scarier, the noise or the silence? Long after the attacks of Sept. 11, the clangor of terror echoes worldwide. But for U.S. investigators, what they don't hear is almost as frightening as what they do. Terrorist communications, according to Francis X. Taylor, the State Department's counterterrorism coordinator, have reached levels "probably as high as they were last summer." Attacks continue. In April, a truck bomb--now thought to be the work of Islamic terrorists with links to al-Qaeda, the ...

For Muslims immigrants in America, the days following 9/11 were a harrowing encounter with fear-fueled American hate. IPod bearing, second-generation techies faced insults in Silicon Valley parking lots; schoolgirls wearing head scarves were attacked; and mosques across the country were vandalized or set ablaze. For many months, it seemed altogether unclear whether America's Muslims — from the cocktail-swilling secular to the mosque-attending pious — would ever live in their communities without apprehension again. That tense period, the Harvard ...

There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the Messenger of God." That confession of faith, the shahada, is professed by all Muslims, be they the 700 million Sunnis who dominate the Islamic world from Morocco to Indonesia or the 90 million Shi'ites who rule Iran and form majorities in Lebanon, Bahrain and Iraq. To the shahada, however, the Shi'ites add, "And Ali is the Friend of God." Those additional words in praise of Ali, whom the Shi'ites passionately ...

It was George W. Bush on the phone. His language was friendly but firm as he asked President Pervez Musharraf on Sept. 11 if Pakistan could help hunt down Osama bin Laden. The choices facing Musharraf were stark: if he refused, America would consider it the worst kind of betrayal, and Pakistan would suffer harsh consequences. If he agreed, there would be enormous trouble at home; many Pakistanis believe bin Laden is not a terrorist but a true warrior of ...

Iran's judiciary has postponed the blinding of a man as punishment for throwing acid in the face of a young woman in 2004, after she rejected his offer of marriage. The delay came in the face of mounting outcry both inside Iran and in the West over the sentencing, which is permissible under qesas, a principle of Islamic law allowing victims analogous retribution for violent crimes. The case has stirred passionate interest in Iran since 2004, when Majid ...

In the movie reel of his imagination, he sees himself standing alone in the desert, silhouetted against the moon, swathed in traditional Bedouin robes, a farsighted prophet of Islam and the mighty creator of the Great Arab Nation, stretching from the warm Persian Gulf to the dark Atlantic Ocean--a nation that would eclipse the West in power and glory and purity. Muammar Gaddafi is not a man of modest ambitions. Nor one without a sense of backlighting. But his messianic ...

To listen to Kamal Habib extol the democratic ideal is to slip into a parallel universe where down is up and black is white. This is, after all, the co-founder of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, who was jailed for years — some of them alongside his classmate from university Ayman al-Zawahiri, now al-Qaeda's No. 2 — for allegedly helping organize the assassination of President Anwar Sadat. His democratic credentials are, at best, slim. And yet here's Habib, on the fourth ...

Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the influential Qatar-based Islamic scholar, recently preached that the "train of the Arab revolution" had arrived in Syria. Syria could well be ripe for upheaval. Like Egypt and Libya, it has been run by a single family, one that lacks the legitimacy of a bona fide monarchy, for 40 years. And like Bahrain, Syria is ruled by a minority: its controlling elite Bashar had two choices: he could choose reform, making concessions to co-opt ...

"We Muslims are one family even though we live under different governments and in various regions." Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, leader of Iran's revolution "The real force of Islam is the feeling that you belong to a brotherhood with the obligation to serve that brotherhood and thereby serve God." Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani, Saudi Minister of Petroleum "Islam judges, Islam protects, Islam urges resistance when there is injustice." Anwar Gamall, Egyptian university student Those are only a few of the voices ...