FaithWorld

(Radical Sunni cleric Maulana Ahmed Ludhianvi (C) greets supporters during his election campaign in Jhang, Punjab province April 16, 2013. Picture taken April 16, 2013. REUTERS/Zohra Bensemra)

When Maulana Ahmed Ludhianvi greets supporters on the Pakistan election trail, he opens his pitch with the kind of promises to the poor that any other politician might make.

But behind the reassuring rhetoric lies what his opponents believe is a dangerous agenda – to gain a foothold in parliament and further his designs to oppress Pakistan’s Shi’ite minority.

Ludhianvi, a radical Sunni cleric, is a hate figure for Shi’ites who accuse him of devoting his decades-long career to fomenting an escalating campaign of gun attacks and suicide bombings targeting their community.

The prospect that he might win a place in the political mainstream at the May 11 vote horrifies Shi’ites who fear his presence in parliament will give him a much stronger platform to strike out at the sect.

(Thousands of gay marriage opponents wave pink, blue and white flags as they take part in the “Manif pour Tous” (Demonstration for All) protest march against France’s planned legalisation of same-sex marriage near the Invalides in Paris, April 21, 2013. REUTERS/Jacky Naegelen)

Thousands of gay marriage opponents waving pink and blue flags marched through Paris on Sunday in a last-ditch protest before a law allowing same-sex union and adoption is passed on Tuesday.

Chanting “We don’t want your law, Hollande!”, some 50,000 protesters massed behind a banner reading: “All born of a Mum and a Dad” and said it was undemocratic to bring about such a fundamental social change without holding a referendum.

Louisville, Kentucky – Friday morning, four Pakistani-American doctors dressed in business suits and medical scrubs sat in one of this city’s most popular breakfast spots and fretted. At an adjacent table, a middle-aged woman grew visibly nervous when their native land was mentioned. One of the doctors, a 47-year-old cardiologist, was despondent.

“We were all praying this wouldn’t happen,” he told me. “No matter what you do in your community, that’s the label that is attached.”

Another doctor worried that years of outreach efforts by the city’s 10,000-strong Muslim community, a mix of Bosnians, Somalis and Iraqis, would be lost. Thursday, he sent a letter to the local newspaper condemning the Boston attack “no matter who committed it.” When news broke Friday that the two suspects were Chechen Muslims, his family grew nervous.

(Tunisian Salafi Islamists wave flags inscribed with Islamic verses during a demonstration in Tunis September 7, 2012. REUTERS/Anis Mili )

Hardline Islamists threw stones and bottles at young women in a student hostel in Tunis to stop them staging a performance of dance and music, witnesses said on Thursday, in another blow to secular freedoms in the country that spawned the Arab Spring.

Since secular dictator Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali fell two years ago in the first of multiple revolts across the Arab world, moderate Islamists have won election and radical Muslims have targeted symbols of a hitherto mainly secular society.

(Bishop Bernard Fellay gestures during a priests and deacons ordination ceremony in Econe June 29, 2012.  REUTERS/Denis Balibouse)

A rebel Catholic group at the heart of major controversies that plagued former Pope Benedict has begun criticising his successor Pope Francis for the popular approach he has taken since his election last month.

In a letter to supporters this week, the head of the ultra- traditionalist Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX) asked whether the new pontiff’s focus on serving people could be only “man-centred philanthropy” rather than true religious leadership.

(The view of the main entrance of the newly constructed building of the Museum of the History of the Polish Jews designed by architect Rainer Mahlamaki and located in the former Warsaw’s Ghetto, April 15, 2013. REUTERS/Peter Andrews)

A new museum of Jewish history opens in Poland this week to refocus attention on a vibrant community that has lived in the country for centuries but whose history, for many, has been eclipsed by the Nazi death camps that nearly wiped them out.

Every year some 1.5 million people visit Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp in southern Poland which has become a grisly emblem of the holocaust.

Business ethics is too bland. That thought crossed my mind during a quite good speech on the topic by Vincent Nichols last week at St Paul’s Cathedral in London.

The Catholic Archbishop of Westminster said many things, but his main idea of how to improve businesses can be summed up in one sentence: “All businesses big or small should be able to demonstrate how they are making the world a better place through providing goods that are truly good, or services that truly serve people, and, by doing so, create employment and fair returns to investors, whilst minimising harm”.
A few moral relativists or free-market ideologues might argue with that, but most business people think they are already behaving as the archbishop thinks they should. They usually see themselves as well-meaning cogs in a basically benign economic machine which provides people with a remarkable array of desired goods and services, and does so efficiently, safely and in a way that is fair to workers and the world.

That self-image is fair. Most businesses in developed economies do work to a quite high ethical standard.

(Security officials assess the scene of a bomb blast in Nigeria’s northern city of Kaduna April 8, 2012. REUTERS/Stringer )

Nigeria’s government is not doing enough to tackle religious violence in central Nigeria, where more than 100 people have been killed since March, a U.S. government agency said on Monday.

Plateau state and other parts of the “Middle Belt” have suffered for decades from violence linked to land disputes between the semi-nomadic, cattle-herding Muslim Fulani and settled Christian Berom farmers.

(Bangladesh Jammat-e-Islami activists throw bricks as they clash with police in Dhaka February 12, 2013. REUTERS/Andrew Biraj )

One night in February, Rajib Haider was set upon near his Dhaka home by five knife-wielding youths. His face was so lacerated that a relative who found the body wasn’t sure it was him until he called Haider’s cellphone and heard it ring inside a pocket.

Haider was a blogger, one of hundreds in Bangladesh demanding the death penalty for Islamist leaders accused of wartime atrocities, whose grisly murder swelled the crowds at student-led rallies many hailed as a “Bangladesh Spring”.

(Thousands rally on the National Mall for the start of the annual March for Life rally in Washington, January 25, 2013. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst)

A city medical examiner described fetal body parts stored in pet food containers during his testimony on Monday at a murder trial that has drawn a national spotlight after anti-abortion groups complained that it was being ignored.

The graphic testimony came in the fifth week of the murder trial of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, 72, who faces the death penalty if convicted of charges he killed seven infants and a female patient at what a grand jury described as his squalid abortion clinic in urban West Philadelphia.