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Why do people tend to hear only one side of the story? A common explanation is that the digital age makes it easy to wall yourself off from inconvenient data, to spend your time in ideological “cocoons,” to hang out at blogs where you are part of a choir that gets preached to.

however big a role the Internet plays, it’s just amplifying something human: a tendency to latch onto evidence consistent with your worldview and ignore or downplay contrary evidence.

All the Abrahamic scriptures have all kinds of meanings — good and bad — and the question is which meanings will be activated and which will be inert. It all depends on what attitude believers bring to the text. So whenever we do things that influence the attitudes of believers, we shape the living meaning of their scriptures. In this sense, it’s actually within the power of non-Muslim Americans to help determine the meaning of the Koran. If we want its meaning to be as benign as possible, I recommend that we not talk about burning it. And if we want imams to fill mosques with messages of brotherly love, I recommend that we not tell them where they can and can’t build their mosques.

She was just 13 when she was snatched by two men on a motorbike while she was walking to a relative’s house near the border with Cameroon.

ually they reached their destination - a huge, makeshift camp. Falmata had no idea where she was.

The camp belonged to Boko Haram, the militant group that has been fighting a long insurgency aimed at creating an Islamic state in northern Nigeria.

Much-dreaded “sharia law,” or something resembling it, may well be coming to the United States.

the religiously motivated laws creeping into public policymaking aren’t based on the Koran, and they aren’t coming from mythical hard-line Islamists in, say, Dearborn, Mich. They’re coming from the White House, which wants to make it easier for hard-line Christians to impose their beliefs and practices on the rest of us.

He vowed to help blur the line between church and state by repealing the Johnson Amendment.

The main missionary and political groups of the ultraconservatives, known as Salafis, threw their support behind Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, a dissident former leader of the Muslim Brotherhood known for his tolerant and inclusive view of Islamic law.

The endorsement goes a long way toward making Mr. Aboul Fotouh the front-runner in a campaign that could shape the ultimate outcome of the revolt that ousted the former strongman, Hosni Mubarak.

Mr. Aboul Fotouh’s liberal understanding of Islamic law on matters of individual freedom and economic equality had already made him the preferred candidate of many Egyptian liberals.

Dutch anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders has said he will show cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in a TV slot allocated to his party.

The cartoons were shown at an event in Texas last month which was attacked by two gunmen. Mr Wilders was a keynote speaker at the event.

Mr Wilders, who leads the Party for Freedom (PVV), has often expressed his distaste for Islam and mass immigration and has called for the Koran to be banned in the Netherlands.

CAIRO — An Egyptian court on Saturday sentenced former President Hosni Mubarak to life in prison as an accomplice in the killing of unarmed demonstrators during the protests that ended his nearly 30-year rule.

They denounced the verdict as a sham because the court also acquitted many officials more directly responsible for the police who killed the demonstrators, and a broad range of lawyers and political leaders said Mr. Mubarak’s conviction was doomed to reversal on appeal.

Mr. Mubarak, 84, was an “accessory to murder” because he failed to stop the killing, a rationale that lawyers said would not meet the usual requirements for a murder conviction under Egyptian or international law.

Most Muslims say that pictorial depictions of the founder of Islam are forbidden - but has that always been the case in all of the Muslim world?

For most Muslims it's an absolute prohibition - Muhammad, or any of the other prophets of Islam, should not be pictured in any way. Pictures - as well as statues - are thought to encourage the worship of idols.

Muslims point to a verse in the Koran which features Abraham, whom they regard as a prophet:

crudely written email threat to members of the Los Angeles Board of Education prompted officials to close all 900 schools in the nation’s second-largest school system Tuesday, sending parents from San Pedro to Pacoima scrambling to find day care — while New York law enforcement dismissed a nearly identical threat from the same sender as an obvious hoax

The unprecedented districtwide shutdown reflected the tense atmosphere over possible terrorist attacks less than two weeks after two Islamic radicals opened fire at a workplace party in San Bernardino, killing 14.

L.A. Unified School District Supt. Ramon Cortines said he made the decision to order the school closures because he couldn’t take a chance with the system’s 640,000 students.By evening, school officials said they had inspected all campuses and that the FBI had discredited the threat.

In many of the countries of South Asia and the Middle East, women can be targeted by their own families for death in what is known as “honor killings.” Often the victim has acted in a way that seems unremarkable to observers from other cultures; she has sought a divorce, refused to go through with an arranged marriage, or had an affair. In the most horrifying cases, a woman who suffers a rape then gets murdered by her own relatives.

In fact, women have been killed when their families knew they were completely innocent; just the fact that rumors had started going around was enough to dishonor the family, so the accused woman had to be killed.

In some cases, however, men may also be victims of honor killing, particularly if they are suspected of being homosexual, or if they refuse to marry the bride selected for them by their family.

Artists explored diverse subjects and worked in varied styles so there is no single form of French Romanticism.

intimacy, spirituality, color, yearning for the infinite, expressed by all the means the arts possess

If David’s work reveals the Romantic impulse in French art early on, French Romanticism was more thoroughly developed later in the work of painters and sculptors such as Theodore Gericault, Eugène Delacroix and François Rude.

Any caught trying to leave are put to death. At the same time, the government tries to encourage defectors, and runs rehab centres to help them re-enter society.

"We are not afraid to tell our stories. Ask us anything you want. You can take our photos and use our real names."

al-Shabab, which has been in existence for more than a decade and controls large parts of Somalia, imposing harsh rules and punishments. The group has set up a parallel administration, with ministries, a police force and a justice system. It runs schools and health centres, irrigates land and repairs roads and bridges, and needs people to carry out this work.

Islam is the second largest religion in the world after Christianity, with about 1.8 billion Muslims worldwide.

7th century

Islam started in Mecca, in modern-day Saudi Arabia, during the time of the prophet Muhammad’s life.

I also know that many Americans have been asking: Why is this crazy scramble necessary? How could Afghanistan have collapsed so quickly?

As a former combat interpreter who served alongside U.S. and Afghan Special Operations forces, I can tell you part of the answer — one that’s been missing from the conversation: culture.

When comparing the Taliban with the United States and its Western allies, the vast majority of Afghans have always viewed the Taliban as the lesser of two evils. To many Americans, that may seem an outlandish claim. The coalition, after all, poured billions of dollars into Afghanistan. It built highways. It emancipated Afghan women. It gave millions of people the right to vote for the first time ever.