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spike in anti-Muslim incidents across the United States in recent weeks that can be linked to last week’s mass shooting in California and the inflammatory rhetoric of Donald Trump

created an atmosphere ripe for these types of stereotypes and incidents,”

“I have never seen such fear and apprehension in the Muslim community, even after 9/11.”

racked more than three dozen incidents since the Nov. 13 terror attacks in Paris that left 130 dead.

spike began with the Paris attacks and has intensified with what happened in San Bernardino and now with what Donald Trump is proposing

pace of the incidents appears to have picked up since the Dec. 2 shooting in San Bernardino that killed 14 people and injured 21 others.

Rick Santorum who questioned whether the U.S. Constitution protected Islam

“After 9/11 there were hate crimes on the edges of society, but now it’s in the mainstream with the leading Republican presidential candidate saying Muslims are not wanted in America.”

police have stepped up patrols around houses of worship after a severed pig’s head was left outside the Al Aqsa Islamic Society

Florida man was arrested after authorities said he vandalized the Islamic Center

someone claiming to be a former Marine left a threatening voicemail message on the mosque’s answering machine on Saturday

man said he “killed a lot of Muslims” and, using expletives, said he would decapitate Muslims.

I kill Muslims,” before punching him in his left eye.

The expulsion of Imam Doudi was recommended by the Marseille authorities under a French law regarding “deliberate acts tending to provoke discrimination, hatred and violence toward an individual or a group.”

Here and elsewhere in France, Salafism is increasingly seen as the enemy, a menacing way-station to terrorism. Five members of Imam Doudi’s flock left to fight jihad in Syria, the police say, though the imam denies knowing them.

His sermons are “exactly contrary to the values of the Republic,” said Marseille’s prefect of police, Olivier de Mazières, a terrorism specialist who has led the case against the cleric, in an interview in his office. “We think he’s preaching hatred, discrimination, violence.”

Mr. Geisser, the Islam expert, is among those who say that, if anything, Imam Doudi was known as a government stooge.“He was best known for having good relations with the security services,” Mr. Geisser said.“He thought that to collaborate was to be protected,” Mr. Geisser added. “He’s someone who stuck out his hand, and it ended up getting burned.”

“Scholars will tell you that Salafism does not lead to jihadism, sociologically,” he said. “You can get to jihadism without having passed through a Salafist mosque.”Those distinctions are being lost in a renewed wave of public anxiety in France, however.“We must forbid the spread of Salafism, because it’s the enemy,” the former prime minister Manuel Valls said in a radio interview last week.The newspaper Le Figaro said in a front-page editorial that “our country must launch a vast operation to eradicate Salafism.

While Imam Doudi acknowledges having once been a follower of Osama bin Laden and the radical Algerian leader Ali Belhadj, the preacher denied that he, or Salafism, was extremist.“Salafism is merely the reasonable middle ground between extremism and negligence. There are sects that pretend to be Salafist — Al Qaeda, Daesh — but are not,” Imam Doudi said. “These are extremists, and in our preaching we are opposed to them.”

“In the Quran, you’ll find verses justifying lapidation” — death by stoning — “and jihad,” Imam Doudi said. “Sooner or later, I’ll read them.”His lawyer, Nabil Boudi, supported the assertion. “It’s a formula you’ll hear in every sermon,” Mr. Boudi said. None of the phrases cited by the government explicitly justify terrorist attacks. Imam Doudi said he is resolutely against such assaults.

Scholars see a more ambiguous relationship between Salafism and jihad than the police do. “The source of radicalization is not Salafism,” Olivier Roy writes in the book “Jihad and Death. “There is a common matrix, but not a causal relationship.

“It could be dangerous for France,” said Fayçal Mansari, a mason, who called Imam Doudi “ a barrier” against Islamic radicals.“Very few people truly know Islam,” Mr. Mansari said. “If they get rid of a truly learned professor, people will find themselves disarmed.”

Despite its French origins, the ISD’s analysis has revealed that the theory is becoming more prevalent internationally, with English-speaking countries now accounting for 33% of online discussion.

She said that of the 10 most influential Twitter accounts propagating the ideology, eight were French. The other two were Trump’s account and the extreme-right site Defend Europa.

The study reveals that alternative social media platforms, image boards, fringe forums and encrypted chat channels are instrumental in diffusing influential ideologies that propagate hatred and violence. Far-right propagandists primarily use mainstream platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter as avenues to disseminate material to audiences, while fringe platforms remain safe havens for the initiated to radicalise further.

The new media ecosystem has been used, for instance, to promote the fear of a “white genocide”, a topic that is active across unregulated image-board threads on 8chan and 4chan, censorship-free discussion platforms such as Voat, ultra-libertarian social-media sites such as Gab and Minds, and closed-chat channels

Defined as a form of ethnic cleansing through the forced deportation of minority communities, the concept of “remigration” has been a particularly fevered subject. Since 2014, the volume of tweets featuring the word has surged, rising from 66,000 in 2014 to 150,000 in 2018.

Jacob Davey, co-author of the report at ISD, said: “Social media platforms are built to promote clickbait content to get more users liking, sharing and commenting. This research shows how the extreme right is exploiting this to boost hateful content in the form of memes, distorted statistics and pseudo-scientific studies.

“The far right is able to take ownership of the ‘grey zone’ around contentious issues like migration because politicians and society are less willing to take on the role of thought leaders in these areas for fear of public outcry and outrage,” said Ebner.

Ms. Le Pen, the leader of France’s far-right National Front party, has a similar fear, and she sees birthright citizenship as the vehicle for replacement. Although she doesn’t use the term favored by many Republicans in the United States (“anchor babies”), she insists, as she told me in an interview last May, that “we must stop creating automatic French citizens.”

Just as Mr. Trump has plenty to say about Islamic State attacks but generally has no comment about hate crimes against Indians, blacks and Muslims, the European far-right is quick to denounce any violent act committed by a Muslim but rarely feels compelled to forcefully condemn attacks on mosques or neo-Nazis marching near synagogues on Yom Kippur.

Their ideology is especially dangerous because they present themselves as natives valiantly defending the homeland. Because they look and sound like most of their co-citizens, they garner sympathy from the majority in ways that Islamists never could. White nationalism is in many ways a mirror image of radical Islamism. Both share a nostalgic obsession with a purist form of identity: for one, a medieval Islamic state; for the other, a white nation unpolluted by immigrant blood.

One problem with this idea is that it implicitly treats Muslims as though they were a separate category of French people, and immature citizens who lag in their comprehension of secular republicanism.

But the French government’s conception of radical Islamism also rests on a problematic assumption: namely that the principal cause of terrorism in France is the failure of French Muslims to fully endorse the country’s secular culture.

The president’s notion of “separatism” seems to assume that a significant minority of Muslims are tempted to set themselves apart somehow from the rest of French society, perhaps by creating enclaves in disaffected suburbs or building Muslim ecosystems of sorts around Islamic schools, halal stores or mosques.

The political scientist Bruno Etienne once called French Muslims “abnormally normal.”

In a study released last year, 70 percent of Muslim respondents said they felt that they could freely practice Islam in France. Some 41 percent also said they thought Islam should adapt in some respects to conform to laïcité — but 37 percent said they wished that laïcité were more flexible.

In the course of my own research, I have found numerous examples of Muslim groups condemning terrorism. After attacks in early 2015, a leading federation of Muslim groups called on mosques to say a weekly prayer asking God “to preserve France.” Muslims routinely hold services to grieve for non-Muslim victims of Islamist terrorism — and, of course, Muslims, too, sometimes are among the victims. The imam of the city of Bordeaux has become a leading figure in efforts to prevent radicalization in France.

Yet in the immediate aftermath of war, precisely because a peace effort is underway, foreign governments and international peacekeepers are unusually well-placed to intervene. Unlike during armed conflict, there is also a chance for international mediators and local communities to work together to prevent attacks before the damage is done.

In Nagorno-Karabakh, too, cultural reconciliation is still possible. Despite the dismal record of the past three decades, both sides have demonstrated awareness of — and admiration for — heritage that is not their own. In 2019, Armenians restored a prominent 19th-century mosque in Shusha (though they pointedly failed to note its previous use by Azerbaijani Muslims). And in his recent address, Mr. Aliyev acknowledged the importance of the region’s churches — even as he denied their Armenian origin.

The Swahili Coast is a narrow strip of land that stretches some 2,000 miles along the Eastern African seaboard — from modern-day Mozambique, Comoros and Madagascar in the south, to Somalia in the north

In its medieval heyday, the region was home to hundreds of port towns, each ruled independently, but with a common religion (Islam), language (Kiswahili) and culture.

Many towns grew immensely wealthy thanks to a vibrant trading network with merchants who sailed across the Indian Ocean on the monsoon winds. Middle Eastern pottery, Asian cloths 0c 0c and other luxury goods came in. African gold, ivory and timber 0c 0c went out — along with a steady flow of enslaved people, who were shipped off and sold across the Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf. (Slave trading later took place between the Swahili coast and Europe as well.)

A unique cosmopolitan society emerged that blended African customs and beliefs with those of the foreign traders, some of whom stuck around and assimilated.

Islam, for example, arrived from the Middle East and became an integral part of the Swahili social fabric, but with coral-stone mosques built and decorated in a local, East African style

Or consider the Kiswahili language, which is Bantu in origin but borrows heavily from Indian and Middle Eastern tongues

The arrival of Europeans, beginning around 1500, followed by Omani sailors some 200 years later, changed the character of the region

over the past 40 years, archaeologists, linguists and historians have come to see Swahili society as predominantly homegrown — with outside elements adopted over time that had only a marginal impact.

That African-centric version of Swahili roots never sat well with the Swahili people themselves, though

They generally preferred their own origin story, one in which princes from present-day Iran (then known as Persia) sailed across the Indian Ocean, married local women and enmeshed themselves into East African society. Depending on the narrative source, that story dates to around 850 or 1000 — the same period during which genetic mixing was underway, according to the DNA analysis.

“It’s remarkably spot on,” said Mark Horton, an archaeologist at the Royal Agricultural University of England

“This oral tradition was always maligned,”

“Now, with this DNA study, we see there was some truth to it.”

The ancient DNA study is the largest of its kind from Africa, involving 135 skeletons dating to late-medieval and early-modern times, 80 of which have yielded analyzable DNA.

To figure out where these people came from, the researchers compared genetic signatures from the dug-up bones with cheek swabs or saliva samples taken from modern-day individuals living in Africa, the Middle East and around the world.

The burial-site DNA traced back to two primary sources: Africans and present-day Iranians. Smaller contributions came from South Asians and Arabs as well, with foreign DNA representing about half of the skeletons’ genealogy

“It’s surprising that the genetic signature is so strong

Gene sequences from tiny power factories inside the cell, known as mitochondria, were overwhelmingly African in origin. Since children inherit these bits of DNA only from their mothers, the researchers inferred that the maternal forbearers of the Swahili people were mostly of African descent.

By comparison, the Y chromosome, passed from father to son, was chock-full of Asian DNA that the researchers found was common in modern-day Iran. So, a large fraction of Swahili ancestry presumably came from Persian men

Dr. Reich initially assumed that conquering men settled the region by force, displacing the local males in the process. “My hypothesis was that this was a genetic signature of inequality and exploitation,”

hat turned out to be a “naïve expectation,” Dr. Reich said, because “it didn’t take into account the cultural context in this particular case.”

In East Africa, Persian customs never came to dominate. Instead, most foreign influences — language, architecture, fashion, arts — were incorporated into a way of life that remained predominantly African in character, with social strictures, kinship systems and agricultural practices that reflected Indigenous traditions.

“Swahili was an absorbing society,” said Adria LaViolette, an archaeologist at the University of Virginia who has worked on the East African coast for over 35 years. Even as the Persians who arrived influenced the culture, “they became Swahili,”

One major caveat to the study: Nearly all the bones and teeth came from ornamental tombs that were located near grand mosques, sites where only the upper class would have been laid to rest.

the results might not be representative of the general populace.

Protocols for disinterring, sampling and reburying human remains were established in consultation with local religious leaders and community stakeholders. Under Islamic law, exhumations are permitted if they serve a public interest, including that of determining ancestry,

The city is many times bigger than any other that the ultra-hardline militant group has ever captured, and it was from its Grand Mosque in 2014 that the group's leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, declared a "caliphate" that also spans parts of Syria.

Their growing influence also contradicts those who claim that Muslim leaders have been silent in the fight against violent extremism.

Several of the targeted Muslim leaders said in interviews that, while they were taking the threat seriously, they had no intention of backing off. They have hired security guards and fortified their workplaces, and some keep guns at home.

“It’s an honor to be denounced by ISIS,” said Imam Webb, who frequently engages young Muslims over social media,

“It has only reinvigorated me,” he said, “to provide the antivenom to the poison of ISIS.”

only three days after the group’s suicide bombers had attacked the Brussels airport and train station.

He argued that the terrorist attacks of recent years had clearly violated Islamic teaching because they “cause more harm than good,”

These scholars ridicule the Islamic State’s claim to have created a “caliphate” ruled by a successor to the Islamic prophet, Muhammad. Instead, in a highly effective bit of rebranding,

To the Islamic State’s propagandists, it does not matter that the imams are fervent Muslims or critics of American foreign policy

This is not the first time that the Islamic State has targeted Muslim leaders in the United States, but this is the longest list yet.

a Syrian preacher based in London who has spoken in support of Al Qaeda, according to news reports.

but that all it would take is one deluded or mentally unbalanced “lone wolf.”

Sheikh Hamza will soon air a television series in the Middle East, “Rihla With Sheikh Hamza Yusuf” (rihla is “quest” in Arabic).

“I’m not scared of ISIS in America,” he said. “I feel very safe in every mosque I go to. But I am scared of other people in this land who are very ignorant and bigoted.”

Attracts students from North-West Frontier Province and tribal areas where militant groups are strong

Library named in honour of Osama Bin Laden

Staff at the website paid tribute to their murdered colleague, and vowed to continue to stand up to militant groups.

"His death is the grim reminder that whoever raises voice against Taliban [and other militant groups] in Pakistan will not be spared. And when they have to murder, they never fail."

While never a monolith, Bosnian Americans in St Louis – which is home to an estimated 50,000 to 70,000 Bosnian Muslims – have near-universally been put off by Trump’s anti-Muslim, anti-refugee rhetoric and are wary of the Republican candidate’s popularity among Serbian nationalists.

Serbian nationalists’ support of Trump has also raised red flags. During the Republican national convention, a man wearing a “Make Serbia Great Again” hat was photographed several times. When Vice-President Joe Biden visited Belgrade earlier in August, hundreds of Serbian nationalists gathered to chant, “Vote for Trump!” The group was led by rightwing Serbian politician Vojislav Seselj, who was accused of helping to orchestrate the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims, Croats, and other non-Serbs from “greater Serbia” in the 1990s.

the ones who’ve adapted most constructively to the new reality have taken all the searching and asking offline. Face-to-face. In clubs that they have created.

We designed a simple structure that will feel familiar to anyone who’s been to a faith gathering: song, a greeting of neighbors, quiet meditation, readings of civic scripture (great American texts, some well-known, like the Preamble to the Constitution; others little-known, like Judge Learned Hand’s speech on the true spirit of liberty), then a sermon, followed by a long (8-10 minute) collective silence adapted from Quaker meeting, in which anyone moved to share a reflection may rise briefly and break the silence before restoring it, and finally, another round of collective singing.

citizens need ritual, shared experiences to help them make sense of our changing country.

Consider the organization NationSwell, which organizes Millennial civic reformers in cities around the country to come together for long dinners to reflect on what they can do for our country.

Or consider Benjamin Franklin Circles, a project catalyzed by the 92nd Street Y in partnership with the Hoover Institution at Stanford and Citizen University.

These are clubs of eight or 10 people who agree to meet for dinner once a month for 13 months. And at every meeting, they agree to discuss how they’ve tried to live out one of the 13 virtues young Benjamin Franklin held himself to during his period of moral formation.

there is a healthier kind of power in the club-making that Franklin practiced, and that Americans throughout the 19th century practiced with almost maniacal fervor. This ecosystem of associational life, which Alexis de Tocqueville admired in its rise and Robert Putnam lamented in its decline, is where America’s hopes truly lie.

low participation, high cynicism, and creeping authoritarianism are signs of just how sick the American body politic is.

It’s time to take responsibility for the cure. Go start a club.

Tuesday's bombing happened during the morning rush hour in Pul-e-Mahmud, a busy neighbourhood where homes, mosques, schools and businesses nestle close to the Ministry of Defence, other ministries and military compounds.

The blast shattered windows up to 1.6km (one mile) away.

"One of the suicide attackers blew up an explosives-laden truck in a public parking lot next to a government building,

"The second attacker engaged security forces in a gun battle before being gunned down,"

"It was as huge as in the morning," said Afghan MP Elay Ershad. "So everyone [is] scared of this situation."

Usually the Taliban does not say it is behind such attacks, which cause large numbers of civilian deaths. But today they did because the target was high-profile and it appears that, for them, hitting the target was worth the civilians killed and wounded.

The country has been at war for three decades, explosives are easily available and bomb-making skills are common.

"Such cowardly terrorist attacks will not weaken the will and determination of Afghan security forces to fight against terrorism."

The ratio of anti-Jewish to anti-Muslim incidents, in other words, appears slightly over two to one, which mirrors the ratio of Jews to Muslims in the population.

Of the 70 anti-Jewish incidents that Think Progress catalogued, only one involved physical attack. (The large majority were bomb threats). Of the 31 anti-Muslim incidents, by contrast, nine did.

There’s been no similar pressure on Trump to condemn attacks on American Muslims. The press has certainly covered Trump’s attitudes—and those of his top advisors—toward Islam, particularly since he announced a ban on travel from seven majority-Muslim nations on January 27

But attacks on American mosques have received far less attention

One answer is assimilation. With the exception of African Americans, American Muslims are a largely immigrant community. By contrast, most American Jews came a century ago. That helps explain why Jews are better represented at elite levels of the press and government, and in a better position to press their community’s concerns.

There is no Muslim equivalent of the ZOA or Simon Wiesenthal Center.

Even the relatively favored areas had rainfall of just 20 to 40 centimeters (8 to 15 inches)—where 20 centimeters (8 inches) is regarded as the absolute minimum to sustain agriculture—and the national average was less than 10 centimeters (4 inches)

Considering only “agricultural Syria,” the population is about five times as dense as Ohio or Belgium, but it does not have Ohio’s or Belgium’s other means of generating income.

Syria is not just a piece of land; it is densely populated. When I first visited Syria in 1946, the total population was less than 3 million. In 2010, it reached nearly 24 million.

The bottom line is that the population/resource ratio is out of balance. While there has been a marginal increase of agricultural land and more efficient cropping with better seed, neither has kept up with population growth.

During Ottoman rule the population was organized in two overlapping ways. First, there was no “Syria” in the sense of a nation-state, but rather provinces (Turkish: pashaliqs) that were centered on the ancient cities. The most important of these were Damascus, which may be the oldest permanently settled city in the world today, and Aleppo.

throughout its centuries of rule, the Ottoman Empire generally was content to have its subjects live by their own codes of behavior. It did not have the means or the incentive to intrude into their daily lives. Muslims, whether Turk or Arab or Kurd, shared with the imperial government Islamic mores and law. Other ethnic/religious “nations” (Turkish: millet) were self-governing except in military and foreign affairs.

the same groups also moved into mainly Muslim cities and towns, where they tended to live in more or less segregated neighborhoods that resembled medieval European urban ghettos or modern American “Little Italys” or “Chinatowns.”

Since this system was spelled out in the Quran and the Traditions (Hadiths) of the Prophet, respecting it was legally obligatory for Muslims. Consequently, when the Syrian state took shape, it inherited a rich, diverse, and tolerant social tradition.

the French created a “Greater” Lebanon from the former autonomous adjunct provinces (Turkish: sanjaqs) of Mount Lebanon and Beirut. To make it their anchor in an otherwise hostile Levant, they aimed both to make it Christian-dominated and big enough to exist as a state. But these aims were incompatible: the populations they added, taken from the pashaliq of Damascus, were mainly Muslim, so the French doomed Lebanon to be a precariously unbalanced society.

the French reversed course. They united the country as defined in the mandate but attempted to change its social and cultural orientation. Their new policy aimed to supplant the common language, Arabic, with French, to make French customs and law the exemplar, to promote Catholicism as a means to undercut Islam, and to favor the minorities as a means to control the Muslim majority. It was inevitable that the native reaction to these intrusions would be first the rise of xenophobia and then the spread of what gradually became a European style of nationalism.

When French policies did not work and nationalism began to offer an alternate vision of political life, the French colonial administration fell back on violence. Indeed throughout the French period—in contrast to the relatively laissez-faire rule of the Ottoman Empire—violence was never far below the outward face of French rule.

the “peace” the French achieved was little more than a sullen and frustrated quiescence; while they did not create dissension among the religious and ethnic communities, the French certainly magnified it and while they did not create hostility to foreigners, they gave the native population a target that fostered the growth of nationalism. These developments have lingered throughout the last 70 years and remain powerful forces today.

in the years after the French were forced out, coup leader after military dictator spoke in nationalist rhetoric but failed to lead his followers toward “the good life.”

for three and a half years, Syria became a part of the United Arab Republic.

Union did not work, so in 1961 Syrians were thrown back on their own resources. A fundamental problem they faced was what it meant to be a Syrian.

The more conservative, affluent, and Westernized nationalists believed that nationhood had to be built not on a religious but on a territorial base. That is, single-state nationalism (Arabic: wataniyah) was the focus of Syria’s statehood.

Their program, however, did not lead to success; its failure opened the way for a redefinition of nationalism as pan-Arab or folk nationalism (Arabic: qawmiyah). As it was codified by the Baath Party, it required that Syria be considered not a separate nation-state but a part of the whole Arab world and be domestically organized as a unified, secular, and at least partly Westernized state. This was a particularly difficult task because the dominant Muslim community, initially as a result of French rule and later as a result of domestic turbulence and foreign interference, regarded the members of the minority communities, particularly the Jewish community, as actual or potential turncoats.

as Syrians struggled for a sense of identity and came to suspect social difference and to fear the cooperation of minorities with foreigners, being an Alawi or a Christian or a Jew put people under a cloud. So, for Hafez al-Assad, the secular, nationalist Baath Party was a natural choice

Their answer was to try to bridge the gaps between rich and poor through a modified version of socialism, and between Muslims and minorities through a modified concept of Islam. Islam, in their view, needed to be considered politically not as a religion but as a manifestation of the Arab nation. Thus, the society they wished to create, they proclaimed, should be modern (with, among other things, equality for women), secular (with faith relegated to personal affairs), and defined by a culture of “Arabism” overriding the traditional concepts of ethnicity.

The “Resurrection” (Arabic: Baath) Party had its origins, like the nationalist-communist Vietnamese movement, in France. Two young Syrians, one a Christian and the other a Sunni Muslim, who were then studying in Paris were both attracted to the grandeur of France and appalled by the weakness of Syria. Like Ho Chi Minh, they wanted to both become like France and get the French out of their nation. Both believed that the future lay in unity and socialism. For Michel Aflaq and Salah Bitar, the forces to be defeated were “French oppression, Syrian backwardness, a political class unable to measure up to the challenge of the times,”

After Assad’s assault in 1982, the Syrian city of Hama looked like the Iraqi city of Fallujah after the American assault in 2004. Acres of the city were submerged under piles of rubble. But then, like Stalingrad after the German attack or Berlin after the Russian siege, reconstruction began. In a remarkable series of moves, Hafez al-Assad ordered the rubble cleared away, built new highways, constructed new schools and hospitals, opened new parks, and even, in a wholly unexpected conciliatory gesture, erected two huge new mosques. He thus made evident what had been his philosophy of government since he first took power: help the Syrian people to live better provided only that they not challenge his rule. In his thought and actions, his stern and often-brutal monopoly of power, he may be compared to the ruling men, families, parties, and establishments of Chinese, Iranian, Russian, Saudi Arabian, Vietnamese, and numerous other regimes.

Hafez al-Assad did not need to wait for leaks of documents: his intelligence services and international journalists turned up dozens of attempts by conservative, oil-rich Arab countries, the United States, and Israel to subvert his government. Most engaged in “dirty tricks,” propaganda, or infusions of money, but it was noteworthy that in the 1982 Hama uprising, more than 15,000 foreign-supplied machine guns were captured, along with prisoners including Jordanian- and CIA-trained paramilitary forces (much like the jihadists who appear so much in media accounts of 2013 Syria). And what he saw in Syria was confirmed by what he learned about Western regime-changing elsewhere.

As Iraq “imploded” in coups beginning in 1958 and morphed into Saddam Husain’s regime, the Syrians came to regard it as an enemy second only to Israel.

During the rule of the two Assads, Syria made considerable progress. By the eve of the civil war, Syrians enjoyed an income (GDP) of about $5,000 per capita. That was nearly the same as Jordan’s, roughly double the income per capita of Pakistan and Yemen, and five times the income of Afghanistan, but it is only a third that of Lebanon, Turkey, or Iran

In 2010, savaged by the great drought, GDP per capita had fallen to about $2,900, according to UN data. Before the civil war—and except in 2008 at the bottom of the drought, when it was zero—Syria’s growth rate hovered around 2 percent,

In social affairs, nearly 90 percent of Syrian children attended primary or secondary schools and between eight and nine in 10 Syrians had achieved literacy. On these measures, Syria was comparable to Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Libya despite having far fewer resources to employ.

Like his father, Bashar sought to legitimize his regime through elections, but apparently he never intended, and certainly did not find, a way satisfactory (to the public) and acceptable (to his regime) of enlarged political participation.

The lack of political participation, fear of public demands, and severe police measures made the regime appear to be a tyranny

This and its hostility to Israel led to large-scale, if covert, attempts at regime change by outside powers including the United States. These acts of subversion became particularly pronounced during the second Bush administration.

between 2 and 3 million of Syria’s 10 million rural inhabitants were reduced to “extreme poverty.”  

Four years of devastating drought beginning in 2006 caused at least 800,000 farmers to lose their entire livelihood and about 200,000 simply abandoned their lands, according to the Center for Climate & Security. In some areas, all agriculture ceased. In others, crop failures reached 75 percent. And generally as much as 85 percent of livestock died of thirst or hunger. Hundreds of thousands of Syria’s farmers gave up, abandoned their farms, and fled to the cities and towns

Syria was already a refuge for a quarter of a million Palestinians and about 100,000 Iraqis who had fled the war and occupation. Formerly prosperous farmers were lucky to get jobs as hawkers or street sweepers. And in the desperation of the times, hostilities erupted among groups that were competing just to survive.

And so tens of thousands of frightened, angry, hungry, and impoverished former farmers were jammed into Syria’s towns and cities, where they constituted tinder ready to catch fire.

Instead of meeting with the protesters and at least hearing their complaints, the government saw them as subversives. The lesson of Hama must have been at the front of the mind of every member of the Assad regime. Failure to act decisively, Hama had shown, inevitably led to insurrection. Compromise could come only after order was assured. So Bashar followed the lead of his father. He ordered a crackdown. And the army, long frustrated by inaction and humiliated by its successive defeats in confrontation with Israel, responded violently. Its action backfired. Riots broke out all over the country. As they did, the government attempted to quell them with military force. It failed. So, during the next two years, what had begun as a food and water issue gradually turned into a political and religious cause.

we don’t know much about the rebels. Hundreds of groups and factions—called “brigades” even when they are just a dozen or so people—have been identified. Some observes believe that there are actually over 1,000 brigades. A reasonable guess is that, including both part-time and full-time insurgents, they number about 100,000 fighters.

In Syria, quite different causes of splits among the brigades are evident. To understand the insurgency there, we must look carefully at the causes. The basis is religion

During the course of the Assad regime, the interpretation of Islam was undergoing a profound change. This was true not only of Syria but also of understanding, practice, and action in many other areas of the world.

tens of thousands of young foreigners flocked to Syria to fight for what they see as a religious obligation (Arabic: fi sabili’llah).

in Syria, while many Muslims found the Assad regime acceptable and many even joined its senior ranks, others saw its Alawi and Christian affiliations, and even its secularism and openness to Muslim participation, insupportable.

The foreign jihadists, like the more recent nationalists, put their emphasis on a larger-than-Syria range. For them, it is a folk nationalism not only to the Arab world but also to the wider world of Islam, affecting a billion people across the globe. What they seek is a restored Islamic world, a Dar ul-Islam, or a new caliphate.

the aims of the two broad groups—the Syrians and the foreigners—have grown apart in a way similar to the split that occurred in Arab nationalism. The Syrians focus on Syria and seek the overthrow of the Assad regime much as their fathers and grandfathers focused on the task of getting the French out of their country—their watan. Their nationalism is single-country oriented

all the rebels regard the conflict in Syria as fundamentally a religious issue. Particularly for the native rebels, as I have pointed out, the religious issue is overlaid by ethnic complexities.

It would be a mistake to regard the Syrian war, as some outside observers have done, as a fight between the forces of freedom and tyranny. If the opponents of the regime are fighting for some form of democracy, they have yet to make their voices heard.

as in Afghanistan, they have fought one another over territory, access to arms, leadership, and division of spoils as bitterly as they have fought their proclaimed enemy. This fracturing has made them impossible to defeat—as the Russians experienced in Afghanistan—but also, so far at least, incapable of governing on a national scale. But they are moving in that direction.

All observers agree that the foreign-controlled and foreign-constituted insurgent groups are the most coherent, organized, and effective. This is little short of astonishing as they share no common language and come from a wide variety of cultures.

Paradoxically, governments that would have imprisoned the same activists in their own countries have poured money, arms, and other forms of aid into their coffers. The list is long and surprising in its makeup: it includes Turkey; the conservative Arab states, particularly Qatar and Saudi Arabia; the EU member states; and the U.S.

The United States has a long history of covertly aiding insurgents in Syria, and has engaged in propaganda, espionage, and various sorts of dirty tricks. The rebels, naturally, have regarded the aid they’ve received as insufficient, while the government has regarded it as a virtual act of war. Both are right: it has not been on a scale that has enabled the rebels to win, but it is a form of action that, had another country engaged in it, seeking to overthrow the government, any American or European administration would have regarded as an act of war under international law.

Such covert intervention, and indeed overt intervention, is being justified on two grounds, the first being that the Syrian government is a tyranny. By Western standards, it is undoubtedly an authoritarian regime

However, the standards Western nations proclaim have been applied in a highly selective way. The EU and the U.S. enjoy cordial and mutually beneficial relations with dozens of tyrannical governments including most of the countries now attempting to regime-change Syria.              

Senior rebels have publicly threatened to carry out a genocide of the country’s main ethnic/religious minority, the Alawis. Scenes being enacted in Syria today recall the massacres and tortures of the wars of religion in 16th- and 17th-century Europe.

Most urgent in the minds of the EU and the U.S. is the second justification for intervention: the Syrian government is charged with using illegal chemical weapons. This is a very serious charge. However, doubts remain about who actually used the weapons. And, more importantly, even though the weapons are indeed horrible and are now generally considered illegal, several other states (the U.S., Israel, Egypt, and Iraq) have used them. Terrible as they are, they are only a small part of the Syrian problem—more than 99 percent of the casualties and all of the property damage in the war have been the result of conventional weapons. Getting rid of chemical weapons will neither in and of itself stop the war nor create conditions favorable to a settlement.

the cost of the war has been immense. And, of course, it is not over. We have only guesses on the total so far. One estimate is that the war has cost Syria upwards of $150 billion. Whole cities now resemble Stalingrad or Berlin in World War II. More than 2 million people have fled abroad while more than 4 million are internal refugees, remaining in Syria.

Lebanon. Even though there is little fighting there, the conflict in Syria is estimated to have cost that little country about $7.5 billion and doubled unemployment to 20 percent. About 1 million Lebanese were already judged by the World Bank as “poor,” and an additional 170,000 are now thought to have been pushed into poverty. The Syrian refugee population in the country has reached at least 1 million, making Syrians now almost a third of the total Lebanese population.

In Jordan, the story is similar. Half a million refugees are camped out there. One refugee encampment in the country houses over 100,000 people and has become Jordan’s fifth-largest city

However reprehensible the Syrian government may be in terms of democracy, it has not only given refugees and minorities protection but also maintained the part of Syria that it controls as a secular and religiously ecumenical state.

Tragic as these numbers are—the worst for nearly a century—factored into them is that Syria has lost the most precious assets of poor countries: most of the doctors and other professionals who had been painstakingly and expensively educated during the last century

Even more “costly” are the psychological traumas: a whole generation of Syrians have been subjected to either or both the loss of their homes and their trust in fellow human beings. Others will eventually suffer from the memory of what they, themselves, have done during the fighting. Comparisons are trivial and probably meaningless, but what has been enacted—is being enacted—in Syria resembles the horror of the Japanese butchery of Nanjing in World War II and the massacres in the 1994 Hutu-Tutsi conflict in Rwanda.

How the victims and the perpetrators can be returned to a “normal life” will be the lingering but urgent question of coming generations in Syria and elsewhere.

one in four or five people in the world today are Muslim: roughly 1.4 billion men, women, and children. That whole portion of the world’s population has its eyes on Syria. What happens there is likely to have a ripple effect across Asia and Africa. Thus, even though it is a small and poor country, Syria is in a sense a focal point of world affairs.

Unlike the Iraq and Afghan wars, the Syrian conflict will also have a “blowback” effect on the countries from which the Muslim fundamentalist insurgents come. It is in recognition of this fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to intervene in the Syrian war.

Even if fighting dies down, “lasting and bitter war,” like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—regardless of what American and European politicians say or even hope—will necessarily involve “boots on the ground.” That is, it will be fought with guerrilla and terrorist tactics on the rebel side against the now-typical counterinsurgency methods on the other side.

The new books, written by a Hamas committee, feature cover pictures of Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, a West Bank city, both sites of continuing clashes between Muslim and Jewish worshipers.

“The book has nothing about Oslo. It’s our right to know about Oslo because it’s a fact in our life.”

“to study the history of Palestine instead of the history of Egypt or Jordan,” and that the books present the “Palestine I want to learn about — I don’t recognize that Palestine is only Gaza and West Bank.”

It’s a lesson of nationalism and belonging.”

In the ritual, crowds of pilgrims throw stones at three pillars in a re-enactment of when the Prophet Abraham stoned the devil and rejected his temptations, according to Muslim traditions.

"Regardless of the investigation results, the improvement of the methods and mechanisms of the Hajj season will not stop. We have instructed the concerned entities to re-evaluate the current policy and the distribution of responsibilities," he said.

On September 11, just days before this year's Hajj started, a construction crane crashed through the roof of another Hajj destination, the Grand Mosque in Mecca, killing 107 people. At least 238 others suffered injuries when a powerful storm toppled the crane.Losing one's life during the Hajj season is considered by many devout Muslims as an entry to heaven.

Religious faith is too important to become a political punching bag. One does not have to like or even respect Islam to believe its practitioners have the right to build a worship center wherever they wish. Christians, especially, should avoid joining the Cordoba House mob. Those who most worry about living in a post-Christian world should most resolutely defend religious liberty for all.