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Peshawar, 4 April 2011, suicide bomber blow himself in Munda Bus stand Lower dir of Khyber Pukhtoon khawa province. According to local police suicide bomber enter in bargain center. Sufi Mohammad Akber sits with his friends. Suicide bomber blow him self in the front of Sufi Mohammad Akber , in result 7 people died including Mohammad Akber , his son and other friends Mohammad Zada , Mohammad Zamir , Mohammad Sharif , Qadir Khan and other unknown civilian persons. More then 15 people injured in incident. Local police cordon the area and start operation at Munda.

The freaky fantasies of a former Guantanamo detainee explain why Sufi Islam won't defeat the jihadists The strangest things kept happening to Walid Muhammad Hajj during his years as a prisoner in Guantanamo Bay. “Once, when I was sleeping – on the floor, not on a bed – I suddenly felt that a cat was trying to penetrate me”, he told al-Jazeera in a recent interview. “It tried to penetrate me again and again.” Then there was that “incident with a guy who sat next to me in the morning. When they brought the milk, he began to urinate into...

KARACHI, Pakistan – Two suspected suicide bombers have attacked the most beloved Sufi shrine in Pakistan's largest city, killing at least eight people, wounding 65 others, and sending a stark reminder of the threat posed by Islamist militants to this U.S.-allied nation. Angry mobs burned tires and torched buses in the aftermath of the bombings in Karachi late Thursday. The attack came amid tensions between Washington and Islamabad over NATO helicopter incursions that have led Pakistan to close a key border crossing used to ferry supplies to Western troops in Afghanistan. Despite U.S. apologies over the incursions, one of which...

Sigmund Freud thought that everything was about sex, and he was half right. Rarely is love so spiritual that it does not also stir the loins, for human beings are creatures not only of soul but of body. Although it is thought rude to say so nowadays, different kinds of love belong to different kinds of sex. Not even Hell can resist divine love, J W Goethe showed in the funniest vignette in all literature: his devil, Mephistopheles, is disabled by an obsessive lust for the cherubs sent to claim the soul of Faust in the drama’s penultimate scene. Heavenly...

NEXT WEEK'S reunion of Led Zeppelin is among the most anticipated in rock history. And with good reason. In the 1970s, the British band was mesmerizing.But beyond unforgettable songs and legendary live shows, Led Zeppelin broadcast a powerful message to fans who tuned in to the right frequency. Bring the soul of the West and Islam together, Led Zeppelin told us, and you can produce a musical force powerful enough to break through the barricade dividing the two civilizations. In its way, this message is far more subversive than the Satanic themes the band was accused of "backmasking" into "Stairway...

A Grand Whirling Dervishes Ceremony in Konya, Turkey, last December. The Dervishes say they whirl to achieve a state of communication with God. They take their inspiration from Rumi, a 13th-century mystic poet and Muslim scholar. Photo courtesy of the Interfaith Dialog Center. They spin in place for nearly an hour -- an act of spiritual devotion and a physical marvel that leaves audiences entranced. On Sunday, the Whirling Dervishes of Rumi will bring their mystical, mesmerizing ritual to the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark. The performance, which includes music, chanting and twirling, will give North Jersey...

What occupies the mind of a jihad-driven Muslim? How is such fervor planted in young and impressionable believers? Where does it originate? How did I—once an invernocent child who grew up in a liberal, moderate and educated household—find myself a member of a radical Islamic group? These questions go to the root of Islamic violence and must be addressed if free societies are to combat radical Islam. To further this aim, I will explore the psychological development of a jihadi’s mind through my own first-hand experience as a former member of a Muslim terrorist organization. I was born in Cairo...

Since the atrocities of September 11, 2001, the West has begun to pay attention to the problem of Islamic education, including particularly the madrassahs or religious schools in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, Indonesia, and elsewhere that indoctrinate young believers in the radical and violent doctrines of Wahhabism and related pseudo-religious ideologies. In recent travels on behalf of the Center for Islamic Pluralism, I have begun analyzing how non-Muslims and other Westerners may assist moderate Muslims in changing this negative situation

Osama bin Laden was far from the first jihadist to kill infidels as an expression of religious piety. This years marks the 600th anniversary of the death of Tamerlane (Timur Lang; “Timur the Lame”, d. 1405), or Amir Timur (“Timur” signifies “Iron” in Turkish). Osama lacks both Tamerlane’s sophisticated (for his time) military forces and his brilliance as a strategist. But both are or were pious Muslims who paid homage to religious leaders, and both had the goal of making jihad a global force. Santayana was correct when he told us that those who refuse to learn from history are...

The Sufi branch of Islam has enjoyed spectacularly good press in the West. Hailed as peaceful mystics who believe jihad is a spiritual quest, nothing violent or unpleasant, Sufism has attracted favorable attention and converts from all sorts of Westerners, from new agers in Marin County, California, to East Coast intellectuals. But Sufis are not necessarily all peace-loving meditative seekers of the divine. The formation of the “The Sufi Jihadi Squadrons of Shaykh ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Gilani” in Iraq was recently announced at the jihadist website, “Jihad Unspun”. The Al-Gilani (d.1166) after whom they are named was in fact a Hanbali...

Venerable white-bearded dervishes and high-heeled girls with garish lipstick found rare common ground before dawn on Tuesday, celebrating an Iranian holiday with the mystical chants of the Sufis. Sufi Muslim spirituality is largely tolerated under Iran’s strict Islamic laws, although senior religious figures occasionally call for a clampdown on its rites. Under an almost full moon, several hundred Iranians came to celebrate the birthday of the ‘Mahdi’ at the Zahir-od-dowleh cemetery in northern Tehran, a dervish hub where many writers and artists are buried. The Mahdi is a key figure of Shi’ite Islam, a descendant of the Prophet Mohammad whose...

Despite the influence of the west on Iran's popular culture, Hafez, a poet who died over 600 years ago, still gets the crowds flocking, writes Robert Tait The pilgrims could have been on day out at Graceland. Representing the full range of the age and socio-economic spectrums, they came to pay homage to an icon of modern popular culture. But the hero being saluted was not Elvis Presley or any comparable figure from the age of mass communication, but a poet who died centuries ago, and whose messages remain disputed and obscure among even the most literary of his fellow...

The Sufi branch of Islam has enjoyed spectacularly good press in the West. Hailed as peaceful mystics who believe jihad is a spiritual quest, nothing violent or unpleasant, Sufism has attracted favorable attention and converts from all sorts of Westerners, from new agers in Marin County, California, to East Coast intellectuals. But Sufis are not necessarily all peace-loving meditative seekers of the divine. The formation of the “The Sufi Jihadi Squadrons of Shaykh ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Gilani” in Iraq was recently announced at the jihadist website, “Jihad Unspun”. The Al-Gilani (d.1166) after whom they are named was in fact a Hanbali...

On March 18th, a shocking crime took place in Berkeley, California, at a spot famous for sweeping Bay views, distinguished architecture, and the genteel atmosphere that wealthy “progressives” create for themselves. An elderly woman, walking home with her husband from an extension class at the University of California, was grabbed from behind by a young woman who had just walked past her on the sidewalk. In a flash, her throat was slit to the bone. As she spurted blood, the suspect drove off with her companion, another young woman, in a light blue BMW M3 convertible, a car which carries...

The word Sufi is most likely to be derived from the Arabic word "soof", meaning wool. This is because of the Sufi habit of wearing woolen coats...1 Sufism is known as "Islaamic Mysticism," in which Muslims seek to find divine love and knowledge through direct personal experience of God 2. Mysticism is defined as the experience of mystical union or direct communion with ultimate reality, and the belief that direct knowledge of God, spiritual truth, or ultimate reality can be attained through subjective experience (as intuition or insight)3 Both the terms Sufi and Sufism and Sufi beliefs have no basis...

The Weekly Standard's House MuslimWhat William Safire probably didn't know.By Timothy NoahPosted Wednesday, July 3, 2002, at 3:54 PM PT On July 1, William Safire published a column denouncing the Voice of America for providing a soapbox to supporters of Islamic terrorism. Safire was particularly exercised about the firing of VOA staffer Stephen Schwartz, which Safire attributed to the fact that Schwartz is an outspoken dissenter from the news director's views. Schwartz, a contributor to the conservative Weekly Standard, is critical of Saudi and Syrian support of terror: in September, Doubleday will publish his likely best seller, The Two Faces of...