SUMMARY 1. Chief message of Qu'ran

is absolute supremacy of Allah

2. Main elements of creed

a. existence of single God (Allah)

b. Angels

c. prophets and scriptures

d. Resurrection

e. Last judgment

f. Divine decree and

Predestination

3. Principal elements in code

FIVE PILLARS

a. Recital of Shahada

b. Formal prayer, Salat

c. Legal almsgiving, Zakat

d. Fasting, Sawm

e. Pilgrimage to Mecca

Hajj.

4. Islam is not only a

private or individual

worldview, but a

social one.

The founder of the religion that is sacred to almost one-fifth of the world's people was not a Bedouin tribesman from the desert but a noble merchant from Mecca. Islam, in fact, was a religion of the city, of the hadar, the sedentary farmers, merchants, and traders --who were its first and most enduring followers -- people who loathed and feared the nomadic Bedouin. In the seventh century, Mecca was western Arabia's most prosperous town and a pagan sanctuary, but it was still backward and inconsequential compared to the cities of Byzantium and Sassanid Persia, the two empires that dominated and fought over the region's lucrative trade routes. In less than fifty years Muhammad would end Mecca's and Arabia's marginality. Little is known about Muhammad's early years despite the many legends and hagiographies that have provided countless tales, most of questionable origin. What is widely regarded as the most authoritative biography, that of the eighth-century believer Ibn Ishaq, was not written until 125 \years after Muhammad's death. Less than two hundred years after Muhammad's death, one celebrated Muslim scholar is said to have discounted 596, 725 hadith then in circulation. The man assuredly was a remarkable figure and political genius, or what historian Maxime Rodinson called a combination of "Jesus Christ and Charlemagne." For the principles by which he lived and the state that he created are the models for today's Islamic radicals. Despite the many uncertainties about the prophet's life and although his words and deeds can be interpreted in many ways, the militants, like all political men, select those parts of his life and example that support their own views on how Muslims should live and think. Muhammad Ibn Abdullah was born sometime around the year 570 C.E. to a noble but not very prosperous branch of the Banu (sons of ) Hashim clan of the Quraysh tribe, Mecca's leading traders. Orphaned in childhood and left virtually destitute, he was raised by his uncle, Abu Talib, who taught him the caravan trade. When he was still in his twenties, he became the commercial agent of a rich widow fifteen years his senior -- a strong member of his own tribe -- Khadija bint Khuwaylid. When he was twenty-five, she asked him to marry her. He agreed, and she bore him four daughters but no surviving sons, a source of shame in all Semitic societies. But as long as he was with this wealthy, determined woman, Muhammad took no other wives. Muhammad did not begin receiving prophetic revelations until he was forty. At first these visions distressed him almost to the point of suicide. But his wife, Khadija -- his first convert and closest companion -- persuaded him that his supernatural visitor was an angel and not a delusion or the devil. While Christians have endowed their leader with divine status as mankind's Redeemer, a notion that might have dismayed the historical Jesus, Muhammad has remained to his followers God's Messenger, a prophet -- albeit the last and most nearly perfect of them -- but like Moses, entirely human. Muslims believe that the angel Gabriel's first words to Muhammad, in Arabic, were "Recite! You are the Messenger of God." The words he was given became the Qur'an, or as it is often written, Koran, literally "recitation."

Go To Sunni Muslims believe that what Allah told his messenger to repeat, indeed every word in the Qur'an, was spoken by God through his inspired prophet. Said to have been recorded during his lifetime on leather scraps, flat camel bones, and any other handy material, the verses constitute the first and some say the finest examples of Arabic rhymed prose, as opposed to the poetry that was Arabia's traditional art form. To believers, these words are divine and eternal, not to be challenged or even questioned. The religion Allah revealed to Muhammad acknowledged the legitimacy of his faith's monotheistic predecessors, the Jews and Christians -- the so-called Peoples of the Book -- as well as their prophets. His new religion's theological respect for the adherents of the two great montheistic faiths was politically shrewd, since seventh-century Arabia was populated by both Jewish and Christian tribes (at least two pre-Islamic Arab kings were Jews) as well as by Arabian monotheists called hanifs. Muhammad sought converts and allies among all of them. Islam was doctrinally uncomplicated. Those who wished to avoid eternal damnation and enjoy paradise after death must believe in and pray to the One God and share their wealth with the poor. In addition to the five pillars of the faith, was an unofficial pillar, jihad. Dying to spread the faith canceled out all sins and led straight to paradise. The vast majority of Meccans initially scoffed at the self-acclaimed Prophet, a tall, supposedly striking man with a gap between his two front teeth. They tolerated him only as long as he did not interfere with their worship of Mecca's many gods -- of which Allah was the major deity -- and more to the point, as long as he enjoyed the tribal protection of Abu Talib, his powerful and well-respected uncle. Initially, the community and Muhammad tried to compromise their theological differences. Meccans, after all, greatly prspered from pilgrimages to the Kaba, a cubic building the size of a small house in whose exterior wall a black stone, probably a meteorite, is embedded; both the Kaba and the stone are revered. When Meccans asked Muhammad whether their gods could be worshiped along with Allah, his One God, the Messenger received a timely ecumenical revelation that sanctioned recognition of Mecca's traditional gods -- the "exalted birds," as Muhammad called them. The answer must have delighed and relieved his fellow Meccans, who were also probably eager to avoid a communal split. But the archangel soon informed Muhammad that the verse he had received came not from God but from the devil. Horrified, Muhammad repudiated the revelation, calling it the "Satanic verses," the words used some fifteen centuries later by Salman Rushdie as the title of his controversial novel. Ultimately, Muhammad must have decided, whether through divine revelation or political acumen, that permitting Meccans to continue worshiping their more than three hundred gods would infringe on the "oneness" of his own true God and dilute his authority as Allah's Messenger. As a result, Meccans increased their harassment of the more vulnerable members of Muhammad's new faith and mocked Muhammad himself by throwing sand, garbage, and even the wombs of sheep at him. After Abu Talib's death in 619 -- and his wife Khadija's` that same year -- a despondent Muhammad decided that his followers, who probably number less than a hundred should abandon Mecca. The warring tribes of the town now called Medina, 280 miles north of Mecca, accepted this honest and charming dissident from the rival Qurayshis of Mecca, their arrogant neighbor, and made him the arbiter of their interminable local quarrels. Muslims date their calendar from this acknowledgment of failure -- the hijira, or emigration from Mecca to Medina in 622 C.E., an echo perhaps of Moses' flight into the desert. But the hijra also marks the beginning of Muhammad's success as political leader, spiritual guide, supreme lawmaker, and commander-in-chief. Militants tend to emphasize the Prophet's life in Medina, for it was there that Muhammad's community took root. And it was also in Medina that tensions mounted with the Jews, another fact of great importance to anti-Israeli Islamists. Muhammad's first agreement governing relations within his umma (community), the ciiy's various tribes, included Medina's numerous Jews. This accord, a unilateral proclamation by Muhammad rather than a bilateral agreement provided that as long as Jews and even pagans fought alongside Muslims against the Quraysh of Mecca or any other external enemy, refrained from "wronging" Muslims or aiding their foes, and helped finance the umma's self-defense, there would be "sincere friendship, exchange of good counsel, fair conduct, and no treachery between them," and, of course, freedom of religion. Muhammad had expectd to find natural allies in the Jews, this ancient People of the Book. Initially he made several concessions to them, such as instructing his followers to pray as they did toward Jerusalem and adopting some Jewish fast days. But the Jews disappointed him. They mocked what they regarded as his misappropriation of their own sacred texts. Nevertheless, Muhammad's new faith grew in numbers and prestige. After Muhammad gained confidence, recruits, and wealth through raids on Meccan caravans, the Messenger decided to take on his rivals in Medina, particularly the Jews. To distinguish his followers from the Israelites, he banned Muslims from praying toward Jerusalem, ordering them instead to pray toward Mecca's Kaba. Then he expelled the Jewish tribe of Banu Nadir, one of whose members, tradition says, tried to assassinate Muhammad. This was followed by the flight of another Jewish tribe to the great oasis of Khabar, north of Medina, which Muhammad would also later conquer. In 627, after Medina, under Muhammad's leadership, survived a protractaed siege by some ten thousand well-armed Meccans, Muhammad decided to eliminate his last potential internal enemy, the Banu Qurayza, Medina's last Jewish tribe. Muhammad accused them of having supported Mecca during the siege, a charge they ardently denied. Muhammad refused to let the Banu Qurayza emigrate, unlike the other Jewish tribes. Disloyalty had to be punished. To decide their fate, Muhammad appointed a man who was dying of wounds received during the siege. The bitter arbiter condemned all adult Jewish males to death, a verdict that Muhammad was said to have praised as "the very sentence of Allah above the seven skies." At least six hundraed Jewish men, and even a woman, were behaded in Medina the next day, their wives and children made slaves, and their property seized. However troubling its moral implications, the massacre was a political success. Never in Muhammad's lifetime -- indeed, not until the twentieth century -- would a Jewish tribe rise against the Arabs. To the militants, this saga of Jewish betrayal has a modern moral: Jews are not to be trusted; pacts with them are not to be made, and if they are made when Muslims are weak, they can be broken. Even before this event, however, Muhammad had established many of the authoritarian principles that would govern his community long after his death and which modern militants would later stress to justify their own rigid political outlook. All executive, judicial, legislative, and religious authority rested in Allan and his Messenger. His state did not separate spiritual and temporal authority. Muhammad's theocracy had no formal police force (though there was no shortage then, as now, of young zealots eager to implement the Messenger's word), no standing army, no bureaucracy; in fact, few institutions of any kind. Though the Qur['an sanctioned slavery and an inferior status for women, it softened existing inequalities and improved conditions for both. Muhammad's new faith revealed a decidedly egalitarian spirit, an intense conviction that tribe, wealth, and origin were less important in the eyes of God than the strength of one's faith and personal merit. While legend has it tht the Prophet was a charismatic man of almost infinite patience who valued those who questioned his orders, militants stress that intellectuals and other skeptics were not among his favorites. Muhammad, after all, was leading a revolution, not a debating society. While he often forgave those who had resisted or plotted against him -- eager to avoid the vendettas and blood feuds at the core of the Bedouin code of honor and life itself-- Muhammad abhorred being mocked in verse or song, an intolerance that has endured in Arab culture. Soon after a successful raid at a place called Badr, Muhammad authorized the murder of an especially irksome critic -- Islam's first politically sanctioned murder of an intellectual opponent -- a woman poet. In her singing verses, Asama bint Marwan had ridiiculed ehr fellow Medinese's slavish acceptance of the f oreigner from the loathsome Qurayshi tribe of Mecca."Fucked men of Malik and of Nabit and of Awf, fucked men of Khazraj," she wrote of Medin'as great clans and tribes in a verse that early Muslim scholars were honest enough to record. "You obey a stranger who does not belong among you." Enraged, Muhammad was said to have asked a question not uncommon among rulers: "Will no one rid me of this daughter of Marwan?" A volunteer went to the writer's house that very night and stabbed her to death as she slept surrounded by her children, a murder Muhammad was said to have praised as "a service to Allah and his Messenger." A few months later, Muhammad ordered the death of a second critic, a male poet whose mother was Jewish.In this case Muhammad accompanied the assailants halfway to the scene of the crime and gave them a blessing, an early precedent for the modern Fatwas sanctioning the murder of a kafir (nonbeiever) as well as intellectual "apostates," those who turn away from Islam. After he conquered Mecca, Muhammad reportedly killed only ten people for their affronts to him and Islam. But among them were an author of satirical (if not Satanic) verses about Muhammad and a young woman whose only apparent crime was to have sung them at a party. Today, militants stress these examples as a warning to intellectuals -- mock us at your peril. A sensible politician, Muhammad accepted most of Arabia's tribal rules and customs, including male circumcision. Few other religions sanction a man's beating a disobedient wife, as does the Qur'an. But other rules, such as his ban on a woman's being "inherited" as chattel by her late husband's eldest son, were decidedly progressive for the era and remained so relataive to the West until the twentieth century. While Allah in his revelations to Muhammad limited to four the number of wives a man could take -- excluding God's Messenger, of course, who was permitted to marry for reasons of state and had at least nine wives (at leaast one of them a converted Jew) and a Christian concubine when he died -- he did not restict the number of a man's concubines or slaves. (Slavery in Saudi Arabia was abolished de jure only in 1962). But Allah required that men treat their wives equally, that women retain their own wealth, and that they be permitted under certain conditions to ask a judge to order their husbands to divorce them (men could end marriages at will) -- all progressive measures compared to the practices of pre-Islmaic society, the jahiliyya. Women themselves were entitled to a share of inheritance, although their portion was half that of men, as was the worth of some of their testimony in court. Islam outlawed the slaughter of infant girls, a pracice in desperately poor and perpetually hungry seventh-century Arabia. Fatima Marnissi, a Moroccan writer, blames much of Islam's misogyny not on the divinely inspired Qur'an but on its all-too-human interpretation, the Sunna, that is, the hadith that Muhammad's companions and even later witnesses and scholars claim Muhammad uttered. For example, the verse requiring Muslim women to wear the hijab (veil) outside their homes -- the most obvious symbol of male supremacy -- was imposed in Medina by the Prophet, she writes, to protect his wives and all free women against rape and harassment in the insecure streets of the city. But even Mernissi is hard-pressed to justify the Qur'ans determination that men are superior to women, that they alone can decide what kind of sexual positions a woman must submit to, and that husbands can use violence against their wives. It may be no accident tht the Qur'an has two distinct voices. In Mecca, Muhammad was a rebel; in Medina he was head of state. The early Meccan verses -- those recited while his new religion was being formed -- concern mainly religious dogma. In the Medina verses, by contrast, Allah took what to a nonbeliever was a surprisiginly detailed interest in the day-to-day problems of Muhammaad's community, even the Messenger's troubled love affairs. (To a believer, of course, God's concern for the welfare of his Prophet is not at all surpsing). One of the most celbrated instances concerned Aisha, his favorite wife, who, as the daughter of Abu Bakr, the Prophet's companion and future first caliph, unterstood how to wield power. Muhammad had married Aisha when she was only six (a union said to be consummated when she was nine, child marriage being a not uncommon practice in Arabia and sanctioned by Allah. Tradition has it that when a Medinese rival of Muhammaad's accused Aisha of adultery, Allah himself exonerated her through a revelation -- just in time, it seems given Muhammad's doubts about her innocence. Muhammad's trance produced two other timely opinons aimed at discouraging such slander: first, the requirement tht four male witnesses attest to an allegation of adultery and fornication, and second, that bearing false witness is to be punished by eighty lashes. Since the dominant branch of Islam believes that Muhammad left no instructions about succession, Islam's first crisis, and an enduring problem in the Muslim Middle East, was not over religious dogma but over who should lead the state after his death. The Medinese wanted Muhammad's successor to come from among them. BUt the men of Mecca installed Abu Bakr as Kalifa, meaning "successor" and "deputy." To avoid future uncertainty over succession, Abu Bakr designated Umar the next caliph. BUt Umaar was murdered in 644 by a disgruntled non-Muslim. The third caliph, Uthman, who won an apparent power struggle among six men whom Umar had named worthy of succession, came from a great aristocratic clan of Mecca, the Umayyads. So many Muslims resented the choice, preferring the more humble Ali, the Prophet's cousin and husband of his daughter Fatima. Opposition to Uthman grew, aggravated by his nepotism, his show of favoritism toward the leading Meccan clans, and his determination to standardize religious dogma by tolerating only his auhorised version of the Qur'an. Uthman's murder in 656 by Muslim dissidents, the first assassination of a Muslim caliph by Muslims, was a "turning point" in Islamic history, which not only created what one scholar called "an ominous precedent" but also "gravely weakened the religious and moralprestige ofteh office as a bond of unity in Islam." The new caliph, Ali, was soon challenged by, among others, the Prophet's widow Aisha. In 656 Aisha herself led a battle against Ali, the beginning of the split of the Muslim realm into rival camaps. At the Battle of the Camel, Ali defeated her.But in 657, Muawiyah, the latae caliph Uthman's cousin, a fellow Umayyad and then governer of Syria, challenged Ali's forces at Siffen, Islam's first fitna (full-fledged civil war). The battle was inconclusive, and Ali agreed to arbitaration. Muawiyah ultimately prevailed, and in 661, Ali was murdered. The war, the compromise over arbitration, and Ali's subsequent assassination were the events associated with the greata division of Islam into rival camps and the beginning of the political fragmentation that Muhammad had always feared. For although Muawiyah and his Umayyad successors proved able rulers, expanding the empire from their new capital, Damascus, into Europe and to the borders of India and China, Ali's followers denounced the Umayyad caliphatae as illegitimate. Henceforth, these partisans of Ali became known as Shia, or Shiites. In 680, Ali's son Hussein, the Propet's grandson, led Shiite forces against the Umayyads in a second round f the civil war, this time at Karbala in Iraq, where he and almost his entire family were slaughtered. To this day, Shiites mourn the "martyrdom" of the Prophet's descendant Hussein ibn Ali in a day of atonement called Ashura.And to this day, Shiites, who make up less than 10 percent of Middle Eaastern Muslims, are a persecuted minority in several Arab states, including Saudi Arabia. This historic division in Islam into Sunnis -- those who stood with Muwaiyah and followed the Sunna, Muhammad's teaching -- and Shiites -- the partisans of Ali -- would never be healed. Another group of dissidents were the Kharijites, or secessionists -- literally, "those who go out." Originally, Kharijites were Shiites, partisans of Ali, but they rejected him, too, when Ali submitted to arbitration: Men, they argued, had no right to decide what Allah had already resolved in Ali's favor and what could be determined on earth only through battle. In their fanataical idealism, they became anarchists, opposing both Muawiyah and Ali, Sunni and Shia, alike. Though the Kjarijits shared the Shia's sense of historical injustice at Ali's loss in Islam's historic power struggle, the sect was ultimately rejected by all Muslims, including the Shia. For it was a Khaijite who murdered Ali. For Kharijites, jihad, or spreading Islam by the sword, was their faith's sixth pillar. Islam became decidely pragmtic in the mid-seventh century under Umayyad rule, reverting more or less to a secular knigship.Muawiyah, the gifted fifth caliph who ruled not from Arabiaa but from Damascus, introduced a dynastic element to Islamic rule and institutionalized practices that most modern Islamic militants reject as secularism, the effective separation of religion and state. But when the Umayyads weakened, another branch of Muhammad's family, the Abbasids,launched Islam's third civil war against the Umayyads. Named for Muhammad's uncle Abbas, the Abbasids triumphantly relocated Islam's capital from Syria to Iraq in 750, thus intensifying a regional struggle between Damascus and Baghdad that has endured until today. While historians often describe the Abbasid caliphate (750-1258) as Islam's golden era, it was even more autocratic than its predecessors. It was also less stable. A fourth civil war occurred in 809. Modern Islamists argue that by the eleventh century Islam was in decline "From then on,"until the sixteenth century and the "pax Ottomanica," the last and greatest Islamic Empire and caliphate in Istanbul, restored "calm and order to the troubled Muslim realm." Given this history, it was ieasy to udnerstand why, despite, or perhaps because of, their endless power struggles, most Muslims feared civil strife and unwarranted challenges to a ruler's authority. By the eleventh century, in fact, Sunni Islamic jurists had pronounced it sinful for Muslims to rebel against their leader -- however cruel, corrupt, or unjust -- as long aas he was a Muslim who imosed sharia, the holy law. It was harder to understand, however, the militants' reverence for the "Rightly GUided Caliphs," that is the first four successors to Muhammad -- what they viewed as Islams true "golden" age. For women, surely, the Rightly Guided Caliphs were a disaster. The limited freedom that women had enjoyed in Medina was quickly denied them by the Prophet's "righeous" successors. Moreover, the repeated power struggles after Muhammed's death exposed major weaknesses of Islamic government that have endured to this day: the lack of a system of succession; the vagueness of what was meant by shura, or consultation with the community; the lack of guidance as to how the community is supposed to determine ijma, or what constitutes consensus; and how it should depose a leader who fails to live up to the Prophet's high standards. The Prophet himself seemed untroubled by such key questions of governance. "My community will not agree on an error." Yet in the bloody epoch now glorified by tosay's Islamists, three of thefirst four Rightly Guided Caliphs had died violent deaths, two of themat the hands of fellow Muslims. Under them the Islamic world had split in two. Less than two hundred years after the Prophet's death, the Islamic community had suffered four civil wars, and rival factions and tribes were feuding over power, giving rise to and justified by, disagreements over religious dogma. From then on Muslims fought bitterly about the laws that governed them. Interpretation of the law was key in Islam, since for Muslims, God made law; man was left simply to interpret and enforce it.Modern Islmists insist that no society can be "Islamic" unless it is ruled by sharia, the holy law based on the divinely granted Qur'an and Sunna, the Prophet's traditions, or the secondhand account of what the Prophet supposedly said.But the holy law was systematized only after Muhammad's deat. The fuqaha (legal scholars) and ulema (the guardians of doctrine) used reasoning by analogy and personal judgment to interpet law until the ninth century, when they decided that all the major questions had been answered and that the gate of itihad, as the process was known, should be closed. Shia, the minority branch, rejected this, although both Shia and SUnni jurists in practice were conservative, relying increasingly on precedent and shunning innovation and interpetation, a development that would have devastating intellectual consequences for Islamic thought. The Rightly GUided Caliphs did not produce paradise on earth, but rather a powerful state with even more powerful rulers. This is the heart of their attraction to modern Islamic militants. For all the chaos, bloodshed, murder, improvisation, and absolutism, the Rightly Guided Caliphs were a precedent for the type of Islamic regime -- the autocratically "virtuous" state -- that contemporary Islamists have sought to create. They seem impervious to the apparenlty inverse correlation between power and Muslim virtue. The more powerful the state (and its caliph) became, the further the polity moved from the ideals that Muhammad preached. But the longing for this ostensibly blissful past and a community ruled by the oxymornic "just despot", an ideal that could be reestablished only by returning to the precepts established by the Messenger andhis original companions, has proved remrkably durable. Eleven centuries later this impulse would create the first Islamic militant reform movement in modern times to forge a state in -- whre else? -- Arabia. Modern Saudi Arabia is actually the third Saudi kingdome. Spurred on by tribal and religious zeal, between 1773 and 1819 the Sauds and the Wahhabis united, often thorugh bloody conquest, most of the land tht Muhammad had ruled and which would become a century later the modern Saudi kingdom. But in 1818 the first state and its capital, Diriyya, were destroyed by Egypt at the urging of the jealous and powerful Ottomas, a humiliation for which Egypt has never quite been forgiven. The second Saudi kingdom (1824-91), also the result of an alliance beteen the Al Saud and the Wahhabis, ended in civil war and the temporary exile of the House of Saud in neighboring Kuwait. The third Saudi kingom (modern Saudi Arabia) owes success to Ibn Saud who in 1902 recaptured Riyadh from local rulers in a daring raid. Attacks last year on Abolkarim Sorush, a philosophy professor in Iran who argues that Islam is compatible with democracy and pluralism and implitly thata clerical rule in Iran is a distortion of the faith, suggests how passionately political currents still run as the revolution enters its seventeenth year. Iram remains a nation of crises, uncertain about its economy, its political system, even its identity. Regime that rules Iran, a once oil-rich nation of seventeen natinalities and 65 million people in a land the size of the Unitd States east of the Mississippi has endured. The eight year war launched by Iraq in 1980, which the Ayatolla Ruholla Khomeini refused to end, is estimated to have claimed more than a million Iranian casualties, though exact figures are unknowable. The pauperization of the middle class and the educated elite continues to alienate young Iranians from the regime and even from Islam itself. After the Islamic revolution overthrew Pahlavi and forced him into exile, the militants' first impulse was to deface the friezes of Persepolis, a symbol not onl of the shah's excesses but of the jahiliyya, the time before the Prophet Muhammad. But patriaots had prevailed and Persepolis was spared. To this day Iranians seem incredulous that by 650 their empire (and much of Byzantium as well) had been conquered by Islam and the Arabs, a people they viewed, and still do, as primtive. How could God have spoken Arabic and not Persian (Farsi)? Iran responded by doing whata came naturallyin adversity or occupation: As Alexander eventually became an honorary Iranian, the new faith of Islam became "iranianizzed," imbued with the customs, traditions, and skills of their ancient civilization. Relations between Iranians and Arabs were always tense. Early Arab Muslims accused Persian Muslims of incest because of the Saddanid custom of marring one's mother or systers; Persians denigrated the Arabs as "lizard eaters." Iran had become officially Shiite, the minority branch of Islam, only under the Safavids, the sixteenth century dynasty of Turkish origin that conquered Iran and imposed Shiism as the state religion on what was then a mostly Sunni population. They choice may have been unfortunate, Shiism being the scorned, defeated branch of the faith. Shiites emphasise this histrical dispossession, mourning for their lost imams -- Shiism's rightful political and spiritual rulers -- as well as IRan's deepsorrow for its own lost empres and grandeur. Iranians practice "Twelver Shiism," which refers t the twelve divinely designated descendants of the sons of Ali, the prophet's cousin who were deprived of their right to rule. Persecuted and feared by Sunni Muslims, the later Shiite imams defended themselves and their faith by various stratagems, including taqiyya, or dissembling to avoid persecution. According to Twelver Shiito doctrine, God had ordered the Twelfth Imam in1874 to remain on earth in hiding or "occultation" until he was commanded to maniffest himself -- to usher in Judgment Day by returning as the Mahdi, the Messiah. The successor to the Prophet Muhammad would possess walayat, the ability to interpret the inner mysteries of the Qur'an and the sharia. Divinely chosen, he would be free of sin and error. As such, he had to be obeyed, a requirement tht Khomeini would briliantly exploit. Fate was not kind to the Iranian revolution. Iranians had barely written their new constitution and elected their first government when Saddam Hussein invaded in 1980. The price of oil that year had begun its steady decline. In addition, the Mjahideen-e Khalq, a socialist Islamic group -- the Khmer Rouge of Islamic militants -- based in enemy Iraq terrorized the new Islamic state with bombing and assasinations. Although such assaults went largely unreported in teh United States, most Iranians loatahed these Islamic extremists even more than they did their own revolution's most uncompromising men; they also never forgot tht the Muhahideen have lavish offices in Washington. Iran's population exploded. Eager for more recruits for the war against Iraq and opposed to birth control on religious groudns, Khomeini's government encouraged Iranians to procreate, with disastrous results. By 1995 Iran's population, some 34 million on the eve of the revolution was 65 million -- 72% were under twenty-five; 53% under fifteen. Some 48 percent of Iranians are still illiterate. With low oil prices, a soaring population, and zealous but colossaly incompetent clerical administration, Iran's economy staggered. Per capita income in real terms is about a quarter today of what it was before the revolution. About 6 million mostly middle-class Iranians now live outside their country, 1.2 million of them in the US.alone. In a dramatic departure from traditional Shite doctrine, Khomeini argued that Muslims should not wait passively for the return of the Twelfth Imam and the establishment of the imamate under the infallible Redeemer but turn immediately to the most enlightened clerics to establish a walayat al-faqih, or vice regency, the guaradianship of the jurosconsul, which would rule with the Messiah's authority until his return. He maintained that Iran's leadership could be vested in a "single outstanding religious figure," the preeminent jurist, whom all Muslims would be religiously bound to obey. THe international Islamic revolution stumbled. If Shiism was born thirteen centuries ago with the slaughter of Imam Hussein (the Prophet's grandson) on the battlefield of Karbala, Khomeini's Shiite international revolution had died in mdoern-day Karbala after the GUlf war, when Iran had done nothing to stop Saddam's slaughter of Iraqi Shiites and the desecration of Shia shrines. Islamic Revivalism --product of many factors: collapse within region of Arab nationalism after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war collapse of Soviet Union and Marxist dream in late 1980s demographic explosion that has strained national resources failure of most Middle Eastern governments to deliver on ambitious promises made after independence effect of Khomeini'spopulist Islamic revolution in Iran explosion of petrodollars American support for mujahideen in Afghanistan Spread of hijab among young women Many cannot afford weekly trips to hairdresser or expensive cosmetics that middle-class Arab women take for granted In Algeria's Casbah, wehre families sleep in shifts and share a single baathroom with many, hijab provides pyschological as well as physical proteaction. To men, Hijab says: This is a devout woman. Leave her alone Also "high end" Islamic courtoure suggests that hijab can be as much a matter of fashion as of politicis Jordan and Israel have been among the boldest in co-opting and marginalizing militant Muslims by offering them political rights and participation. But in neither state do militants stand much chance of ruling. In Israel, the overwhelming Jewish majority will not permit the country's non-Jewish minority, almost a fifth of the population, to challenge Israel's identity or threaten its existence. In 1960, average per capita income in the seven most prosperous Arab states was slightly larger than that of the seven East Asian "tigers." By the early 1990s, per capita income of the Arab group was only $3,342, while that of the Asian countries stood at $8,000. IN Israel, per capita income is more than $12,000. Today the Middle East attracts only 3 percent of global foreign investment; Asia gets 58 percent. Middle East's share, despite Arab-Israeli peace treaties, continues to decine. Global economy is developing so quickly that nations or regions tht fail to make the necessary structural adjustments to compete for market share and capital are now likely to remain permanently poor. Arab Middle East and Iran will have to create almost 50 million jobs by 2010 simply to provide sufficient work for those who will enter the labor force. No Middle Eastern state except Israel is now creating jobs to match current levels of growth.