Islam | featured news

The portrait investigators have begun to piece together of the two brothers suspected of the Boston Marathon bombings suggests that they were motivated by extremist Islamic beliefs but were not acting with known terrorist groups — and that they may have learned to build bombs simply by logging onto the online English-language magazine of the affiliate of Al Qaeda in Yemen, law enforcement officials said Tuesday.

In the years before the Boston Marathon bombings, Tamerlan Tsarnaev fell under the influence of a new friend, a Muslim convert who steered the religiously apathetic young man toward a strict strain of Islam, family members said.

A court here handed down a suspended 10-month jail term on Monday for Fazil Say, an internationally acclaimed Turkish pianist and composer convicted of insulting Islam and offending Muslims in postings on Twitter.

Protests by Islamists allied to President Mohamed Morsi forced Egypt's highest court to adjourn its work indefinitely on Sunday, intensifying a conflict between some of the country's top judges and the head of state.

Egypt's Islamist-dominated constitutional assembly passed a rushed draft of a constitution early Friday to ease public anger against President Mohamed Morsi's expanded powers and preempt an expected court decision to disband the chamber this weekend.

A Turkish court on Friday convicted 330 military officers, including the former air force and navy chiefs, of plotting to overthrow the Islamic-based government in 2003, state television reported, in a case that has helped curtail the military's hold on politics.

An actress who appears in a clip of an anti-Muslim film blamed for causing deadly violence in the Middle East says she will continue to press to get YouTube to pull the trailer. A judge denied Cindy Lee Garcia's request Thursday that he order the clip removed. Superior Court Judge Luis Lavin says he rejected the request in part because Garcia hadn't served the film's producer with a copy of a lawsuit demanding its removal.

“Innocence of Muslims” -- the crude and provocative anti-Islam video blamed for a wave of deadly violence against U.S. diplomatic outposts -- was promoted by a small band of anti-Muslim Christian activists, according to reports, but the true identity of its director remained unclear.

Chanting "death to America," hundreds of protesters angered by an anti-Islam film stormed the U.S. Embassy compound in Yemen's capital and burned the American flag on Thursday, the latest in a series of attacks on American diplomatic missions in the Middle East.

J. Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, was killed Tuesday in the attack on the U.S. consulate in the eastern city of Benghazi by protesters angry over a film that ridiculed Islam's Prophet Muhammad.