As the administration confronts domestic radicalization, some government analysts say they have much to learn from clerics like Qadhi.
Defiant Priests highlights a clerical culture that embraced violence and illuminates how the parish church could become a battleground in which rivalries among clerics took place and young clerics learned from senior clergymen to meld the lay masculine ideals that were a part of their everyday culture with the privilege and authority of their profession.
Given the significant dissident clerical movement within Iran, it is not unlikely that Iran's ruling hard-core mullahs -- and Mr. Sadr, Mr. Hakim and other revolutionary Iraqi clerics -- will lose influence when Iraqi clerics learn more about Iran's "Islamic Revolution".
It's the brainchild of Sheikh Ahmed el-Tayeb, the grand imam of Egypt's Al-Azhar, the revered 1,000-year-old 1,000-year-old 1,000-year-oldthat trainseaterics and schofarSunnim around the world.
The seminars are opening the eyes of the religious leaders, he said, citing admissions by the clerics that they have learned something unique that theological colleges do not offer.
The pupils who attended these urban schools learned in them their future occupation as clerics; they learned Latin, learned to sing the various offices, and studied Holy Writ.
"The layman who learned some of his religion from [mainstream] clerics think of jihad as a fanciful act, conducted far away from him.
What has the United States government learned about the participation before and after 9/11 by these Saudi clerics?
Ames's quiet wisdom offers a view of religion for the non-religious, but perhaps all our literary clerics could learn from him.
Former members of the Revolutionary Guard, now seeking the presidency, play down their military records, brandish questionably learned doctorates and appear in computer-enhanced photographs that hide their pates if they are bald and their turbans if they are clerics.
