Gary Tuchman | BIO
AC360° Anchor

Arsalan Iftikhar
AC360° Contributor
Founder, TheMuslimGuy.com

Most of the world's 1.57 billion Muslims know that the Holy Quran states quite clearly that, "Anyone who kills a human being ... it shall be as though he has killed all of mankind. ... If anyone saves a life, it shall be as though he has saved the lives of all of mankind."

Accordingly, it should come as little surprise to any reasonable observer that when Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan recently committed his shocking acts of mass murder at Fort Hood, Texas, America's Muslim community of over 7 million felt an added sense of horror and sadness at this senseless attack against the brave men and women of the U.S. armed forces.

True to form, many conservative media pundits wasted little time in pointing to reports that Hasan had said "Allahu Akbar" (Arabic for "God is great") at the start of his murderous rampage. News coverage continuously showed the looping convenience store black-and-white videotape footage of Hasan wearing traditional white Islamic garb.

First of all, someone simply saying "Allahu Akbar" while committing an act of mass murder no more makes their criminal act "Islamic" than a Christian uttering the "Hail Mary" while murdering an abortion medical provider, or someone chanting "Onward, Christian Soldiers" while bombing a gay nightclub, would make their act "Christian" in nature.

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Program Note: See an investigation into why authorities are concerned about the violent messages being preached outside a New York mosque on tonight's AC360° at 10 PM ET.

Drew Griffin and Kathleen Johnston
CNN

Outside a Manhattan mosque where the imam preaches against terrorism, the brothers of the "Revolution Muslim" are spreading a different message.

Protected by the Constitution of the country they detest, radical Muslim converts like Yousef al-Khattab and Younes Abdullah Mohammed preach that the killing of U.S. troops overseas is justified. In their thinking, so were the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States - and so are attacks on almost any American.

"Americans will always be a target - and a legitimate target - until America changes its nature in the international arena," Mohammed said.

Al-Khattab and Mohammed consider al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden their model.

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Program Note: See an investigation into why authorities are concerned about the violent messages being preached outside a New York mosque on tonight's AC 360 at 10 PM ET.

Drew Griffin and Kathleen Johnston
CNN

Outside a Manhattan mosque where the imam preaches against terrorism, the brothers of the "Revolution Muslim" are spreading a different message.

Protected by the Constitution of the country they detest, radical Muslim converts like Yousef al-Khattab and Younes Abdullah Mohammed preach that the killing of U.S. troops overseas is justified. In their thinking, so were the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States - and so are attacks on almost any American.

"Americans will always be a target - and a legitimate target - until America changes its nature in the international arena," Mohammed said.

Al-Khattab and Mohammed consider al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden their model.

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St. Cecilia's nearly closed. After it was designated the parish home for Latinos, the congregation quadrupled.

Emily Probst
CNN

"I'll take two chili, uh..." a hungry customer stammers at the front of a two-hour-long line. "Chile rellenos," the money-handler trills back in perfect Spanish. This is not a trendy Tex-Mex restaurant; and it's more than 1,000 miles from the Mexican border.

The stuffed pepper causing the stutter is the hottest menu item at St. Cecilia's Lenten fish fry in St. Louis, Missouri. Chile rellenos, a traditional Mexican dish, have replaced fish as the main draw for Catholics giving up meat on Fridays. This century-old parish founded by German immigrants has turned 85 percent Hispanic.

"It's the browning of the Catholic Church in the United States," says Pedro Moreno Garcia, who until last month led the Hispanic ministry for the Archdiocese of St. Louis. Moreno Garcia points to St. Cecilia's Spanish-dominant Mass schedule as a sign of the times.

"Hispanics are the present and Hispanics are the future of the Catholic Church in the United States," says Moreno Garcia.

One-third of all Catholics in the United States are now Latinos thanks to immigration and higher fertility rates, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. While St. Cecilia's parish has relished the growth, elsewhere, the Latino population boom has rocked the pews.

"Instead of screaming out, 'The British are coming!' " Moreno Garcia says some people are screaming, " 'The Hispanics are coming! The Hispanics are coming! Run, run.' "

A self-described Nuyorican or Puerto Rican from New York, Moreno Garcia says even he gets mislabeled.

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Alyssa Fetini
TIME

The split between Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims is one of the most important schisms in modern religion — yet in the West, at least, it's one of the least understood. The centuries-old strife sporadically erupts into new bloodshed throughout the Middle East — today, particularly, in war-torn Iraq, where the power vacuum left by the fall of Saddam Hussein has reopened old wounds. As British-born journalist Lesley Hazleton argues, these wounds have been left to fester by a lack of adequate planning or understanding of the issue's complexities on the part of American policymakers. Her new book, After the Prophet, recounts the epic story of the split between Islam's two main factions and its present role in the Middle East. TIME talked to Hazleton about the history and misunderstandings of this dispute and what, if anything, can be done to extinguish it once and for all.

What's the Shi'ite-Sunni split really about?
It's about who should lead Islam, and it began at the moment of Muhammad's death. As the founder of Islam, he was the undisputed leader. And if he had had a son, the split might never have happened — a son would automatically have inherited his father's authority. But he died without sons and without leaving a clear will. His closest male relative was his cousin and son-in-law, the philosopher-warrior Ali, whose followers — the Shiat Ali [followers of Ali], or Shi'ite for short — say that he was the only one with the spiritual authority to succeed Muhammad. The Sunnis believed that the caliphate should go to whoever would be best equipped politically to maintain the burgeoning Muslim empire, backing Muhammad's father-in-law Abu Bakr. In the end, Abu Bakr was named the first caliph. Though Ali eventually assumed the caliphate 25 years later, he was assassinated, power fell to the founder of the first Sunni dynasty, and the Shi'ites felt a terrible, lasting sense of dispossession. In a nutshell, the difference between the two is that the Sunnis tend to respect how power actually works rather than the way it should work in an ideal world. In a sense, the Shi'ite ideology is more idealistic, while the Sunni one more pragmatic.

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President Obama, speaking in Cairo, Egypt, urges a new chapter in ties between the U.S. and the Muslim world.

Eboo Patel
For On Faith
washingtonpost.com

Whoever selects and assigns the books on Islam for the Sunday New York Times Book Review needs to widen his reading and add some new names to his rolodex.

Last week there was a rave review of Bruce Bawer's alarmist book Surrender (the subtitle says it all: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom).

This week, the cover of the Book Review has a picture of a group of fully covered Muslim women set against a crowd of 'normal-looking' mostly-white Europeans with the headline "Strangers in the Land".

The review betrays more about the opinions of the reviewer – the noted and controversial academic Fouad Ajami – than the book under consideration, Christopher Caldwell's Reflections on the Revolution in Europe.

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Editor's note: This is a video of a church in Baghdad. It was the worst hit on Sunday evening.

Editor's Note: This is an excerpt from Jon Krakauer's book "Under the Banner of Heaven" about the Mormon faith. Krakauer is also known for his other books "Into the Wild", "Into Thin Air" and "Eiger Dreams". He won the Academy Award in Literature in 1999. Two Americans recently killed in Mexico, Benjamin LeBaron and Luis Widmar, lived in a Mexican township founded by ex-communicated Mormons.

Jon Krakauer

From "Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith"

Balanced atop the highest spire of the Salt Lake Temple, gleaming in the Utah sun, a statue of the angel Moroni stands watch over downtown Salt Lake City with his golden trumpet raised This massive granite edifice is the spiritual and temporal nexus of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), which presents itself as the world's only true religion. Temple Square is to Mormons what the Vatican is to Catholics, or the Kaaba in Mecca is to Muslims. At last count there were more than eleven million Saints the world over, and Mormonism is the fastest-growing faith in the Western Hemisphere. At present in the United States there are more Mormons than Presbyterians or Episcopalians. On the planet as a whole, there are now more Mormons than Jews. Mormonism is considered in some sober academic circles to be well on its way to becoming a major world religion–the first such faith to emerge since Islam…

The affairs of Mormondom are directed by a cadre of elderly white males in dark suits who carry out their holy duties from a twenty-six-story office tower beside Temple Square. To a man, the LDS leadership adamantly insists that Lafferty should under no circumstances be considered a Mormon. The faith that moved Lafferty to slay his niece and sister-in-law is a brand of religion known as Mormon Fundamentalism; LDS Church authorities bristle visibly when Mormons and Mormon Fundamentalists are even mentioned in the same breath. As Gordon B. Hinckley, the then-eighty-eight-year-old LDS president and prophet, emphasized during a 1998 television interview on Larry King Live, "They have no connection with us whatever. They don't belong to the church. There are actually no Mormon Fundamentalists."…

There are more than thirty thousand FLDS polygamists living in Canada, Mexico, and throughout the American West. Some experts estimate there may be as many as one hundred thousand. Even this larger number amounts to less than 1 percent of the membership in the LDS Church worldwide, but all the same, leaders of the mainstream church are extremely discomfited by these legions of polygamous brethren. Mormon authorities treat the fundamentalists as they would a crazy uncle–they try to keep the "polygs" hidden in the attic, safely out of sight, but the fundamentalists always seem to be sneaking out to appear in public at inopportune moments to create unsavory scenes, embarrassing the entire LDS clan.
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David Puente
AC360° Producer

Father Alberto Cutie, who millions of Hispanics know simply as El Padre Alberto, has married the woman that he called “the love of his life”. The charismatic Miami priest left the Catholic Church after photos of him kissing his girlfriend – now his wife – on the beach were published in a magazine.

Father Alberto left the Catholic Church last month to become an Episcopal priest. Now many believe the Episcopal Church will become better known and more popular especially with Hispanics who know Father Alberto from his radio and TV broadcasts across the US and Latin America. He's been dubbed "Father Oprah."