In the Middle East, Islam is the dominant religion. Islam’s followers, Muslims, worship in mosques, like the one in Iran shown here. The women in the foreground have their heads covered, as required by Islamic law in Iran. In most other countries, Muslim women can choose whether to wear a veil or head cover.
Credit: © Patrick Ben Luke Syder, Lonely Planet Images

In September 2022, public protests broke out in dozens of Iranian cities following the death in police custody of a 22-year-old Iranian woman named Mahsa Amini. On September 13, Amini had been arrested in Tehran by officers of Iran’s morality police, who enforce the nation’s strict dress code. The police arrested Amini for incorrectly wearing her hijab, the traditional headscarf worn by Muslim women. Though many Muslim women choose to wear the hijab, wearing one is required by law in Iran. Amini died in police custody on September 16. In the protests that followed, some women burned their headscarves. Women in Iran and around the world cut their hair in protest.

According to human rights groups, thousands of protesters were arrested, more than 185 people were killed, and hundreds more were injured. The authorities stated they would investigate the civilian deaths and claimed violence was caused by dissident groups. The government restricted access to the internet and social media as part of an attempt to end the protests. In response to the government’s actions, some global powers have imposed sanctions on Iran.

The protests persisted into October. Deaths of other protestors added fuel and heartache to those protesting the regime. Those included Iranian teenage girls who shared their lives and talents on social media. Nika Shakarami, a 16-year-old Iranian student, died during the protests. Iranian authorities claim Shakarami died by falling from a building. Her mother, Nasreen, said that the body was buried without the family’s consent, and records showed severe damage to her skull. Sarina Esmaeilzadeh was 16 years old and joined the protests on September 22. It was reported that she was beaten by Iranian forces and died of her wounds, although that has been denied by authorities, which claim she died by suicide.

This challenge to authorities is one of the greatest in Iran since the 1979 revolution. In 1979, revolutionaries under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a Muslim religious leader, overthrew Mohammad Reza. The revolutionaries took control of Iran. They changed Iran’s government from a constitutional monarchy to an Islamic republic. Their policies led to strict Islamic control over all areas of people’s lives. Their rule resulted in severe economic problems for the nation. Relations between Iran and Western countries became strained.

April 16, 2018

Hindi <<HIHN dee,>>, also called Modern Standard Hindi, is spoken by more than 500 million people. It is the principal official language of India. More than two-fifths of India’s people speak one or more of the dialects (language variations) of Hindi. There are many regional and local dialects in India, and each state has its own official language. Hindi is the official language of the capital, Delhi, and seven states. Hindi speakers live mostly in northern India, but Hindi is commonly heard in other parts of the country. Hindi speakers are also found in Nepal, Singapore, South Africa, the United Kingdom, the United States, and many other countries.

The flag of India flies over hundreds of millions of Hindi speakers in India. Credit: © T. Lesia, Shutterstock

Urdu is a sister language of Hindi. The languages are similar in grammar and pronunciation. When written, however, they use different alphabets and scripts. Cultural differences further separate the languages. Indian Hindus, people who practice Hinduism, often speak Hindi. Indian Muslims, people who practice Islam, often speak Urdu. Urdu is also spoken in Pakistan and Kashmir. Scholars sometimes speak of the two languages collectively as Hindi-Urdu. The spoken form is sometimes called Hindustani. Hindi-Urdu is the main language used in Indian films (Bollywood) and in much Indian popular music.

The Indian film industry produces hundreds of motion pictures every year. Most films are in Hindi (or Hindustani), but some are made in regional languages. Credit: WORLD BOOK photo by David R. Frazier

Hindi is an Indo-Aryan language of the Indo-European family. It is part of the New Indo-Aryan (NIA) group. Hindi uses the Devanagari alphabet, which has roots in Sanskrit, the oldest formal written language of India. Devanagari is a phonetic alphabet, so each letter represents a sound. It has 44 letters, with 33 consonants and 11 vowels. Smaller marks called matras represent vowels preceded by a consonant. Matras are written on the symbol of the preceding consonant. The letters are formed by markings that hang down from a horizontal line (see the red script in the movie poster above).

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Hindi is spoken in Delhi and the northern states of India. Credit: WORLD BOOK map

Hindi nouns have gender, number, and case. They can be masculine or feminine, singular or plural, and direct or oblique. Most adjectives agree with the gender, number, and case of the nouns they modify. Hindi has four simple tenses and three aspects. Word order for the Hindi language is subject-object-verb. Hindi is written from left to right, and Urdu is written from right to left. Urdu uses the Persian-Arabic alphabet. English words with Hindi origins include bungalow, shampoo, bandana, and jungle.

Hindi and Urdu are based of the spoken dialect of Delhi, Khari Boli, which means standard speech. The modern literary language is based on Khari Boli, which was written in the Devanagari alphabet. Written Hindi can be traced back to poetry of the 1300′s. Hindi prose became prominent in the early 1900’s.

June 7, 2016

Muslims pray at the Taj Mahal in Agra, India, during the holy month of Ramadan.
Credit: © AFP/Getty Images

On Sunday night, June 5, at the sighting of the new, crescent moon, the Muslim holy month of Ramadan began in many parts of the world. Ramadan is a month of fasting when Muslims who are physically able to do so avoid eating or drinking during daylight hours. Such fasting is thought to purify the faithful physically and spiritually. It also helps bring to mind the poor, and many Muslims give to charities or perform charitable acts during Ramadan. According to Islam, Ramadan is the month when the prophet Muhammad received the first of the revelations that comprise the Qur’ān, the holy book of Islam. Fasting during Ramadan is one of the Five Pillars of Islam, formal acts of worship that provide a framework for Muslim life.

In addition to avoiding food and drink, observant Muslims abstain from smoking and sexual activity from sunrise to sunset. At night, they may eat, drink, and resume other normal activities. They break the daily fast with a meal known as iftar. Later, an extremely early predawn meal prepares Muslims for the day ahead. In some Middle Eastern countries, the government enforces fasting, and people who eat during the day may be fined or even arrested. In addition to being a time for fasting, Ramadan is a period for special prayer and religious contemplation. Nightly prayer at a mosque and recitation from the Qur’ān are common Ramadan practices.

Ramadan is the ninth month of the Islamic year, which is based on lunar months rather than solar months. For this reason, Ramadan moves backward by about 10 days each year, migrating through the seasons. In many parts of the world, different seasons have longer or shorter days, meaning longer or shorter periods of fasting. In some far northern locations, such as northernmost Sweden, the sun does not set for months at a time during summer. Muslims there observe Ramadan based on the day’s length elsewhere, such as Mecca, Saudi Arabia, the holiest city of Islam.

A major Islamic festival called Id al-Fitr (Feast of Fast-Breaking) marks the end of Ramadan. Muslims celebrate Id al-Fitr during the first three days of Shawwal, the 10th month of the Islamic lunar calendar. On the first morning of the festival, they attend special prayer services. Throughout the festival, they visit and share meals with family, friends, and neighbors, and children receive gifts.

August 8, 2014

The United States launched air strikes in Iraq today against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), a radical Sunni Muslim jihadist group that now control large swathes of Iraq and Syria. The U.S. Department of Defense has confirmed that U.S. aircraft dropped 500-pound (227-kilogram) laser-guided bombs on artillery that was being used against Kurdish forces defending the northern Iraqi city of Arbil. President Barack Obama authorized the air strikes yesterday, but said he would not send U.S. ground troops back into Iraq. In late June, ISIS declared that it was establishing a caliphate on the territories it controls to be known simply as “the Islamic State” and will extend from Aleppo in northern Syria to Diyala province in eastern Iraq.

Yesterday, ISIS captured the city of Qaraqosh in Iraq’s Ninawa province after Kurdish forces withdraw in retreat. As many as 100,000 residents of Ninawa—many of them Christians—fled their homes for the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq. Qaraqosh—which is largely a Christian city—is 19 miles (30 kilometers) southeast of the city of Mosul, which Isis captured in June. Most Christian families fled Mosul after ISIS gave them an ultimatum to convert, pay a special tax, or face death.

The U.S. Air Force today bombed ISIS artillery outside the Iraqi city of Arbil, which is just east of Mosul. Isis, a radical Sunni jihadist group, is now in control of large swaths of Iraq and Syria. (World Book map)

On August 6, a senior Kurdish official warned that tens of thousands of members of the Yezidi religious minority were trapped without water on a mountain to the west of Mosul. They face slaughter at the hands of Isis militants surrounding them below if they flee, or death by dehydration if they stay. The Sunni Jihadists regard the Yezidis as devil worshipers. The Yezidis fled their homes last weekend during an Isis offensive in which it took control of several towns in the northwest as well as an oil field and Iraq’s largest dam. The United Nations has confirmed that it had received credible reports that 40 Yezidi children had died “as a direct consequence of violence, displacement, and dehydration.”

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said today that the world needed to wake up to the threat posed by ISIS: Its “campaign of terror against the innocent, including the Yezidi and Christian minorities, and its grotesque targeted acts of violence show all the warning signs of genocide.”

Additional World Book articles:

• Umayyad caliphate
• Iraq War
• Iraq 2012 (a Back in Time article)
• Iraq 2013 (a Back in Time article)
• Syria 2013 (a Back in Time article)
• Syria: The Roots of a Rebellion (a special report)

March 19, 2013

A wave of deadly bombings in and around Baghdad, primarily in Shi’ite Muslim neighborhoods, left at least 48 people dead and hundreds injured on the 10th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The coordinated attacks included at least 15 car bombings, multiple roadside bombings, and shootings by snipers, all during the morning rush hour in the Iraqi capital. The deadliest of the attacks, which took place outside the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, killed 7 people and injured at least 20 others. Another 6 people were killed and 15 others wounded when a bomb exploded outside a restaurant near the main entrance to the heavily fortified Green Zone, where the U.S. embassy is located.

Baghdad (AP/Wide World)

A militant group known as the Islamic State of Iraq, which includes al-Qa’ida in Iraq, is known to have accelerated its attacks on Shi’ite targets in an attempt to revive the secular insurgency that left tens of thousands of people dead between 2005 and 2008. Their aim is to bring down the Shi’ite-dominated government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. The Iraqi government is largely deadlocked, with Maliki at odds with Kurds in the north, most Sunni groups, and even factions within his own Shi’ite community. Iraq was controlled for years by that country’s Sunni minority, under the Baath government of dictator Saddam Hussein, who was overthrown in 2003.

Additional World Book articles:

• Iraq history
• Iraq 2005 (a Back in Time article)
• Iraq 2006 (a Back in Time article)
• Iraq 2007 (a Back in Time article)
• Iraq 2008 (a Back in Time article)
• The War in Iraq: the Military Campaign and Aftermath (a special report)
• The War in Iraq: Shifting Alliances on the World Stage (a special report)
• Iraq: a Quest for Political Identity in a Second Year of War (a special report)
• The Middle East: From Fall to Spring (a special report)

February 18, 2013

A wave of car bombings in Shi’ite neighborhoods in and around Baghdad yesterday left 37 people dead and some 125 others wounded. Al-Qa’ida in Iraq has claimed responsibility for the attacks, and al-Qa’ida and other Sunni extremist groups have ramped up attacks on Shi’ite Muslims as a way of bringing down the Shi’ite-led government. At least 200 Iraqis have been killed in attacks targeting Shi’ites since January.

Iraq’s Sunni minority claims that Prime Minister Nouri Kamel al-Maliki and his political allies have undermined Sunni politicians to monopolize power. In November, an Iraqi court sentenced Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi to death for the third time on charges that he instigated terrorist attacks on Shi’ite pilgrims. All verdicts were delivered in absentia because Hashemi fled Iraq in 2011 and is living in exile in Turkey. Al-Hashemi claims that his long-time rival Prime Minister Maliki is behind the charges, which he alleges are politically motivated.

On February 15, tens of thousands of Sunni Muslims rallied in several Iraqi cities to protest what they describe as unfair treatment by the Shi’ite-led government. In a Sunni neighborhood in Baghdad, some 3,000 lawyers recently took to the streets, demanding an end to judicial corruption and prisoner abuse in Iraq’s prisons.

Iraqis pull down a statue of Saddam Hussein after U.S. forces entered Baghdad in 2003. Iraqis had high hopes after the U.S. military deposed Hussein in 2003, but 10 years later, many Iraqis are living in deplorable conditions. (AP/Wide World)

In recent weeks, both Sunni and Shit’te Iraqis alike have begun to openly protest the wretched conditions and bitter sectarian conflict they have endured since the United States invaded Iraq in 2003 and overthrew the Saddam Hussein government. Demonstrators have stormed government buildings in several cities to protest political corruption and shortages of food, electric power, and jobs. The Reuters news agency reported: “. . .  years after the U.S.-led invasion, Iraq’s infrastructure remains severely damaged. The country suffers a chronic water shortage, electricity supply is intermittent and sewage collects in the streets.”

Additional World Book articles:

• Iraq 2006 (a Back in Time article)
• Iraq 2007 (a Back in Time article)
• Iraq 2010 (a Back in Time article)
• Iraq 2011 (a Back in Time article)
• Iraq: a Quest for Political Identity in a Second Year of War (a special report)
• The War in Iraq: the Military Campaign and Aftermath (a special report)
• The war in Iraq: Shifting Alliances on the World Stage (a special report)

September 17, 2012

Demonstrations continued today across the Muslim world in protest of Innocence of Muslims, an amateur, anti-Islam video thought to have been produced in the United States. Indonesians hurled rocks and Molotov cocktails at the U.S. embassy in Jakarta, capital of the world’s most populous Muslim nation. In the Philippines, thousands rallied in protest in the city of Marawi. In Lebanon, Hezbollah Sheikh Nassan Hasrallah’s call for further protests prompted thousands of people to mass in Beirut and other cities. In Afghanistan, protesters fired weapons in the air and torched police cars in Kabul. On September 15 in Afghanistan, Taliban militants, claiming to be enraged by the video, attacked a heavily fortified NATO camp, killing two U.S. Marines.

Since the first violent reaction to the film erupted in Egypt and Libya on September 11, some 40 people are believed to have been killed. On September 11, the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other Americans died in an attack on the U.S. consulate in the eastern city of Benghazi. In Cairo on September 11,  an angry mob scaled the wall of the U.S. embassy and pulled down and burned the American flag.

A group of Muslim women gather for outdoor prayers in Indonesia, where more than 85 percent of the people are Muslims. (c) Photobank

The exact origins of the film are unknown, though American authorities have uncovered some connection between it and one Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, a convicted felon living in California. A 14-minute trailer for the film was posted on the video-sharing website YouTube. American officials are still investigating whether the attacks were actually triggered by the video or whether they were pre-planned by some terrorist organization to coincide with the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States.

Additional World Book articles:

• Afghanistan War
• Diplomatic corp
• Foreign Service
• Iran 1979 (a Back in Time article)
• The Middle East: From Fall to Spring (a special report)

September 13, 2012

Anti-Amercian protests have spread across the Middle East and North Africa, in the wake of the violent anti-U.S. demonstrations in Egypt and Libya on September 11. Today in Yemen, demonstrators stormed the grounds of the U.S. embassy in Sanaa, the capital, and burned the American flag before being driven back by security forces. In Egypt, protests erupted for a third day outside the U.S. embassy in Cairo, where at least 70 people were injured in scuffles with police. In Iran’s capital, Tehran, crowds chanting anti-American and anti-Israel slogans demonstrated outside the Swiss embassy, which handles U.S. interests in the absence of formal diplomatic relations with Washington. (The United States has not maintained diplomatic relations with the Iranian government since revolutionaries seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979 and held a group of Americans, primarily embassy employees, as hostages.) Protesters also staged demonstrations in Iraq, Morocco, Sudan, and Tunisia. In Afghanistan, officials have reportedly suppressed Internet access to prevent users from viewing the offending video online to forestall public unrest.

The Middle East and North Africa (World Book map)

The United States ambassador to Libya and three other Americans were killed on September 11 in an attack on the U.S. consulate in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi. Libyan Ambassador Chris Stevens and the other victims died as rioters attacked with rocket-propelled grenades and machine gun fire. In Cairo on September 11,  an angry mob scaled the wall of the U.S. embassy and pulled down and burned the American flag. The violence in both Libya and Egypt was initially linked to a highly inflammatory, anti-Islamic film.

The film, Innocence of Muslims, was reportedly written and produced by an anti-Muslin filmmaker, possibly of foreign extraction, living in California. A 14-minute trailer for the film was posted on the video-sharing website YouTube. However, U.S. officials are investigating whether the attack in Libya was triggered by the inflammatory film or whether it was pre-planned by some terrorist organization to coincide with the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

Additional World Book articles:

• Diplomatic corp
• Foreign Service
• Iran 1979 (a Back in Time article)
• The Middle East: From Fall to Spring (a special report)