chief, top dog, head - a person who is in charge; "the head of the whole operation" tribal chief, chieftain, headman, chief - the head of a tribe or clan imam, imaum - (Islam) the man who leads prayers in a mosque; for Shiites an imam is a recognized authority on Islamic theol...
Saudi Arabia has been leading an Arab military coalition that intervened in 2015 to support the Yemeni government. The UAE is part of the Saudi-led coalition.■
The speech provides little information about the new leader or spokesperson, with both names pseudonyms that mask their real identity, but tie them to the Quraysh tribe, a historic Arab tribe based near Islam's holy city Mecca. Doing so is a way to create legitimacy for their leadership becau...
The coup was successful, and Quadaffi claimed Libya as an Arab republic. The same year Quadaffi came into power, Adam al-Hawaz and Musa Ahmad orchestrated the first of a dozen unsuccessful coup attempts against Quadaffi. Quadaffi called himself “the leader” and his philosophies drew from ...
4 So Joshua called together the twelve men he had appointed from the Israelites, one from each tribe, 5 and said to them, “Go over before the ark of the Lord your God into the middle of the Jordan. Each of you is to take up a stone on his shoulder, according to th...
Sheik Ali Hatem al-Suleiman, emir of the prominent Sunni Dulaim tribe from Anbar province, north of Baghdad, told CBS News that al-Maliki "has become paralyzed." "You can't rely on him," the tribal leader told CBS News' Clarissa Ward. "U.S. policy cannot rely on a paralyzed man wh...
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi sought to establish an Islamic “caliphate” across Syria and Iraq, but he might be remembered more as the ruthlessly calculating leader of the Islamic State group who brought terror to the heart of Europe and set up a short-lived or
It was the Iraqi method of road building, using the bodies of their enemies to construct assault routes for tanks and trucks. There are other grisly anecdotes from the Iran-Iraq War that help define Saddam Hussein--glimpses of an enigmatic leader who in the last 12 days has sealed his nati...
To Americans, most of the achievements of the priest who shook the world were dismaying paradoxes, and the imam (representative of God on Earth) remained an enigma to the end. His public and private personalities were rooted in the mystic conviction that he was God’s appointed spokesman. He...
The chief of an Arab clan or tribe traditionally took one-fourth of the booty for himself. Muhammad decreed that he receive only one-fifth, and even this the chief took not for himself but in the name of the ummah. Under the old ways individuals kept whatever booty they had captured. ...