1, Imam Ali, the prophet's son-in-law, is regarded by Shia Muslims as the heir to Mohammed's spiritual authority.

2, A Shia would be the speaker of parliament.

3, An educated cleric well versed in Shia theology, he presents reasoned arguments for the beliefs of the conservative establishment.

4, Most Azerbaijanis (or Azeris) are Shia Muslim.

5, Shia Muslim women attend the festival of Arbaeen, one of the holiest days in their religious calendar, at the Imam Abbas shrine in Karbala, Iraq.

6, The other leading Shia party, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, led by the ailing Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, is equally worried by what it sees as the prime minister's authoritarian bent.

7, But now the Shia militants who control southern Lebanon are hugely exercised about the issue.

8, In mainly Shia Basra, most of the insurgency is aimed at British soldiers rather than Iraqis.

9, In Shia Iran , by contrast, religion has top place: the supreme leader is always a cleric.

10, The suicide blast targeted the funeral of a Shia Muslim man who gunned down on Thursday.

11, With around 8 m people, most of them Shia Muslims, it has the biggest population.

12, Sufi, Shia and Ahmadiyya holy sites in Pakistan have been attacked, she said,[http:///shia.html] as was a Syriac Catholic church in Baghdad just a few weeks ago.

13, Kurd and Turk, Baghdad Shia and Saudi Arabian Wahhabi have bridged the sectarian rifts that bedevil their homelands.

14, But for that to happen it must appeal beyond its core Shia constituency.

15, Some seek revenge for atrocities committed in suppressing the Shia uprising.

16, In the south the enforcement of a no-fly zone by western aircraft has raised the possibility of a Shia secession.

17, Some towns in the province have a record of Shia - Sunni enmity.

18, Others fled to Saudi Arabia where they were influenced by Wahhabism, a branch within Sunni Islam that is considered extremist even by many Sunni and Shia Muslims.

19, A young boy looks through a bullet hole in the window of a school in the Shia area of Sadr city in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad.

20, To the east was the Afghan Taliban, a regime that espoused a ruthless brand of Sunni Islam and viewed Iran's Shia Muslim leaders as heretics.

21, This atrocity, directed at a Muslim house of prayer, was designed to provoke retaliation from Iraqi Shia - and it succeeded.

22, At least 40 people have been killed and more than 140 wounded by bombs apparently been aimed at Shia pilgrims on the final day of a religious ceremony in the Iraqi city of Karbala.

23, What sets it apart is Mr Allawi's angle of vision, as a thoughtful Shia Muslim intellectual, loyal to his community but determined to be fair-minded .

24, This is bad news, which promises many more bombings of Shia processions and Ahmadi mosques.

25, Government ministers accused agents provocateurs linked to Sunni Muslim militants of deliberately panicking the huge crowd of Shia Muslim pilgrims into a stampede.

26, Again, he has a slightly more honest young striver — Shia LaBeouf, the next-generation Charlie Sheen — primed for a master's instruction and destruction.

27, The 3, 000 lives killed heinously, and his mis-reading of Islam confound Shia and Sunni.

28, Only Iran, for whom Syria is a priceless Arab ally, and Hizbollah, the Lebanese Shia movement Damascus sponsors, have real cause for alarm.

29, The goal, it suggested, was to weaken Sunni Arab states so as to realise "Safavid dreams" of Shia expansion, a reference to the 16th-century dynasty that enshrined Shiism as Iran's state religion.

30, The attack represents a direct challenge the authority of the Shia - led government.

31, In the Shia Muslim tradition, there is asimilar institution called Nikah Mut'ah (marriage for pleasure), in which themarriage is entered into with a pre-ordained termination point, like a carrental.

32, At least 30 people have been killed and dozens injured in a suicide bombing on a Shia Muslim march in the Pakistani city of Karachi, officials say.

33, Xinhua News: Iraqi police said 12, the day the city of Samarra in northern Iraq suicide bombings, killing at least 10 Shia Muslim pilgrims died.

34, "I have always had a soft spot for the Shias of the south, " said Shahristani, himself a Shia Muslim.

35, If you organise a mourning demonstration for a Shia imam, you'll have 30 million behind you.

36, A fight for supremacy within the new Shia establishment has also begun.

37, Iranian officials linked the recent suicide bombing of a Shia mosque in Zahedan, in Sistan-Baluchistan, to US,[http:///shia.html] British and Israeli support for the Jundullah Sunni Muslim separatist group.

38, Shia state its border , adjacent to where its own restive Shias live, would horrify Saudi Arabia.

39, At least 400,000 people, mainly in the Shia - inhabited south, have fled.

40, Police in Pakistan say a suicide bomb at a Shia Muslim procession in the city of Quetta has killed at least 50 people.

41, The Bahraini authorities say they'll dismiss charges against some of the demonstrators detained during months of anti-government protests by members of the Shia majority.

42, Karbala has been the scene of clashes between loyalists of Shia cleric al - Sadr and Iraqi forces.

43, A sectarian attack like this had been feared on what a particularly holy day for Shia Muslims.

44, Ultimately, all this will likely produce a fragmentation of the country and a proxy war between Saudi-supported Sunni and Iranian-supported Shia, with the Kurds eventually going their own way.

45, Opposition parties had urged people to take to the streets as the Shia Muslim festival of Ashura reached a climax.

46, A leading Bahraini Shia politician has returned to his country from self-imposed exile in Britain.

47, Security official said the blast occurred near a restaurant in the mainly Shia Muslim Shula district in the northwest of the city.

48, The Aga Khan, the spiritual leader of the world's Shia Ismaili Muslims, has praised Canada's pluralism as an "asset of enormous global value".

49, Why not split the country into Shia , Sunni and Kurdish statelets?

50, Bahrain's Shia Muslim majority has long complained of discrimination and dominance by the Sunni minority, including the ruling royal family.