The rapid rise of hard-line Sunni Muslim groups like the Nusra Front -- some of which have seen their ranks swelled by foreign jihadi fighters -- is a trend that makes Jouejati and other more secular revolutionaries deeply uncomfortable.
Mr Buti was a Sunni Muslim - the majority sect in Syria, who have led the uprising against Mr Assad, who is an Alawite - but had been a vocal supporter of the president.
Even if a Hezbollah-dominated government does move in, it could have trouble working with Christian and Sunni Muslim politicians who -- under Lebanese law -- must participate in the government.
No group has said it carried out attack, but Sunni Muslim militants - including some with links to al-Qaeda - often target government officials and offices.
The meeting is a significant move and it is not the first time that Al-Azhar, a highly-respected Sunni Muslim institution, has intervened to help solve a political crisis, the BBC's Yolande Knell reports from Cairo.
Al-Bayda is reportedly a predominantly Sunni Muslim village located in an area inhabited largely by members of President Bashar al-Assad's Alawite sect, a heterodox offshoot of Shia Islam.
The manifestations of this rising tide have become evident not only in the Muslim world - Arab and Persian, Sunni and Shiite alike.
Both the government and al-Azhar, the Sunni Muslim world's highest authority, condemned the incident.
Police in Pakistan say they have detained 250 members of the hardline Sunni Muslim group, Sipah-e-Sahaba.
Al-Azhar University, a revered 1, 000-year-old seat of Sunni Muslim teaching in Cairo, has come out strongly against any change.
It traced radical Sunni Muslim activities in non-Muslim countries to the "jihadi-Salafi" ideology, better known as Wahhabism, created in Saudi Arabia and supported by major extremist resources in Pakistan (the jihadist movement of Mawdudi) and Egypt (the Muslim Brotherhood).
He singled out Youssef al-Qaradawi, an Egyptian Sunni Muslim cleric who is based in Qatar.
About 99% of Afghans are Muslim - more than three-quarters of them Sunni.
The bombed area is predominantly Shia Muslim, and the Sunni extremist group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi said it had carried out the attack.
Lashkar-e-Jhangvi is a radical Sunni Muslim militant group that has carried out many attacks in Pakistan, especially against minority Shiite Muslims.
The oil-rich gulf kingdom, a Sunni Muslim country with deep suspicion of Iran's Shiite Muslim rulers, is believed to also be adamantly opposed to any deal that would benefit Iran.
Witnesses and activists from Houla, a string of villages northwest of Homs where most residents belong to Syria's Sunni Muslim majority, claimed that pro-government thugs from neighboring villages of Alawites the minority sect that essentially rules the country led the attacks there, shooting or killing women and children in their beds.
So these ceremonies, often held in public where Shiites curse the caliphs, are routine sources of public disturbance where you have mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhoods all over the Muslim world, in places like Lahore in Pakistan or in Iraq.
Houla is a Sunni Muslim town, a stronghold of the anti-Assad movement.
For the Kurds, Shi'ites, Druse, Alawites, Copts, and other non-Sunni, non-Arab, or non-Muslim populations in the region, the end of Western rule meant the end of their relative freedom.
The university belongs to the al-Azhar mosque, one of the main centres of Sunni Muslim learning, which also awards degrees in sciences and humanities.
The U.S.-led coalition faces insurrections on several fronts, including the Sunni Muslim stronghold of Fallujah, west of Baghdad, and the militia of a Shiite Muslim cleric in Najaf in the south.
Tensions are high between Iraq's Sunni and Shia, amid claims by the Sunni Muslim communities that they are being marginalised by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's Shia-led government.
Osama al-Nujaifi, speaker of the Iraqi parliament and the country's top Sunni Muslim official, said rebuilding projects "had unfavourable outcomes in general".
Sunni-Shiite rivalries -- not only in Iraq, but throughout the Muslim world -- have been a factor in the torpid pace of diplomatic relations between Iraq and the Arab world.
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Tensions are high between Iraq's Sunni and Shia, amid claims by the majority Sunni Muslim communities that they are being marginalised by Prime Minister Nouri Maliki's Shia-led government.
Sunni Arabs see al-Tai's death sentence as further evidence of a Shiite Muslim witch hunt against their minority's once-dominant position and of undue influence by the Shiite-dominated government over the judiciary.
Indeed, to the extent that radical Islam grew stronger during this encounter, it was not the Sunni zealots of al-Qaeda who benefited but their rival pretenders to leadership of the Muslim world: notably the Shia leaders of Iran and, after the 33-day war with Israel in 2006, Iran's Hizbullah co-religionists in Lebanon.
That is why advocates of a Wolfowitz-style strategy concentrate on the south, the focus of Shia Muslim opposition to Mr Hussein's predominantly Sunni regime.
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