With their distinctive, colourful turbans, their storied industry, and their expansive presence all over the world across a range of professions, Sikhs are easily India's most prominent ethnic community.

Karina is an atheist, but her friends jokingly call her “the prophet.” That is because she is helping nurture a community for unbelievers in predominantly Muslim Indonesia, where trumpeting one’s disbelief in God can lead to abuse, ostracism and even prison.

It looked like the backlash was starting even before the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing were identified as Muslim.

President Obama spoke to nearly a thousand Planned Parenthood supporters Friday, telling them that moves to restrict abortion access across the country represented an effort “to turn back the clock to policies more suited to the 1950s than the 21st century.”

The number of U.S. states allowing gay marriage is set to enter double digits now that Rhode Island's state Senate has taken a landmark vote.

Behind every death there’s the narrative of a life – its hopes and fears, joys and sorrows – and how it ended.

When the bombs at the Boston Marathon exploded a week ago Monday, a familiar chain of events and emotions unfolded for many in the American Muslim community: shock and grief, followed by an unspoken dread that the perpetrators could be Muslim; condemnation of the attack; fear of reprisals – and of being conflated with the acts of violence; and quietly, an inward examination of what went wrong.

After two vote delays and in the midst of an intense debate among lawmakers, who made use of legal and religious arguments, the Colombian Senate late Wednesday rejected a bill that would have legalized gay marriage.

A cultural war has erupted between Israel’s rising political star and his ultra-Orthodox rivals.

With an automatic weapon at his side and a black flag behind him, the Islamic rebel explained in a video why he had gone to war with his government. As is often the case in the broiling Muslim insurgency here in the North Caucasus, his complaints were intensely local: a police commander had announced a policy of harassing and threatening family members of suspected militants.

Battered by a French-led military campaign in Mali, al-Qaida’s North African arm is trying something new to stay relevant: Twitter.

Nearly four years into Nigeria’s bloody struggle with Islamists in its impoverished north, a new threat has emerged with deadly implications, this time for Westerners as well as Nigerians: local militants who openly claim to be inspired and trained by Al Qaeda and its affiliate in the region.

As Egypt’s economy crumbles and its democratic transition falters, some opponents of the country’s Islamist president are pinning their hopes on unlikely saviors: the powerful generals who have been mostly sidelined since last year’s elections.

The injured suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings has told interrogators that he and his brother were driven by hard-line Islamist views and anger over the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq but had no ties to foreign militant groups, U.S. officials said Tuesday.

On Tuesday afternoon, France is expected to become the 14th country to legalize marriage for all couples, regardless of gender or sexual orientation.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev had already found religion by the time he landed in Dagestan, a combustible region in the North Caucasus that has become the epicenter of a violent Islamic insurgency in Russia and a hub of jihadist recruitment. What he seemed to be yearning for was a home.

Host Jacki Lyden talks to Omid Safi, professor of religious studies at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Safi has blogged about the Tsarnaev brothers, the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings, and what it means to the American Islamic community that the brothers are Muslim.

A Hindu nationalist leader is his party’s top candidate to become India’s next prime minister, despite being banned from entering the U.S. because of accusations his government was involved in deadly anti-Muslim riots.

For 35 years, Michigan law has protected health care providers who refuse to perform an abortion on moral or religious grounds.

In the jarring aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings, the Saudi Arabian embassy and consulate prepared for the worst.