President Obama, renewing his call for better relations between the United States and the Muslim world, used a long-awaited homecoming trip to this island nation to make a symbolic visit on Wednesday morning to the largest mosque in southeast Asia — even as he declared that “much more work needs to be done” to fulfill the promise he made 17 months ago in Cairo of a “new beginning.”

When Michelle Obama, the first lady, introduced her husband to a group of college students here on Sunday, she urged them to ask him “tough questions.”

Yin Xinhui reached the peak of Mount Yi and surveyed the chaos. The 47-year-old Taoist abbess was on a sacred mission: to consecrate a newly rebuilt temple to one of her religion’s most important deities, the Jade Emperor.

Pope Benedict XVI won the No. 5 spot in a list of the world's most powerful people, one of only two religious leaders in Forbes magazine's list of 68 influential men and women.

Comparing their struggle with America's civil rights movement, India's low-caste Dalits are urging President Obama to take note of their suffering during his state visit next week.

Iran's supreme leader wrapped up an unprecedented 10-day visit to the Iranian seminary city of Qom on Friday that was widely seen as an attempt to bolster support among those in a clerical establishment either indifferent or hostile to his conservative agenda.

Protests by Tibetan students over plans to elevate Chinese to the main language of instruction in western China schools spread Friday to Beijing, where students at a minority university staged a rare public demonstration.

China is courting the secessionist government of oil-rich southern Sudan, an apparent departure from Beijing's decades-long opposition to independence movements abroad.

Iran is secretly trying to set up banks in Muslim countries around the world, including Iraq and Malaysia, using dummy names and opaque ownership structures to skirt sanctions that have increasingly curtailed the Islamic republic's global banking activities, U.S. officials say.

Turkey's governing party failed to win key opposition support on Wednesday for plans to lift a ban on the wearing of Islamic head scarves at universities, a deeply divisive issue in a country with secular laws and a Muslim population.

Scores of Catholics took to the streets in Hong Kong yesterday to demand Beijing free imprisoned evangelists and allow people freedom of belief and religion.

More than 100 Chinese Christians seeking to attend an international evangelical conference in South Africa have been barred from leaving the country, some in the group said, because their churches are not sanctioned by the state.

A massive global evangelical gathering known as the Lausanne Congress will begin Oct. 16 in Cape Town, South Africa. But it looks likely to take place without the participation of more than 230 Chinese delegates.

Turkey is quietly resolving an issue that has come to symbolize the country's bitter divisions and nearly toppled its government two years ago: Slowly, women are being allowed to wear Islamic headscarves on university campuses.

We know about the aging of developed countries and the number of people on the move, but the figures can still startle.

Churches in India have joined other faiths and political leaders in calling for calm after a court ruled that a religious site violently disputed by Hindus and Muslims should be split between the two groups.

Officials in Buddhist-majority Bhutan have barred Hindu and Buddhist clergy from voting in upcoming elections in order to keep a clear distinction between religion and politics.

A brazen attack by Islamist militants who killed at least 23 Tajikistan soldiers on Sunday is stoking concerns that the war in Afghanistan is spilling across the border into former Soviet Central Asia, destabilizing the already fragile governments there and endangering key coalition supply routes.

A Sunday service at a historic church in eastern Turkey underscored both the desire for reconciliation between Turks and Armenians and the hurdles that remain nearly a century after a violent massacre of Armenians.

 It is often thought the main threat of radical Islamism to the West and, indeed, the world, is terrorism. It is also said to be the isolation of Muslim communities, which allows extremists to recruit people to their cause.