Abanoub Guirguis Naeem, a Christian dental student was recently granted admission to complete his final year of experiential training at Al-Azhar’s Faculty of Dentistry in Assiut, an unprecedented rarity in the prestigious Islamic University. Naeem is the first recognized case of a Christian student enrolling at Al-Azhar University, which is considered a beacon of centrist, moderate Islam in Egypt. The 1,000-year-old seat of Sunni Islamic learning has been training clerics and scholars from around the world, and is known to only accept Muslim students into its colleges for educational purposes.

Pope Francis prayed Saturday for the Coptic Christians killed a day earlier in Egypt by Islamic extremists, saying that there are more Christian martyrs today than in ancient times.

Pope Tawadros II has announced that he will donate the prize money from the “Award of the Unity of Orthodox People”, which he received on Tuesday in Russia, to contribute to the building of a mosque and church in the New Administrative Capital.

Bahrain is investigating the death of five people during a raid on the home village of the spiritual leader of its Shia Muslim community, the interior ministry said on Thursday. A ministry statement said the five were among a group that attacked security forces raiding what it said were "terrorist organizations" on Tuesday in Diraz, the village of Ayatollah Isa Qassim, and that nearly 300 people were arrested.

The appeals court of the Cairo Court for Urgent Matters rejected on Wednesday an appeal against a previous ruling, in which the court said it had no jurisdiction to withdraw national merits from Egypt's ousted Islamist president Mohamed Morsi.

The Manchester suicide bomber who killed 22 people at a concert venue packed with children had recently returned from Libya, a British minister said, and her French counterpart said he had links with Islamic State and had probably visited Syria as well. Interior minister Amber Rudd said Salman Abedi had likely not acted alone, and troops were being deployed to key sites across Britain to help prevent further attacks after the official threat level was raised to “critical”. Rudd also scolded US officials for leaking details about the investigation into the Manchester attack before British authorities were prepared to go public.

Egyptian prosecutors announced on Tuesday that a number of defendants accused of involvement in three recent deadly church suicide bombings in Egypt have confessed to the crime, state news agency MENA reported. According to the confessions, the defendants participated in a 2013 sit-in in Cairo's Rabaa El-Adaweya protesting the ouster of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi earlier that year, and also received military training in Libya with Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State militant group.

A car bomb exploded in Homs on Tuesday morning, Syrian state television said, two days after the city passed back under full government control for the first time since 2011. Authorities destroyed another vehicle rigged with explosives near a Shi'ite Muslim shrine south of Damascus, the broadcaster and other state media outlets reported.

Egypt's general prosecution referred on Sunday 48 defendants to military court on charges of involvement in three recent deadly church bombings in Egypt, according to a statement by Prosecutor-General Nabil Sadek. The accused are also charged with being members of terrorist cells, affiliation with the Islamic State group, and manufacturing weapons and explosives, among other charges, the statement reads.

A bomb blast at a hospital in the Thai capital, Bangkok, wounded 24 people on Monday, on the third anniversary of a 2014 military coup. There was no claim of responsibility for the blast at the Phramongkutklao Hospital, which is popular with retired military officers.

Attorney General Ahmed Sadek referred 48 defendants to military trial on charges of collaborating with the Islamic State group in Egypt and established two affiliated cells in Cairo and Qena. The charges include involvement in the deadly Palm Sunday church bombings in April and an attack on Abbassiya Cathedral in December 2016.

Turkey's state-run news agency says two people suspected of being members of the Islamic State group have been killed in an Ankara police operation.

An Iraqi envoy met Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus on Thursday to explore direct military cooperation against Islamic State (IS) militants, Syrian state media said. The Syrian state news agency SANA said Iraqi national security adviser Faleh al-Fayad and Assad discussed "practical measures for military coordination on both sides of the border in light of the victories the Iraqi army is achieving in Mosul".

Following the recent war declaration by North Sinai’s second largest group, Al-Sawarka, against the IS-affiliated group Sinai Province, anonymous militants — believed to be members of the group — made an interim checkpoint south of Rafah city in North Sinai to disseminate a hard copy of a statement. According to residents in the city who preferred to remain anonymous, the statement disseminated by the militants is actually issued by Sinai Province and is addressed to North Sinai’s prominent tribe of Al-Tarbiyeen.

Islamic State (IS) militants are planting bombs near front doors in Mosul to prevent civilians leaving, a federal police commander and witnesses said on Wednesday, as Iraqi forces make their final push against the Islamist militants after seven months of fighting. Trapped in a shrinking area of the city, the militants are increasingly using the several hundred thousand civilians under their control as human shields to avoid being targeted or perhaps tarnish what Iraqi leaders describe as imminent victory.

Iraqi forces have recaptured nearly 90 percent of west Mosul from the Islamic State (IS) militant group and other Islamist militants in the city are on the "brink of total defeat", officers said Tuesday. Iraqi forces launched the massive operation to retake Mosul from IS nearly seven months ago, fighting their way to the city held by Islamist militants, retaking its eastern side and then attacking the west.

Egypt's Grand Mufti Shawky Allam said on Tuesday that Muslim scholars need to engage in a reform of religious discourse, adapting their interpretations of Islamic law in line with changes in society, according to state-run news agency MENA.

Malaysia’s most-wanted member of the Islamic State militant group has been killed in Syria, police chief Khalid Abu Bakar said on Monday, citing intelligence information. Muhammad Wanndy Mohamed Jedi, 26, who was on a US list of global militants, was the alleged mastermind behind a grenade attack on a Kuala Lumpur bar last June which injured eight people. It was the first and so far only Islamic State attack that caused casualties in Malaysia.

Pope Francis has appealed for penitence and prayers for the end of conflicts and wars he says are disfiguring “the face of humanity.”