Europe - Sheikh Nazim, Spiritual Leader to Sufis, Dies at 92 --- Sheikh Muhammad Nazim Adil al-Qubrusi al-Haqqani, a leading figure of Sufism, the mystical branch of the Islamic faith, died on Wednesday in Nicosia, Cyprus. He was 92. -- Imam Shakir Alemdar, the vice grand mufti of Cyprus, confirmed the death. -- He called Sheikh Nazim one of the world’s great Islamic scholars and a spiritual leader to followers of Sufism, which traces its origins to the roots of Islam itself about 1,500 years ago. -- Sheikh Nazim was leader of the Naqshbandi-Haqqani Sufi order. He was born on April 23, 1922, in Larnaca, Cyprus, in the east Mediterranean. He received his first religious instruction from his grandfather, an Islamic scholar, before studying chemical engineering in 1940 at Istanbul University. In 1944, he visited Lebanon, where he received further religious instruction. -- He traveled within Europe in the 1970s and in the 1990s to the United States, where he gained many followers. He opened a study center in Fenton, Mo. -- Later in life, Sheikh Nazim received guests at his home in Lefka, Cyprus. He met Pope Benedict XVI during the pontiff’s 2010 visit. The encounter came as the pope was walking in a procession to a Mass at a Nicosia church near the United Nations-controlled buffer zone that divides the island into a breakaway Turkish Cypriot north and an internationally recognized Greek Cypriot south. -- Sheikh Nazim married in 1941 and had four children. - THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, NYTimes