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...whole world is a mosque, the Prophet Muhammad once said. With pious intent, a faithful Muslim can conjure a mosque almost anywhere, transforming a desert sand dune, airport departure lounge or city pavement into a sacred space simply by stopping to pray. The first mosque was Muhammad's mud-brick house in Medina, where a portico of palm-tree branches provided shade for prayer and theological discussion. As the young religion spread, Arabs - and later Asians and Africans - developed their own ideas of what made a building a mosque. But that innovative spirit has slowed in recent decades, leaving most...
...France and Germany have also exploded. While Europe's churches sit empty or are converted into luxury lofts and schools, Muslims are building mosques in old nightclubs and supermarkets, in former sauerkraut and pharmaceutical factories and, yes, abandoned churches. As Muslims get wealthier, more confident and more geographically diffuse - almost a third of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims live in non-Muslim-majority states - their mosques are no longer just monuments to the rulers whose names they bear. Increasingly, they symbolize the struggle to marry tradition with modernity and to set down roots in the West. The most daring...
...energy supplies - another objective that looks more urgent after the Russia-Ukraine gas battle in January that left people in some E.U. countries freezing and factories idle. Currently, the E.U. gets more than 40% of its gas imports from just one company: Russia's giant Gazprom. In addition, almost all the gas that comes to Europe from the resource-rich Caspian flows through Gazprom's pipelines. Yet the long-planned Nabucco pipeline - designed to transport Azerbaijani, Turkmen and, maybe one day, Iranian and Iraqi gas to the E.U. through Turkey - is stuck at the planning stage...
Sporting geniuses such as Tiger Woods have an intuitive, almost artistic feel for golf; Harrington belongs to a breed of amateur scientists who use an agonizing process of trial and error to master their craft. "Padraig is the hardest worker I've ever coached, and the most curious," says Bob Torrance, Harrington's 77-year-old swing guru. "[Former great Ben] Hogan was similar, both struggled early in their career. Both learned long and hard, and both became great...
...year ago. Most of the nation's auto makers including BMW and Porsche have adopted short-work programs in some of their factories. In Japan, too, the number of workers who have applied to the "employment-adjustment subsidy" program leaped sixfold between December 2008 and January 2009, to almost...