Word: islamics
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...Iranian love affair with yoga is a complex thing, born of many factors. There's the general disenchantment with strict, orthodox Islam and the accompanying pull to alternative forms of spirituality. There are strictures that women face in exercising outside covered, and the appeal of gentle, indoor sport. Add to all that yoga's global fashionableness and Iranians' high rates of anxiety and depression, and you have the first genuinely yoga savvy middle-class in the entire Middle East...
...once, in all my years in Tehran, did I hear anyone suggest yoga might be incompatible with Islam. Indeed, the city's packed yoga classes overflowed with believers, instructors who started class by venerating the Prophet Muhammad on his birthday, Ramadan classes where everyone was fasting and went all noodlely by the end. Most seemed sensible enough to realize you could lower or raise the spirituality volume of yoga as you pleased, and that doing downward facing dog didn't make you a bad Muslim. One of my girlfriends even attended a Sufi yoga class where the teacher played...
...Naughty Knickers and Pious Pilgrims. While they controlled the streets of Kadhamiya, the Mahdi Army had imposed a harshly puritanical interpretation of Islam on the residents. Women were required to wear the form-obscuring black cloaks known as abayas. Today, in a sign of the freedom felt in the neighborhood, a storefront displays sexy women's underwear in its windows, just a stone's throw from the great shrine of Imam Kadhim. Its owner told me business was good...
...shrine, with its distinctive pair of golden domes, is one of Shi'a Islam's holiest sites, and it draws millions of pilgrims every year, many of them from outside Iraq. The police told me the shrine currently gets 4,000 Iranians a day, and many of them take time to shop for gold jewelery - and, presumably, for lingerie...
...design everything around one person or one family or a couple of people, it's not going to work forever.' SEIF AL-ISLAM GADDAFI, son of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, on the nation's plan to adopt a constitutional democracy at the end of his father's one-man rule...