Word: koran
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They surrendered all along what was supposed to be the mighty "Saddam line," in squads, then platoons. Many waved tattered pieces of white cloth. Some held aloft the Koran...
...light!" They have conjured a moment, and smiled, and passed, and then, poof! they are back on a miserable street among the pariah dogs. If people are poor and live in the desert, language may be their richest possession: Why not? It opens miraculously onto other worlds. The Koran, with its bursts of sonority and light, describes a paradise that has everything the desert does not: the sweetest water, cool shade, silken couches, wines that one can endlessly drink without getting drunk...
...North Yemen to retrieve his journals, buried for safekeeping on the island. It is not much of a payoff, though along the way Hansen delivers a lush portrait of a society that has managed to survive even though there seems to be a Kalashnikov for every copy of the Koran...
...concept of just war, but an equally complex notion stands in its place: jihad. The term has become disturbingly familiar to Westerners, but its meaning is far broader than holy war, the sense in which it has been brandished by Saddam Hussein and numerous Middle East militants. In the Koran the Prophet Muhammad is depicted as a divinely inspired military leader who unified formerly separate Arab tribes around his new faith. While the Koran most often uses the concept of jihad in the military sense, the word actually translates as "striving." According to an authoritative tradition, Muhammad returned from...
During the century after Muhammad's death in 632, Muslim conquerors established sway from Spain to the borders of India. Islamic scholars of the era emphasized militaristic verses of the Koran over those that counsel peacemaking. Muslims spoke of the earth as being divided between the dar ul- Islam (realm of Islam) and the dar ul-harb (realm of war), implying a need for ongoing combat to extend the faith's domain. In succeeding centuries, as Muslims consolidated a multinational empire, the language of militant jihad faded...