Word: koran
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Realizing that an armed invasion might well cause a war with both Spain and Algeria, Hassan had asked for 350,000 volunteers to cross the frontier, armed only with the Koran. By the end of the week, 700,000, including 70,000 women, had signed up for what Moroccan newspapers had dubbed "the Green March" (after Islam's traditional color). Doctors were still giving physical examinations to decide who was up to the arduous 15-day, 60-mile trek across a land as desolate as the moon, where temperatures at this time of year can climb as high...
Divine Protection. To take care of those who fell from sun or heat stroke, the government had also commandeered 220 ambulances and recruited 470 doctors and nurses. Premier Ahmed Osman personally sent off the first contingent of 20,000-most of whom carried copies of the Koran along with soup bowls, spoons and bottle openers-from the oasis of Ksar-es-Souk. "Go then under divine protection," he said, "helped by your unshakable faith, your true patriotism and your total devotion to the guide of your victorious march, King Hassan...
...disappointed, Morocco showed no intention of acquiescing in the ruling, and at week's end its troops were massed along a 140-mile border with the Spanish Sahara. Morocco's King Hassan II vowed to send 350,000 people, including 30,000 women-armed only with the Koran-to "liberate" the territory. Meanwhile, Spain, which still has control, warned that its troops in the Sahara, estimated at 15,000 to 30,000, would fire back if fired upon. Algeria had thousands of its own soldiers ready for action at the Tindouf oasis. Neighboring Mauritania, to whom the court...
...thing everyone "knows" about Islam is that it prohibited artists from painting the human figure. In fact, this was not wholly true. The Koran had nothing to say on the matter. Prophetic tradition banished figures from the walls of mosques, for fear of idolatry; but there was no rule against secular figure painting. Therefore, the decoration of all the great mosques of Islam was nonfigurative, but there was nothing heretical about the secular miniatures−of astrological images, courtly scenes or scientific inventions−represented in this show. Arab culture was pragmatic. Almost everything the Italian Renaissance knew of medicine...
...overwhelmingly abstract and, to a Western eye, puzzlingly so. This is partly due to the circumstance that, illiterate in Arabic, a Westerner cannot decipher the inscriptions or savor the interplay between conceptual and visual meaning in Islamic calligraphy. One can visually enjoy the writing on an 8th century Koran page: the angular Kufic script done in a swordsman's strokes, decisive and muscular; the rich gold foliations round the white chapter heading; the placement of red dots, fit to make Mondriaan despair. Nevertheless, it is frustrating not to be able to read the page. (In a less exalted context...