Word: koran
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Last Request. Colonel Siamak took a pen and with trembling hands wrote his last words. A mullah offered him the Koran. Siamak waved it aside: "I don't believe in God and that sort of thing." To each of the others in turn, the mullah extended the Koran. Pray and be sent to Paradise, he begged. "Paradise was the place we were going to make in this country," said one, stonily. "We know no other paradise." But three among the ten accepted the mullah's offer. Then the condemned men made one last request: to be left alone...
...Judaism "in that it did not restrict God's concern to any one group of people." But one thing put him off: "The distinction it made between the soul and the body, the world of faith and the world of practical affairs." Not so Islam. "Nowhere in the Koran could I find any reference to a need for 'salvation.' No original, inherited sin stood between the individual and his destiny ... No asceticism was required to open a hidden gate to purity: for purity was man's birthright, and sin meant no more than a lapse from...
...Allah," calls the faithful to the salat al-jami, the obligatory Friday service. The devout shutter their shops, rush through a thorough washing, and hurry into the mosque. Clad in dignity and finery, the imam ascends the pulpit, murmurs "salaam alei-kum," recites a text from the Koran, and begins a sermon which rarely lasts more than 20 minutes. So it has been for centuries...
Islam lived through its first three centuries without any clergy at all, for each man is responsible for his own obedience to Allah. But increasingly the Friday service became a time when the imam discoursed on morals, freely relating the Koran to any contemporary subject, including politics. The opportunity was made to order for Egypt's fanatic and xenophobic Moslem Brotherhood, now driven underground by Egypt's military junta. One recent Friday an imam who belongs to the Brotherhood preached that the government had sold out to the British. He paused dramatically, then he called attention...
...Rusi Nasar, 37, are Moslems. They knew each other in their native Russia, both contrived to escape from the Russian army in World War II, both eventually found their way to the U.S. This year they decided to go on a hadj-the pilgrimage to Mecca enjoined by the Koran upon every able-bodied Moslem...