Word: koran
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...confirmed) reports of female interrogators tormenting pious detainees with sexual come-ons, should Newsweek's item have helped trigger violence? The full answer involves Pakistani politics and flagging Afghan goodwill. But the short one concerns a religious force often mismeasured in the West: Islam's extreme reverence for the Koran and fury at its defilement...
Westerners often compare the Koran to the Bible, but as religion professors routinely explain, a closer Christian analogy is Christ himself, described in the opening of the Gospel of John as a divine expression ("In the beginning was the Word") subsequently made flesh. Like Christians regarding Christ, Muslims believe that the Koran was not created but has existed with God for all eternity. If "Jesus is God's revelation, and the meaning [to Christians] of that revelation unfolds in the events of his life as described in the Gospels," writes comparative religion expert F.E. Peters in his book The Monotheists...
...Koranic defilement is a recurring Islamic concern. The first recorded prefiguring of the alleged insult at Gitmo may have been in the 1200s when Mongols invading Baghdad were said to have used Koran pages as toilet paper. But as early as the 700s, notes UCLA Islamic-law expert Khaled Abou El Fadl, jurists commenced a centuries-long debate over the just punishment for spitting on it, impaling it or feeding it to goats...
...makes one laugh, how ignorant U.S. soldiers are." MOHAMMED SHASIQ, Afghan student, on reports that American soldiers desecrated a copy of the Koran at the Guantánamo Bay naval base to intimidate Muslim prisoners. The reports have sparked anti-U.S. demonstrations in Afghanistan and other Islamic countries...
...corner of the grassy Great Court, which served as a gathering place for the lunchtime throngs, Saudi Arabian women lectured on a feminist interpretation of the Koran. In another, a black American conga drummer from Harlem spontaneously threw up her arms and shouted to the assembly, "You have changed my life!" In yet another, a raven-haired Bolivian in a felt bowler talked excitedly to a veiled woman from the Western Sahara. Each day at noon, Betty Friedan conducted an informal seminar in the cool shade of a fig tree. And nearby, a dozen black-robed Iranian women assembled...