Word: koranic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...hand cut off; adulterers are either scourged or stoned to death; falsely accusing a woman of adultery calls for 80 lashes-the same penalty imposed on a Muslim caught drinking alcohol. The equivalence of the two punishments exemplifies the time-honored logic of the Shari'a. The Koran forbade the drinking of wine, but did not specify a punishment; 80 lashes, however, was decreed for those who bore false witness. Making the analogy that drink leads to hallucination and to telling untruths, Islamic sages decided that the punishment for the two sins should be the same...
...husband is impotent. Women must dress modestly, and their inheritance is limited to a fraction of that of men. In defense of these sexist inequities, scholars of the Shari'a note that Islamic law was advanced for its time. Before Muhammad, women in Arabia were mere chattel. The Koran emphatically asserts a husband's duty to support his wife (or wives), who are allowed to keep their dowries and to own property-rights that did not emerge until much later in Western countries...
...Muslims accept the Koran as God's eternal word, but Islam to some extent is a house divided, although its divisions are not as extensive as those in Christianity. About 90% of all Muslims are Sunnis (from sunna, "the tradition of the Prophet"), who consider themselves Islam's orthodoxy. In Iran and Iraq, the majority of Muslims are Shi'ites ("partisans" of 'Ali), who differ from the Sunnis in some of their interpretations of the Shari'a and in their understanding of Muhammad's succession. The Prophet left no generally recognized instructions...
...grandeur of the Koran is difficult to convey in English translation. Although Islam's Holy Book is considered God's precise word only in Arabic, a generally recognized English text is that of Abdullah Yusuf...
...example, are represented either as bloodthirsty mobs, or as hooknosed, lecherous sadists. Academic experts decreed that in Islam everything is Islamic, which amounted to the edifying notions that there was such a thing as an "Islamic mind," that to understand the politics of Algeria one had best consult the Koran, that "they" (the Muslims) had no understanding of democracy, only of repression and medieval obscurantism. Conversely, it was argued that so long as repression was in the U.S. interest, it was not Islamic but a form of modernization...