Word: koranic
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Islam, the youngest of the major faiths, was influenced by Judaism and Christianity. Muslims are "people of the book," accepting the Jewish Bible and the New Testament as Holy Scripture while maintaining that the Koran's famously elegant and expressive Arabic is God's final and inerrant word. Similarly, followers of Islam believe Moses, John the Baptist and Jesus were prophets but the final messenger was Muhammad, to whom, they say, the angel Gabriel dictated the Koran. Like Christians and Jews, says Jamal Badawi, a religion professor at Saint Mary's University in Halifax, N.S., their core concerns are "moral...
African Americans are among America's most observant Muslims. While Yvonne Haddad of Georgetown University's Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding estimates the fraction of immigrants who attend mosque at a mere 10%, many American blacks, with converts' zeal, memorize verse after verse of the Koran and are extremely serious about Islamic injunctions against premarital sex, abortion and alcohol. Most also shun MTV, Hollywood films, hip-hop and dancing. Such social conservatism also translates politically: the tally of Bush votes among African-American Muslims was 25% higher than in black America as a whole. The community is thoroughly patriotic...
...created by God, who is referred to as "the compassionate and merciful." The Judeo-Christian respect for the widow and the orphan is amplified by the fact that the Prophet Muhammad was himself an orphan, notes Georgetown's John O. Voll. And for all the conflict depicted in the Koran, its recognition of pluralism is embodied in a verse that explains that God created humans different from one another so that they can learn from one another...
That opinion rests on the Koran's Chapter 60, Verse 8, which bids Islamic victors to "show [civilians] kindness and deal with them justly." In the Hadiths, or traditions of Muhammad, the Prophet commands, "Neither kill the old...nor children and babes nor the females," and is portrayed as appalled to discover a woman's corpse on a battlefield. Similar protections pertain to farmers and tradesmen. Even the slaughter of enemy soldiers is enjoined if no war has been declared. "It's basically the Geneva Convention," says Jamal Badawi, a well-known Islamic interpreter who teaches at St. Mary...
...Karim is not a theologian, but he is a man of faith. "The Koran says, if a man kills an innocent person, to God it looks like he is killing all innocent people on earth," he says. "If you save an innocent person, it looks to God that you are saving all life on earth." He has urged his fellow Rotarians to raise money for the Red Cross. He prays for last week's victims. And for America. "This is my home and my country," he says. "And I want my country to come back together...