Word: korans
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...imams heard Sociologist Ali Abdel Wahad tell them that suppression of women in the Arab world is a distortion of the Koran's teaching. They heard Mohamed Madani, dean of the Islamic Law Faculty, declare that "not a single phrase in the Koran is against science." To this tradition-bound university, such lectures are unprecedented. Al-Azhar, in many ways the spiritual center of the Mohammedan world, is in the midst of the most drastic renaissance in its long history...
...three tall, sand-colored towers of the Mosque of al-Azhar dominate the university, which was built in 972, only three years after Cairo was founded. A few years later the mosque became the classroom for Koranic law courses, and thus Islam's most famous center of learning was born. Al-Azhar weathered the crusades, but fell into academic stagnation after the Ottoman Turks occupied Egypt in 1517. For three centuries it knew no other role than to be the official interpreter of the Koran. There was no curriculum; a sheik simply sat by his favorite pillar and waited...
Nasser's Voice of the Arabs raged that Kassem was an apostate whose followers had torn up the Koran outside his office door shouting: "Death to Arab nationalism, death to Islam!" Nasser, who hitherto has hesitated to make a jihad, or holy war, against his Arab enemies, now invoked this highly charged cry against the Kassem regime and its atheist Communist comrades. (Use of such dangerous religious passions for political purposes may be effective against the Reds, but it also upsets Lebanese Christians and other non-Islamic Arabs...
...opponents has not been resolved. Matters came to a head in the holy city of Najaf when party militants tried to turn a Soviet embassy official's courtesy call on a Shia Moslem leader into a Communist rally. Outraged, Moslem monks and youths, holding aloft copies of the Koran, fought a pitched battle against them. Scores were hurt...
...King could not see this fine distinction. Fortnight ago he broadcast a message to the rebels, and Moroccan air force planes showered reprints of the speech on the mountain slopes. Using the term "mutiny" and quoting from the Koran to warn of "cruel punishment" to come, the King gave the dissidents 48 hours to come down from the hills and surrender...