Word: mecca
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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They were mostly three-or four-story structures-musty headquarters for centuries of proud merchant traders, insurance brokers and craftsmen who preferred tradition to comfort. Here & there stood the steel skeleton of a modern building, its girders fantastically warped and bulged by heat. Fleet Street, mecca of British journalism, was badly hit, and behind it stood the blackened hulk of the Associated Press building. St. Bride's white spire, Wren's "madrigal in stone," stood alone over the ruins of the church. Supreme amid wreckage rose the great dome of St. Paul's, saved through the devotion...
King Ibn Saud, a man who has been credited with the strength of 40 men, and actually has 40 sons, is protected by an efficient police force. In pilgrim-packed Mecca last week they suddenly arrested on charges of plotting regicide one of the most notorious wastrels in the Near East. He was besotted Sherif Abdul Hamid, whose peccadilloes caused him to be cast off by his family. In Arabia, where the Sherif is considered a mental case, none was surprised when the King's police presently announced, after grilling six and killing one of the followers of Abdul...
...Mecca the arrest was just a local scandal, but to London it smacked at first of important Nazi machinations in the Middle East. Wastrel Abdul Hamid did visit Germany last year. Asserted Lord Beaverbrook's London Daily Express: "The conspiracy to murder King Ibn Saud was hatched not in the sultry courtyards of Mecca but in the chill, tile-floored galleries of the Wilhelmstrasse. . . . Germany's object was to start a guerrilla war behind Britain's back in Palestine and Egypt." Next day the Daily Express was curtly corrected by a Saudi Arabian official statement in London...
...British were last week busy offsetting Mussolini's claim to be "Protector of Islam." To England's Moslems the British Treasury, which is already subsidizing pilgrimages of the faithful from India to Mecca (TIME, Nov. 18), has given a tidy ?100,000 ($400,000) for a mosque, promised them a site in London for it. In Libya when a force of Australians holed up a body of Italians at the oasis of Jarabub, the R. A. F. knew better than to bomb it. Jarabub has several holy Moslem buildings and the British did not intend to injure...
Thirteen centuries ago Mohammed gave a spiritual and material boost to his native Mecca by calling upon his followers to make a pilgrimage thither at least once in their lifetimes. Pious Moslems have been making the Haj ever since, thus gaining the privilege of: 1) being called Haji (pilgrim), 2) wearing green turbans, 3) dyeing their beards red with pounded hennaleaves...