Word: mecca
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet. Pray five times a day. Give alms. Fast during the month of Ramadan. If you are capable, make a pilgrimage to Mecca. If these "five pillars" seem foreign to you, you may not be talking with your neighbors. Islam is an American religion. There are some 7 million Muslims in the U.S. That's more than the number of Jews and more than twice the number of Episcopalians. Thirty years ago, the Islamic count was a mere 500,000. The number of mosques rose from...
...point of Islamic pride that a Muslim can walk into any mosque anywhere in the world and participate in the service. That said, the Islamic population in the U.S. is almost as varied as Mecca's. The first Muslims here were African slaves, who were forcibly Christianized, although some Muslim descendants still live on the Georgia coast. Syrians and Lebanese began arriving in the late 1800s. But the three largest groups in America are made up of more recent additions...
...came from the Saudi bin Laden Group, built by Osama's father Mohamed, who had four wives and 52 children. Mohamed had had the good luck of befriending the country's founder, Abdel Aziz al Saud. That relationship led to important government contracts such as refurbishing the shrines at Mecca and Medina, Islam's holiest places, projects that moved young Osama deeply. Today the company, with 35,000 employees worldwide, is worth $5 billion. Osama got his share at 13 when his father died, leaving him $80 million, a fortune the son subsequently expanded to an estimated $250 million...
...time ever. Like many other Muslims, bin Laden was offended by the Army's presence, with its Christian and Jewish soldiers, its rock music, its women who drove and wore pants. Saudi Arabia has a singular place among Islamic countries as the cradle of Islam and as home to Mecca and Medina, which are barred to non-Muslims...
...covers the mouth, a "zone of pollution ... disrespectful to expose before others." Each man adjusts his veil subtly, constantly, in response to others and in accordance with status. One of high rank may let the veil fall. "Only someone who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca," Keenan writes, "can divest himself entirely...