Word: moslem
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During Ramadan, the Moslem month of fasting, no believer is supposed to take food or drink from sunrise to sunset. But as Ramadan ended, the religious fasting in large parts of Indonesia had become full-scale famine. Parched by drought, the rice crop in Java had failed; in Bali, last year's eruption of the Gunung Agung volcano had buried two of the island's largest rice areas under volcanic ash. In central Java, an invasion of rats, many 18 inches long from head to tail, had decimated rice stores and created a serious threat of bubonic plague...
Frankincense & Myrrh. Of all the nations in East Africa, none combines poverty and pugnacity as completely as Somalia. Outside the capital, its 2,000,000 inhabitants-99% Moslem and 90% illiterate-earn a meager $10 a year on the average, mainly by herding goats, sheep and camels over the parched grasslands of the interior. The country has no deep-water ports, no railroad, in a land half again the size of California. As if to cement its image of Biblical backwardness, Somalia brags of its exotic exports-frankincense and myrrh...
First came the troubles in Indian Kashmir's capital of Srinagar, where the loss of a treasured Moslem relic kindled anti-Hindu feelings (TIME, Jan. 10). As rumors spread, Moslem mobs in East Pakistan sacked Hindu shops and homes, left 29 dead before the army restored order. Panic-stricken, hundreds of Hindu families poured across the East Pakistan border into West Bengal, then headed for Calcutta, 35 miles away...
Spreading Infection. Calcutta's explosive social conditions had already brought relations between the city's Hindu majority and its 1,000,000 Moslems to the boiling point. Tens of thousands sleep on the streets or in abandoned sewer pipes and gutters are clogged with garbage, cow dung and human excrement; the water is polluted, epidemics frequent, poverty rampant, and unemployment endemic. In this morass of 6,500,000 people, the Hindu refugees' Moslem-atrocity stories spread like an infection. Inevitably, Calcutta's Hindus retaliated...
Pouring into the streets, Hindu mobs tossed kerosene-soaked rags into Moslem shops, then lit them with fireworks. Looters paraded their booty in handcarts for public view. In one outlying district, four police constables stood off hundreds of looters until their ammunition ran out. One constable escaped; the rest were killed on the spot. Moslem pedestrians were grabbed in the streets and beaten to death, and knifings were so numerous that Calcutta police simply released the total of stabbing deaths each day without giving details...