Word: muezzin
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Despite a reliance on missionary-poisition Freud, Dr. Ober is rarely dogmatic He is frequently humorous. Commenting on the tribulations of Christopher Smart an 1 8th century English poet with an embarrassing compulsion to pray on rooftops, the author observes that "there was very little need for such a muezzin in Georgian London." Disagreeing with a view that D.H. Lawrence celebrated sex alfresco while Americans kept to bedrooms, the doctor notes the abundance of contraceptives in brooks and rivers and concludes that "if Americans are not sylvan cohabitors, they are at least riparian." On Dr. William Carlos Williams, who Ober...
Those are only a few of the voices of Islam, as powerful and compelling today as the muezzin's ancient call of the faithful to prayer. The voices speak Russian and Chinese, Persian and French, Berber and Malay, Turkish and Urdu?and Arabic, of course, the mother tongue of the Prophet Muhammad and language of Islam's holy book, the Koran. Islam is the world's youngest universal faith, and the second largest, with 750 million adherents, to about 985 million for Christianity. Across the eastern hemisphere, but primarily in that strategic crescent that straddles the crossroads of three continents...
...snap of bubble gum is heard in the Koran school. Fashionably oversize sunglasses are worn by women in purdah while their denimed daughters in platform shoes kick up the dust in the streets of Istiqlal, the capital. Down in the slums the click of cal abashes and the muezzin's call to prayer compete with an alien rhythm, "with words, repeated in the tireless ecstasy of religious chant, that seemed to say. Chuff, chuff/ do it to me, baby,/ do it, do it,/ Momma don't mind what Daddy...
...frontier is a rusting jumble of barbed wire and garbage, and the village has the same sleepy, slightly disheveled air that it had before. Men wearing the keffiyeh, the traditional black and white checkered headdress, sit around in circles drinking muddy Turkish coffee and playing shesh-besh (backgammon). The muezzin of the large Moslem mosque snoozes on a straw mat, waking periodically to give the wailing call to prayer...
...villagers in Ramparts of Clay, yesterday, today and tomorrow are one. The muezzin's chant, the shepherd's flock, the inexorable rhythms of the desert-all seem to have been delivered whole from the verses of the Koran. In Director Jean-Louis Bertucelli's first feature, that isolation has the dimension of tragedy. Though France has granted Tunisia her independence and social change has been promised, the citizenry are still degraded, the colonial mind is still at work...