Word: muezzins
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...akbar! Allahu akbar!" The call to prayer echoes forth from a minaret in Tashkent, as it has from mosques throughout the 13 centuries of Islam. "Was it loud enough?" asks the mullah who will lead the prayers. That is an eminently reasonable question, since in the Soviet Union no muezzin is allowed to use a loudspeaker. The inquiry is also metaphorical. In the U.S.S.R.'s fourth largest city and leading Islamic center, as elsewhere across the nation, believers are cautiously regaining their public voice after an oppressively enforced silence...
...Morocco, but the guests' garden patio might almost be a military compound under siege. Its protective wall is topped with shards of implanted glass and barbed wire. Palm fronds are silhouettes against an implacably blue sky, and in the distance one hears the eerie, insinuative call of the muezzin, summoning the faithful of Islam to prayer...
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...